Mortehoe, sea mist. Oil on board 6"x5".
You know what it's like - you think, "It's a lovely day, I'll go out and do some painting - somewhere high up to get some great views". You drive a couple of miles to where you know the view will be sublime, set your easel up and - in rolls a sea mist. Your lucky if you can see 50 yards.....bu***r!
This doesn't happen often but when it does it's frustrating! The silver lining, however, was that on my way back I passed through Mortehoe, a little village, high up on the top of coastal cliffs. The mist was diffusing the sunlight and coating everything with moisture. The buildings, roads and gardens glistened like they were encrusted with jewels. I stopped to paint.
As I was working I realized I was looking at something that was familiar to me, even though I had never been to Mortehoe in the mist. I thought at one point that the buildings, shrouded in mist, reminded me of my earlier life spent in a northern, industrial city where smog from the burning of coal for heating and power was a common phenomenon. It wasn't that.
What was familiar to me was the "look" of the scene in front of me. I had seen this "look" many times in the paintings of English landscape painters. You can see it in Gainsborough and Constable to the Pre Raphaelites but also in modern painters like Michael Andrews and Kurt Jackson. You don't see the "look" in French painting, for instance, - even Corot who didn't rely on sun lit scenes for impact or Courbet who habitually used a near- black ground for his landscapes. It's not to be found in Irish or Scottish landscape painting either, even though geographically similar.
Initially (and to the uninitiated) the "look" can appear dark, miserable, gray, austere and, I suppose, off-putting to people used to sunnier climes.
To an English eye, or to
this English eye at least the "look" is composed of a low- light, as in mood-lighting, used to seduce, not the spotlight used to advertise. It has a mellow look, soft and rich -in musical instrument terms it would be woodwind, not brass. If it were food it would be a bacon and avocado sandwich in granary bread (try one!), not a pizza or anything from Maccydee's.
It's an acquired taste. The painter that exemplifies the "look" best is Sickert. When he painted under Desgas he used colour in a European way -lot's of verve and dash. He refined his use of colour under the American Whistler and learnt to use tertiaries. But really came into his own when he got in with the English boys and eventually painted with a more English "look" than any of them (with the possible exception of Harold Rutherford - one of Sickert's pupils).
The mention of a bacon and avocado sandwich has done it....... lunch!
