SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT PAINTING WOODLAND SCENES

Throughout the ages, artists have enjoyed painting woodland scenes.  Today's modern painters' works, however, are a far cry from the woodland scenes of the painters of old.

Here is an example of an "old" woodland scene, painted by George Baret the elder (what a name!), 1723-1784.

I am sure we could not fault those trees...but to my eye, despite its probable accuracy, it is stodgy,  heavy and gloomy.

More modern painters have treated woodland scenes in quite a different way, and I would like to show you a few of my favourites, so that you can see, perhaps, a different "path through the trees" for your own work.

Lawrence Gowing says that he returns time and time again to certain woodland areas to paint.  He loves groves of trees, with branches meeting overhead, like columns of Gothic arches in a "cathedral of trees".  His woodland scenes are often concerned with a ceiling of leaves, making an enclosed space often leading to a further space beyond.  He makes small "sketch" paintings as rehearsals for larger paintings.  He says he tries to "paint the scoop of space without losing the flatness of the painting surface". Sometimes this results in very abstracted images, the motif having been just a starting point.  "Gifords Copse", the oil painting below, is one such image.

Giford's Copse

The painting "Four Trees in a Wood" 1987, below, also has a really contemporary feel to it, and to my mind, it is interesting to consider why.  Is it the colours ?  They are certainly of his own choosing and bear little resemblance to reality.    Is it the brushstrokes?  What makes it look so modern and such a far cry from the woodland scene of Mr Baret above?  If you look at it very carefully and closely, you will see that in fact, although not such an obvious abstraction as "Giford's Copse", the marks he has used are flat and two dimensional, there is little attempt to achieve three-dimensional form;  the tree trunk of the tree on the far right bears no resemblance to photographic reality whatsoever.  Yet, we recognise perfectly that it is a woodland scene and we understand it fully.

Here is another  woodland scene I have long admired:  Roger De Grey, "La Tremblade" 1989.  It is owned by the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and I wish it was mine!  I just love it.

When I first saw this painting, I was fascinated by the fact that there is little or no recession created by the conventional method of tones becoming paler in the distance.  Instead, the recession is created purely by change of scale.  The artist complains that he find trees "baffling things to work with" and difficult to paint, and spends hours, apparently, trying to make the trees in his paintings seem to grow out of the ground properly.  Clearly, those hours are well spent.

I cannot begin to compare to these masters above, but here is one of my own personal favourites, painted within a couple of hours at a demonstration evening for an art club. It was a bit of a departure for me, since I used imaginative colour, and allowed the painting to hover between representation and abstraction.  But, I hope you will feel it is still an interesting woodland scene even if it owes little to photographic reality!

and this one perhaps does have a little more to do with a "real" woodland scene, although again, I did allow myself some artistic licence with the colours chosen, borrowing some of the gorgeous cool turquoise greens that Lawrence Gowing used - they seemed appropriate to the cool early days of Spring.  It is important, I feel, to remember that creating a painting is not just about  faithfully"duplicating"  the real world...it is about creating something special.... a piece of art which connects with personal vision.

"Spring woods"  pastel on card  21x21cm
available, unframed (mounted) price $295

Arguably, it was from Monet and Cezanne that the landscape painting of this century developed.  Gradually, artists began to give themselves even more permission to try different ways of seeing and painting and expressing their relationship with the landscape. They recognised that the recording of every leaf or tiny branch of a tree may well lead to a rather tedious, lifeless image (and anyway, the camera can do it better) - and they knew that the exploitation of shapes, masses, rhythms, colours, textures and movement can produce far more exciting imagery.   The degree to which an artist transforms the landscape, to express his feelings, is entirely personal and can vary dramatically, but one thing is for sure...as a result our own mood and personality will inevitably be revealed in our paintings. 

 Two people, standing shoulder to shoulder, can photograph the same scene, and their photos will look virtually identical...but no two artists will ever paint the same scene in exactly the same way, even if they are painting side by side.  This is something we artists need to recognise - and capitalise upon.

PAINT WHAT YOU REALLY SEE

'The overwhelming tendency is to see what we believe to be there, rather than believing in what we actually see.' (Arthur Maderson)

As a tutor, I used to find, very often, that artists often do paint what they BELIEVE to be there, often denying the evidence of their own eyes.   I can hear my own tutor saying to me  “paint EXACTLY what you see, Jackie”. It took me a long time to realise properly what she meant.

Often, what we see is not what we expect.  In the distance, for example,  there may be a person, or a group of people……but the light at that moment in time might break up the colours into fragments, the shapes barely discernible.  Sometimes, all we actually see is a few dots and dashes of colour.  However…..what do we so often do?  We make it up.  We look down, away from the scene, and make sure that in our painting, the viewer knows exactly what’s what and where.

A classic example is a scene full of houses, a village perhaps on a hillside, with the houses receding into the distance.    Can we actually SEE all the windows in the distant buildings?  Perhaps some of them, but I’d like to bet not all of them...........and yet, I have seen artists laboriously putting in every window because they KNOW they are there.  And they put white window frames around them....because they know they are there.  Yet, the building might be in shadow and the frames hardly visible!

When painting in Venice, I sketched this scene.  Now, I COULD have put in every window on those distant buildings.  I know many an artist who would have done.  But actually, with the light behind the buildings, the windows were hardly discernible.  Putting them in, in this painting, would not have been properly true to what I was really seeing.  

Here is another example........can you see every brick in the archway?  I would only have been able to "see" every brick if I had concentrated fully on one, then looked at the one beside it, then looked at the one beside that..and so on.....   Instead,  at first glance at the scene, I saw the light on the wall, and got a sense of texture;  I would NOT have been able to "see" every brick in the wall, in the way that a camera would.    A good way to prove to yourself what you are really seeing is to look at the scene, then close your eyes, and look at what you see then, in your mind's eye. 

Here are a few more words from Arthur Maderson, one of my favourite present-day painters:


"The overwhelming thrust of advice from many of our finest figurative painters, from Constable to Cezanne, has been to develop skills in seeing PURE VISUAL INFORMATION.  Cezanne said that the painter "must always follow the logic of his eyes.  If he feels accurately, he will think accurately.  Painting is primarily a matter of optics.  the matter of our art lies there, in what our eyes are thinking".


However, we do need to learn all we can about colour, in order to sharpen up our awareness to visual information.  One painter, when looking at a nude, will see small variations within the concept of "flesh colour" whereas Bonnard once said "I see thousands of tiny tints, I have to try and find ones which will live and make the flesh vibrate like that on my canvas". And Monet said "Paint it just as it LOOKS TO YOU, the exact colour and shape until it gives your own naive impression of the scene before you".  If we sharpen up our knowledge of the world of colour, and at the same time, allow ourselves to really see what is before us, instead of just painting what we think "ought" to be there, then, as Arthur Maderson says "once one has perceived nature in terms of delicate stabs of colour, then there is no going back, the world takes on the aspect of crushed jewels. Extraordinary things begin to happen.  The gap between the act of painting and nature ceases to exist.  nature looks like a painting.  Your attention is distracted from what a person is saying because their left ear has turned a transparent orange/red, and viridian hues are detected in a passage of reflected light on their lower jaw.  What was ordinary appears extra-ordinary."


I am still striving to achieve this.......it is not easy, but it certainly is exciting, and much more exciting than laboriously painting in windows because "they were there".


If you would like to see some of Arthur's works do click here:
The works of Arthur Maderson


Hus work appeared in  'International Artist' where he was one of only eight European artists featured in 'Modern Master Painters of the World'.