Turner: Glazing over Impasto

Recently I made the 3-4 hour car trip from Sydney to Canberra to see the Turner from the Tate exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia.

I had seen many of the works years ago at the Tate Gallery in London (which has the best collection of his much dispersed work), but an opportunity to see them in the flesh again was too good to pass up.

J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851) was one of Britain’s most original and inventive artists, a key figure of Romanticism, who influenced the Impressionists and even the Abstract Expressionists.

The exhibition includes several immense landscapes full of his ethereal brushstrokes and fascinating detail. These seem to glow as with an inner light, and are magnificently framed in monumental gilded mouldings. There are also many gem-like little watercolours to see.

A highlight of his later career is Venice, the Bridge of Sighs, 1840 (top and detail) in which he uses the oil technique of glazing over impasto. This technique gives the illusion of fine detail, without the need for laborious brushwork. 

The toxicity of real Lead White paint meant that it has been replaced by other pigments such as Titanium White. It's not easy to obtain these days, but some manufacturers of professional grade oil paints still make it - for a hefty price. Lead White it is particularly suited to the creation of fine impasto effects due to its ropey consistency, which can be manipulated into delicate peaks and cake-decoration-like swirls. 

Lead paint is fairly safe as long as the pigment is bound in the oil medium and not in a powder form, where it can be inhaled. You would not want to lick your brushes, as some artists I know have a habit of doing. I wouldn't recommend getting it on your skin either.

After the impasto has dried, a thin glaze of a contrasting grey or ochre is washed over it. The glaze collects in the depressions of the impasto, giving the impression of detail from a distance.

In Bridge of Sighs, Turner uses impasto only to pick out foci of interest, such as architectural details on the Doge's Palace. It looks as though he's used both an ochre yellow and a purplish grey glaze. Purple and yellow are complementary colours, so the effect, especially from a distance, is a kind of vibrating iridescence, later used by Monet to great effect to recreate sunlit walls.

Here are some photos the exhibition staff let me take (no flash allowed, so a little blurry, but better than I expected in the dimly lit gallery):

The last three images are details from the larger works.

More information about the exhibition here.

James Perry Wilson

Wilson had a masterly control of tonal values.
















His simple palette consisted of the primary colors: three blues, three yellows and three reds.


Permalba white
Ultramarine blue
Cobalt blue
Winsor blue
Cadmium yellow pale
Cadmium yellow deep
Yellow ochre
Alizarin crimson
Cadmium scarlet
Indian red

Burnt umber, cadmium pale green for highlighting leaves, and cadmium lemon were also used with less frequency.

He primed his supports with brilliant white oil paint that lent a brilliance to the colors layed over it. He used the Impressionist technique of optical mixing of colors but was careful to make them of the same tonal value. Wilson describes his method for painting a vibrant sky.

Set out three dabs of white (or four, if you want to use two blues).  With one mix a tint of ruby madder, with one a tint of cadmium, and with the remaining one (or two) tints of blue.  In working the color into the white, you can produce a graduated tint, covering the range of values you will want in your sky.  Then from the deepest part of the tints you can mix a color for the top of the sky.  As you come down, use successively lighter parts of the tints.  An effective way of mixing the color from the three tints is not to use a knife, but to pick up a bit of each tint directly with your brush.  Stir them together only lightly, so that they are not too thoroughly mixed.  Then you will get a suggestion of broken color, in a free, loose way.  In preparing the three (or four) tints, be careful to make the values correspond; for in broken color it is important to have your values the same; otherwise the colors will never flow together and produce vibration.  This, to my mind, is the failing of the French Impressionist painter Seurat.  He uses dots of color of varying values and they remain just dots of color, never uniting to the eye as Monet's do.

Source: www.peabody.yale.edu

Thomas Paquette - American

These works have a wonderful mystical feel. I think the medium is oil, but, if I remember correctly, this artist also uses pastels, and may have wanted to bring something of pastel technique into oil painting. Some oil painters squeeze their paint out onto absorbant paper to take out as much oil as possible, this gives their work a chalkier appearance. I believe Monet did this.

Steve Underwood Workshop

Date: Sunday August the 10th, 10 am until around 5pm. Balmoral country property.

We all painted the same scene (from a copies of a photograph), watching the teacher step by step, and learned to achieve atmospheric effects through colour and tone with a limited pallet. $40/student for a full day indoor workshop, which was very reasonable. Working indoors was good because we could concentrate on the techniques of the step by step lesson, and not get distracted by the vastness of nature and changing light/weather etc.

Steve emphasised getting correct tonal values and colour temperatures to create the illusion of depth. It was very helpful the way he put a dab of the paint he had mixed on our palettes, so we could try to match it.

We did the underpainting of the receding hills with French Ultramarine mixed with a little Alizarin Crimson, and progressively added white (and crimson?) as things got more distant. The foreground underpainting was quite dark. We did the reflections in the water at the same time.

Sky - just French Ultra and white, graduating whiter towards the horizon - leaving the white primer showing where clouds would be painted (this meant that there was no need to wait for the blue to dry, and no need to add many layers of white paint to cover the blue and get the clouds looking white enough. Where the sky meets the horizon, we blurred the hard edge a bit - particulary in the distance.

Clouds - it's important to keep the blue of the sky saturated enough so that you get enough contrast with the clouds. Avoid making the clouds too cottonwool-like - they can be painted quite roughly, with rough edges. We added a dot of yellow to warm up the white for the clouds, and added shadows of ultramarine with a dot of aliz crimson. White cloud painted next to dark cliffs enhanced tonal contrast.

Overpainting of vegetation. We mixed greens using cool yellow, ultramarine and white in the distance; progressing to viridian mixed with cad yellow, or cad orange, with less white in the foreground. A little yellow ochre for the closest areas. It's important that the underpainting be tacky/dry, not wet, when stippling the foliage over with a dry brush (no medium). We tried to leave some of the underpainting showing where there were shadows.


Materials:

10 x 8" board, prepared beforehand with two coats of gesso primer. Steve used oil painting paper (he doesn't bother to gesso it). He uses regular house paint to prime his boards. Flat brushes of various sizes and a very small round brush for final little details. He recommends pig bristle flats (not nylon) as they produce messier, more natural marks. I was using brights (short bristles); he advised using longer bristles to get more 'flick' in the brushstrokes - this was very helpful.

We used table easels. A box of tissues was handy to wipe the brushes. Steve recommended a fast-drying (number one) medium, as he likes to paint alla prima, and so we needed the underpainting to dry quickly.
The following oil paints (Steve recommended Windsor and Newton) were used:
Opaque White
Lemon (cool) yellow
Cadmium (warm) yellow light, Cad orange
Yellow ochre
Burnt Sienna
Cool red, eg alyzarin crimson, permanent rose
Cadmium red (warm red)
Veridian or pthalo green (more intense green for foreground)
French Ultramarine Blue
Cobalt Blue (I don't think we used this)

Note: these colours are for painting the Australian lanscape. Other regions probably require a different palette.

Thoughts about Painting

Sometimes it's good to start a painting with a colour that is deliberately 'wrong', in the sense that it doesn't match 'reality'. Think of the evocative gold backgrounds in icons or Japanese screens, or the mysterious black backgrounds in European Portrait painting. This forces you to think of the painting as a self-sufficient design with it's own internal laws, not as a slavish reproduction of nature.