Tonal Study
 

After about 3 weeks of watercolour horses I needed to get back to oils. This is the result of the influence of watercolours, particularly in the renewed sensitivity to tone and the leaving of areas of blank canvas as part of the composition and light.

It is 16" x 20". A 5 hour painting.

I love your daubs of paint that coalesce into a coherent whole, Thomasin. The spaces in between the daubs work quite well.

Thanks Julie.

I just had a look at the post again and found there were a lot more blotches in the uploaded image than in reality. Here's a more accurate image of the painting:

Tonal Study

Thomasin, This is very exciting! I see something happening in this latest piece: the background and the figure are no longer two separate things. You're making similar kinds of marks everywhere and the result is that the figure truly emerges from the ground. It appears to have grown out of the ground, actually, since there is an organic, morphing sort of quality about your figures. The effect is totally mesmerizing. It's both completely three-dimensional and completely two-dimensional at the same time. The deep color in the background absolutely works with the colors in the head, too. Brilliant! Your work never ceases to awe me.

Thanks Alex, very much. It was something that just started out of an idea I wasn't going to take seriously - just playing with an image of a head and with chiaroscuro in order to put a patina on the canvas for the real painting, but then it just started to work so well and sort of painted itself (which is a lot like watercolours). I was trying to get a feeling of atmosphere and spatial depth. The green in the background was the thing that harmonized the figure with the surrounding dark. It wasn't immediately obvious, and I worked the background with browns and oranges until I suddenly felt that green would work much better. Things don't usually go this easily for me at all, so this is like is a welcome little holiday for me. (I bet I won't be able to do it again.)

Thomasin,

When things go this easy on the easel and the results are this good, it only shows that the author has mastery and focus. I

Thomasin, I find very interesting how the sharpest parts of the image are the closer to us (nose and mouth).
This adds to the effect of the image emerging from the indistinct background, but in a sense also opens the space to infinity: we know where the prominent features are situated in space (almost in the living space of the viewer) and we don't know how deep the space is inside the picture
Very captivating
Ilaria

Thank-you Sharon. One of the things that, for me, gives a feeling of life is the blues and greens in the light areas. Putting those colours down helps give a vibration and a sense of movement, as well a creating a felt three-dimensionality. Finding and painting those cool colours is one of things that most interests and excites me in painting.

Thank-you for your kind words and encouragement, Carlos. I do hope to continue in this direction and will do a larger one sometime soon. I want to continue with my watercolours to try and get the same sense of substance as in an oil - which seems an immensely difficult task!

Ilaria, thank-you! I am trying to work with tonal variations to get a sense of the figure and of life, space and form without resorting to merely illustrating the figure (you, of course, are going in this direction and doing extremely well! I had your paintings in mind when painting this one, and very often have your words going around my head i.e. "think flat". So thank-you for being so good at what you do).

Close-up
 

Here's a close-up you can zoom into. It is linked to another forum who has this feature, but it is something that is important, I think, for everyone who posts on the SOG forum. Wouldn't it be nice to see such full-size close-ups of everyone's work - almost like seeing the real thing and getting a much better idea of the sizes of paintings. If Cynthia is reading this, is it a feature we could possibly include here?

Close up of Tonal Study