Music, History and Painting at Biggar Little Festival 2024
What an honour to be part of this musical creation! Rob Hall and Chick Lyall gave a wonderfully uplifting performance for piano and clarinet yesterday at Biggar Corn Exchange. This was Rob’s Scottish premiere of his suite of pieces named ‘Close Encounters’. He’d been inspired by the history and my paintings of these ancient passageways and it was moving to listen to these new compositions.
Putting on a performance like this takes hours of practice on top of composing the music in the first place!
A few of the visitors to my exhibition asked about my own process behind these paintings. I’d like to share an overview on one example -Bernard’s Wynd. It’s a helpful reminder to myself as to how I get there!
I start with thumbnail sketches of the subject to find an interesting composition. I then worked in charcoal on paper primed with yellow paint for an initial study.
The project was to paint the backs of Lanark’s 12 medieval closes for a joint exhibition at the Tolbooth in Lanark (previous post). The back views can look quite grungy even on a sunny day with their many layers of embedded history and I wanted my work to reflect this.
I wanted to move away from my usual pen and ink drawing towards painting and chose to work with acrylic for my underpaintings and finish in pastel – a challenge for me. Chunky soft pastels are the opposite of crisp ink lines!
I chose an intense warm yellow as the base layer for all the paintings – yellow is such a bright optimistic colour and it felt good to underpin the work with it. The closes had recently been revived with new lighting and and information boards – a project by Discover Lanark and I wanted to capture light and movement through these narrow passageways which ventilate the High Street.
Next, I worked into the underpainting using Liquitex Prussian Blue ink, both transparent and lightfast. I diluted it with water and applied with a soft brush in several layers – to build my own history into the work.
Once the underpainting is dry, I applied a layer of Liquitex clear acrylic gesso to add a ‘tooth’ or ‘key’ to the surface – it feels like very fine sandpaper and helps bind the fine pigments to the surface.
The fun part is applying the pastels. The ones I used are made by Unison – they’re luscious! Their colours are so richly pigmented that they are almost luminous. Unison have a breath-taking range of colours which can be hard to resist!
The final stage was to ‘fix’ the pastel. I opted to use a single light spray of fixative and frame the work behind glass. There are many pros and cons with regard using a fixative but only a few weeks ago, I read this blog post from Unison’s website about their own fixative and I’m delighted to hear such positive conclusions.
Two of the 12 paintings done and ready to go off to the framers.
Ten of the twelve closes paintings are still available to buy framed at £180 each, free postage within the UK.
Thanks for reading and good luck with your own creative process,
Ronnie 🙂
Drawing the Street 