November Musings

The Rembrandt Hotel

The Rembrandt Hotel

I don’t know why November gets such a bad press. Here in West Wales it’s chucking it down, but the colours are all the more vibrant for it. Rain covers everything with a mantle of tiny light refracting prisms: grass gets more luminous, slate gets darker, golden leaves shimmer.  In summer there is merely the contrast between lit planes and shadow planes to be depicted, but November brings iridescence, and it’s quite a challenge for the artist. 

I tussled with depicting increased leaf luminosity for a long time; my solution now is to use the old master’s technique of  ‘glaze over force’ (which is how Vermeer painted that pearl). In a conventional oil painting the white gesso is the only light source, reflecting light back through layers of glazes. If I want something to pop forward I add some bright daubs of white paint then glaze over the top. This upper level of white ‘forces’ the light forwards. It also helps to use a glaze with a colour that is complementary to the surrounding hue, as here, where I have tried to make the sunlit bark pop forward.


 
Rain covers everything with a mantle of tiny light refracting prisms: grass gets more luminous, slate gets darker, golden leaves shimmer.
 

Emma George