colonial art | Helen Hopcroft: an artist's life

Day two and three in the studio (not consecutive) involve more layers of acrylic paint and fiddling with the drawing…

It’s about this stage that I started missing oil paint, its sticky richness and intensity of colour. The acylic is fine for the underpainting, helps seal the canvas and means that you’re not waiting around for ages until it dries. It’s nice to handle, non toxic, ideal for mucking around with image and composition, but it just doesn’t have that…. thing.

I think it’s about this point that I started using oil paint over the top of the dry acrylic underpainting.

Me!

Reference material: the poor, doomed thylacines (Tasmanian Tiger).

What the painting looked like at the end of day three.

Came into the studio on day four and decided that I was creating major compositional, not to mention aesthetic, problems for myself. The mountain range behind the figures was originally planned to open up, on the right, into a wide bowl shaped valley. This would have given the painting some depth, a sense of space. However with the mountain rapidly turning into a one dimensional granite escarpment, and the low stone wall acting as another visual barrier, the whole thing was getting visually claustrophic. I dragged out some of my holiday snaps from Tasmania and decided to repaint the background using an actual mountain view as reference.

Nothing beats the real

The first stage involved repainting the sky with pale greys.

The next phase involved working out the tonal gradations and colours of the mountain ranges in the background. Using various mixes of warm grey at this point, mixed with some burnt umber, a bit of paynes grey, some black, titanium white, yellow, chromium green oxide and a couple of miscellaneous tubes of grey paint that my Aunty Pam gave me.

The final stage of day four, which was a short day in the studio. It still looks like a mess, but I’m much happier with the composition. Next step is to work on the rock wall in the foreground, using the following image as reference (it’s outside a country church in Tasmania).

More reference material…

After this I’ll go hunting for figure reference material for the children (probably involves photographing Sophie and one of her mates) and costume reference.

Another well intentioned attempt to follow a painting from ‘cradle to grave’, or rather from the first sketches through to the end product. The painting I have chosen is about 4′ x 5′ (must get into metric one day) and I have a special affection for it, although currently it remains untitled. It’s part of a series I’m working on for Despard Gallery, Tasmania, in preparation for my next solo exhibition with them in early 2012.

Strange Tales will include about six large paintings like this one, a number of smaller bird canvases, and perhaps some large scale charcoal drawings. I’ve found that I’m missing drawing, particularly drawing from life, the immediacy and the fluency of drawing media. Although I’m still working it out, most of these paintings will be specifically about Tasmania, the island’s history and its colonial art, this constant sense of the past and the present colliding.

This is the canvas with its first coat of acrylic paint. While trying to replicate something of the style of either colonial or naive art, I’m sticking to some of the more traditional painting methods, like starting from a pinkish ground (usually closer to a red/brown or pale terracotta, but I want these images to be sickly sweet, right from the beginning). The image is of a small girl, wearing colonial era garb, riding a Tasmanian Tiger. A young boy holds the reins.