Paint is an unfamiliar material to me, though I’ve tried periodically to make friends with it, we’ve never really been pals. For some reason this makes me want to keep trying though. I adore drawing and charcoal is by far my favourite medium, but paint can do things that dry media can’t and oil paint in particular has an affinity with charcoal and shares its malleable qualities.
In the studio with Alan, making a painting using the ‘wipe out’ technique
So I decided to seek some expert tuition and booked a place on Alan McGowan’s ‘Drawing in oils’ two day workshop in Edinburgh. He is a resident artist of my former studio building St Margaret’s House and I love the strong draughtsmanship, energy and movement evident in his figurative oils. He is also an excellent and experienced tutor. The aim of the weekend was to show how oils can be used for drawing the figure and how to move from drawing to painting, so it seemed like the perfect course for me to begin with.
We worked solidly over the two days, producing a lot of drawings/paintings and gaining both knowledge of our materials and an insight into Alan’s approach. He shared some of the works and artists that inspired him and showed us many different surfaces and ways of combining materials. For the final session I chose the wipe out method to spend more time exploring, since it seemed to me to be a painty parallel to my charcoal technique.
Once back in the studio I carried on playing, this time using tree images I’m familiar with. I came away from the course feeling like I had a whole new toolbox to play with, though very much aware of how much I have to learn – colour is still like a foreign language to me but at least now I have a few basics to begin with. It will be a long time before the will be any oil paintings of sufficient standard to exhibit as a great deal of rubbish needs be generated first, but I’m excited that ‘Project Paint’ has properly begun.
