The making of a painting: 2 The Geometer's Cafe

For those of you who have not read my previous blog The making of a painting: 1, the introduction to that applies word for word to this, and therefore need not be repeated.

Some forty–one years separate the Surrey landscape of my late teens from the ‘cafe–scape’ that is the subject of this blog, and a curiosity might be noted here: just as the Surrey landscape could not possibly have taken the form it did without the influence of the Impressionists and Van Gogh, neither could the ‘cafe–scape’ have taken its form had Picasso and Braque not invented what came to be called Cubism – and which some people still curiously think of as Modern Art, even though it was begun in 1909. (Cubism represents the beginning of Modernism in art, and is no longer in any sense modern. Postmodernism seems to be on the wane, and the safest term to use is Contemporary Art. Anyway, neither Modernism nor Postmodernism can ever be used again as terms descriptive of broad movements in art.)

The starting point of The Geometer’s Cafe could not possibly be guessed by looking at the painting. (The Surrey landscape did not have a starting point as such: it had a ‘subject’ in the form of a chosen area of the countryside.) It is a pity that I did not keep the preliminary sketches: the first was a landscape–format drawing of the interior of a cafe, conjured – so to speak – from my imagination. I was not very satisfied with it, and so tore it into strips, which I put into the waste bin. However, by happenstance, the juxtapositions formed by the strips in the bin suggested a much livelier composition. So I retrieved the strips, and arranged them on a fresh sheet of paper, using Pritt Stick to keep them in place. From this arrangement I made another drawing – this time in portrait–format, and very nearly the size of the canvas (which is 20 x 26 inches). This I squared up and transferred to the canvas. In the absence of photographs of those drawings, I can at least demonstrate how it was that my torn up drawing became the salvation of my painting (and consider how fortunate it was that I did not crumple my drawing up!):

As a conventional photograph this is not entirely without interest: it has pleasing textures, interesting rooflines, etc – yet lacks the movement, drama, and mysterious atmosphere of its fragmented counterpart.

Its counterpart also pleasingly flattens the perspective, so that the conventional, and often tedious, ‘lead in from foreground’ is removed, and therefore allows for a greater freedom of placement of the various compositional elements. However, in making a drawing from this photograph, as the basis for a painting, I would not simply copy the collage. For example, I would not include the heavy rectangle top left; or the rectangle of sky bottom left. Yet some means of breaking up the dark mass of fencing, hedge, and barn walls that forms the lower half of the picture would certainly be necessary. So all kinds of compositional changes would be made, and yet the colours appeal to me greatly as a starting point: the near–monochromatic reds, greens, and browns – as indeed the blacks. The preparatory drawings I made for the The Geometer’s Cafe were entirely in black and white, so that I was free to choose whatever colours I liked, but exactly how I started I cannot now remember. One thing however is certain: the final result was utterly different to any of my preconceptions. This is always the case, and were it not the business of painting would be tedious in the extreme.   

   

I hope that it is possible to see, from the example of the arranged torn strips of the photograph, how it was that The Geometer’s Cafe gained its compositional movement – most immediately apparent I think in the two chairs, the curtains, and the ‘table cloth’ area.

The Geometer's Cafe, oil on canvas. 2002

Almost there would be too much movement, were it not for the stabilising verticals and horizontals. For example, the green curtain descends assertively, but is checked by the diagonal of the table and diverted to the left by the central diagonal row of tiles, which in turn lead to the ascending stile of the chair: a forceful counter to, and echo of, the curtain (and the chair’s top rail reinforces this ‘counterweight’). The chair on the right forms a similar function, and each chair is connected by a series of curves which play out against the curves of the net curtain and those above the wine bottle and to the right of the jug. (If you ask “Was I aware of these checks and counterbalances?” the answer is, yes; and looking at the painting in a mirror is a great aid to spotting any aspect that needs to be modified or changed.) The shape of the green curtain is repeated in the deep yellow section of the tablecloth, aligned to the grey descending cloth. But the assertiveness of this shape too is checked by a number of elements: the red (z–bend) edging of the cloth; the diversionary diagonal that cuts across between the yellow and the grey; and a series of oppositional curves and distracting lines that move the eye to the left and right. Otherwise, both curtain and tablecloth would plummet to the bottom of the composition and clean out of the picture. In a painting you need variety of shape, line, and colour. You also need tensions played off against ‘rests’.

One of the aspects that I most enjoyed ‘playing about with’ in this picture was that of the various circles. Top right is the church tower clock face – relatively quiet and unassuming. Centre left is a variety of circles in the form of tiles, plates, and the wine bottle label; and centre bottom are two floor tiles which it pleased me form as moons: mysterious aspects of the night in an unexpected placing! The plates, as well as the circular and square patterning of the tiles, I’ve varied in colour as much as possible. Monotony spells death to a painting, and a slapdash painter would apply the same colour to each tile and plate – almost as if they were manufacturing them, and setting them up in a showroom . . . (That the clock face has no hands, and the wine bottle label no lettering or design is deliberate: details of this kind are distractions, and at worst it’s possible to imagine people peering at the clock to see what time it records, or trying to identify the wine.)

A note about colour  

It is usually a good idea to restrict the number of colours: primarily because it helps to give a painting overall unity. However, I used sixteen colours for The Geometer’s Cafe, and the reason that these did not prove impossible to manage is, I think, because I used reds that were no brighter than alizarin crimson and Indian red; yellows no brighter than cadmium lemon and yellow ochre deep; blue no brighter than ultramarine; and five earth colours.

Only in extreme and rare circumstances – as perhaps in some Fauve works – would a painter use unmixed colour: that is, pigment straight from the tube. As supplied, colour is pure: bright, deep, brilliant, pale, raw, burnt, unbleached, etc. But all of these need in some sense to be subdued – mixed in order to form compound colours. Moreover, for a colour to have a certain intensity it is not necessary for it to be intense in itself. Some idea of this can be seen by comparing the isolated triangle of yellow ochre to the left with the appearance of this hue in the painting: which is the ‘axe head’ shape just to the left of the carafe and brown basket of oranges. Its being surrounded by a red, a bluish–green, a pale and a dark blue – and even by another, slightly more muted, yellow ochre – gives it a considerably greater degree of brightness. Note: I find this difficult to believe myself. Yet both were scanned from the same photograph. I think that it is the contrast of the white surround that makes the yellow appear so dark; or rather, under these circumstances it is dark

Detail of The Geometer's Cafe. Note The painting as reproduced in full is reversed. I do not know why, but the original photograph was taken on a friend's digital camera in 2002 

A note about the style

Clearly this is Cubist painting. However, it follows no set way of doing things – another fatal path in painting – and the only thing I attempted was to flatten the perspective and not to worry about clear demarcations between the various components: in places, you may be looking at tiles, tablecloths, flooring, or quite simply abstract shapes that seemed right for a certain area. It is a painting that is as much about colour and oil paint as it is about a cafe that after all exists nowhere in the world.

I do not know – or cannot remember – why I used (predominantly) white outlines, rather than dark outlines. Each seems to be equally effective, but I do not know why. 
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The colours used are all from Michael Harding, except for Payne's Grey & Mars Black, which are from Winsor & Newton

Flake White                                                                                       

Cadmium Yellow Lemon                                                               

Lemon Yellow Pale                                                                       

Raw Sienna — a yellowish–brown earth colour

Yellow Ochre Deep — Yellow Ochre heated (or calcined) until it turns orange–yellow

Yellow Ochre

Chrome Green Deep — a modern version of an old (and unreliable) bluish green

Phthalo Turquoise — a modern blue–green — or green–blue . . .

Ultramarine Blue — a reddish blue, originally made from crushed lapis lazuli 

Alizarin Crimson — an intense bluish red — made from a coal tar derivative

Indian Red — iron–oxide, a bluish red

Burnt Sienna — iron–oxide, a warm brown

Raw Umber — iron–oxide, a cool brown

Burnt Umber — iron–oxide, a warm brown

Red Umber — iron–oxide, a warm reddish brown

Payne’s Grey — made with Ivory Black, Yellow Ochre, and Ultramarine Blue — a cool grey

Mars Black — iron–oxide — makes a warm grey

Note

Nearly all of the above colours are modern replacements for earlier colours that were problematic in various ways. Some were fugitive (likely to fade); some were liable to react chemically with other colours, causing colour change; and some were even liable to fail structurally. Most of these problems came about as the result of new, untested, colours coming onto the market in the nineteenth century. Many of the Impressionists’ paintings have been badly affected by these problems — in particular, Renoir, some of whose paintings are practically drained of colour, and look quite awful. I’ve also seen a Vuillard in which some of the paint had turned into what I could only describe as viscid coke dust . . .            

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