Telling a Story

For this exercise, we are asked to use all of the resources of colour, tone, shape and line to create a painting that goes beyond the merely figurative to convey a simple narrative.

Last year, we visited the Spice Island of Grenada in the Carribean and took a tourist trip round the island.  One of the highlights of the tour was to visit the nutmeg factory on the west coast of the island.  This small factory, bordered by the sea on one side and a busy market road on other, was an oasis of quiet and cool on a hot, humid day.  The smell of the nutmeg was almost overpowering, even medicinal, with the upstairs being given over to large tiered racks to dry the nutmegs before sorting.  Downstairs (via the most rickety staircase I have ever been down) was the area for grading the nutmegs into different sizes, bagging and storing.  It was downstairs where I came across two ladies who worked in the factory sorting the nutmegs (apparently only women do this because they are much faster) either on a break, or ready to finish their shift, sitting patiently on chairs watching the world outside go by.

I took this photo with the deliberate intention of creating a painting from it as I had no chance to sketch the scene.  The contrast of the gloomy factory with bright green and oranges they were wearing, and the bright light entering from the open, wooden door created wonderful contrasts.  The light highlighted their figures – the older lady on the right, with some of her teeth missing and slumped in a plastic chair and the younger, larger lady with her large bosom and baseball cap.

On a wall on the opposite side of the factory was a notice reading; “WORKERS – bring God’s peace inside and leave the Devil’s noise outside” which, to me, totally encapsulated the scene in front of me.

In terms of composition, my first thought was to broaden the scene, turning the composition landscape, to include more of an outside area.

However, I didn’t feel this composition worked; the figures were not given enough prominence and the outside area (imagined market space) drew the eye too much as the area was much brighter. 

I therefore went back to the portrait orientation, making the figures larger and did a colour sketch with neocolour crayons.  I felt this worked much better, but still wasn’t completely satisfied.  

I had been reading Classical Painting Aterlier: A Contemporary Guide to Traditional Studio Pracice and came across a reference for a geometric technique for creating composition called the “armature of the rectangle” – a system of intersecting lines based on the main and secondary diagonals created when joining the corners and centre of a rectangle.  When the intersecting points of the rectangle are joined up, the lines create the ¼, 1/3 and ½ way points of the rectangle.  These points have traditionally been used as focal points in composition.

I created my own armature on a sheet of A4:

and then applied this to my drawing:

Here, you can see that the composition broadly follows a number of these diagonals (main ones relevant here marked in thicker pen).  From this, it clearly shows why this composition works and how many of the main lines in the sketch mirror those of the armature.

When it came to create my painting, I drew the main lines of the armature identified in my sketch and then drew the composition around this, tweaking some areas of the subject to mirror the composition lines.

I completed the figures first, mixing colours carefully to keep the vibrancy of the bright colours (orange and green) and to show the effect of strong sunlight coming through the door.  I was conscious of the edges in this painting – I wanted the crispest line to be that between the figures; the dark shadow of the woman’s back against the lighter colours and folded fabric of the woman in green.  To show the darkness inside, I also decided to lose the back edge of the woman in green, and to have her clothing melting into the shadows of the background.

Nearly finished here.  A few things to change: touch up the edge of the door and add the highlights to the metalwork gate; area around the feet needs more work – need to darken around the feet and add more detail; need to darken the bottom right corner as well to show the strong shadow; need to glaze over the blue wall – the strong white of the flaking paint is too bright and prominent.