Exercise – View from a window or doorway

As I live in a bungalow, surrounded by other bungalows with established gardens, there are not many views from my house!

I did a number of sketches from various windows and decided the view from my lounge window on to the back garden offered the most interesting view in terms of framing, colour, etc.  Luckily I sketched this on one of the few recent days we have had sunshine and, as my back garden is west facing, the early afternoon sun was coming through the windows to create contrast and interesting shadow detail.

My original sketch comprised the whole window, but I decided if would probably be more interesting to crop the view to just include part of the window and to create more of a focal point on the daffodils in a vase on the windowsill.

I also began thinking more about the brief for the exercise. We are asked to “chose a view onto the world”, the mood and atmosphere and whether or not to include the framework of the window / door to make the internal / external contrast more prominent.

On the concept of “framing”, the dictionary defines this as: to build by putting together the structural parts of; to conceive or design; and to arrange or adjust for a purpose.  All of these definitions apply to all the art we create in one way or another – we always choose to “frame” our view in a certain way for our own purposes.

Two artists came to mind regarding “framing” in landscape:

The first is David Hockney, especially his more recent works and the exhibition at the RA where his very large landscapes were painted on a number of canvases and then formed into a grid, creating an overall impression but each individual canvas was also a painting in its own right.  Hockney expanded this idea further by attaching a number of cameras in a grid to the top of a vehicle and driving around.  I found this installation fascinating – the grid pattern disrupted the eye, forcing you to focus on the individual images and made you look around the screen much more than a standard moving image would normally.

The second is Ben Nicholson and his inside/outside Cornish landscapes where he minimalised both the landscape and the still life image he placed in front of the window (frequently by just outlining the objects).  As I had objects on the windowsill, I wondered whether I could simplify them / make them “transparent” to focus the view on the outside.

While sat on my stool trying to decide the way forward, I focused on the differences between the two windows I was looking out of.  Even though the view is technically the same view, I began to see a contrast between the views from each window:

• The view through the larger central window is much more open – you can see into next door’s garden, trees in further neighbours’ gardens and the sky.  The fence separating our garden from the next faces almost due south so gets full sun and the daffodils on the window add a further splash of colour in front of the “sulphur heart” ivy, which is very bright acid green and yellows.
• The view through the furthest window is much more enclosed – next door have very large trees (mainly conifers) which take up the whole view over the fence.  The large shrub/tree just over the fence is still just branches which creates a strong contrast against the very dark conifers. 

The other thing I noticed by looking closely was the way the shadows played both through the window and how the bright sunshine changed the colour of the white window frames, putting most of it into shadow, as well as the window recess and wall.

I wondered how best to reinforce the “same but different” feel I was getting from this view, which is where Hockney’s grids/frames idea came into play.  I felt that if I could actually split the two views, it would force a viewer to actually see the two views differently, as well as it being obvious it was the same window view.

I sketched the windows on a sheet of A5, in effect making them two paintings within one.  Originally I thought of doing a diptych but decided that two paintings “framed within a frame” would work well.  My tonal biro drawing strengthened my decision to emphasise the differences between the two scenes and encouraged me to exaggerate the depth of shadow (especially in the far window) to create a stronger contrast.

Almost finished painting – just need to add a few white highlights and go over the daffodils where the pencil marks still show:

I carefully measured the canvas so the frame around each painting was equal and then masked off the canvas so I could paint freely without worrying about marking the areas I wanted to leave as bare canvas.  I was careful over the drawing stage as I wanted to make sure the perspective was accurate and the main lines in both paintings were precise (the masking tape helped here as I was able to create continuous lines by drawing over the tape).

The paint was applied fairly loosely using a filbert brush and neat oils (only using liquin on the blue fence (1) to dilute the colour slightly and (2) so it dried quickly so I could overpaint the branches of the magnolia.  The area above the ivy in the far window I painted with a wash of beige paint so I could then overpaint the trees to achieve finer branch detail.

This panel is the more colourful of the two, with the strongest contrast being of the complementary colours of the yellow against the blue fence.  Even though the outside greenery is fairly dark, the splashes of bright yellows and greens, as well as the strong shadows on the windowsill and on the fence and the blue sky, create the feeling of a sunny day in spring. 

This panel is much darker than the first, and so the tonal contrast here is the strongest one; the bare branches against the very dark conifers, the dark interior walls against the window and the dark shadow under the windowsill and radiator cover.