Canvas vs. Panel

Summer Marsh

38 x38

Oil on canvas

I often debate with myself what surface I prefere to paint on.  Sometimes it is nice to switch things up.  If I have been working on panel it can be nice to move over to canvas.  The give that canvas has can be nice in the early stages when mapping the image out.  The play and bounce of the canvas becomes its own language.  The force that the brush playes back is a conversation that feels different than panel.  It is also nice to hit a new canvas and hear the drum sound.  When painting with turniptine the canvas absorbs the terps better than the panel would.  The hard panel has a directness were each mark is free from the texture of the canvas or linen and is easier to read and give the illusion of space in an emediate way that canvas doesn't do.  Sometimes when getting up close to a canvas the materials stop the mind from the trick of photographic illusion. 

With the painting above I used a palette knife in the clouds in the sky.   I really enjoy painting the sky and like John Constable will make studies for larger works.

Sea Lawn

24x36

Oil on panel

This painting is painted with more layers using liquin as a glaze.  With panel I find that I tend to paint with a little less impasto.  It I do use impasto it is with the whites and I employ less paint with the darks such as brown and green. 

Usually the panels are first painted with an orange or thin red oxide.  This way the white really jumps out and the values can be established.  To me in landscape painting the values are the first thing as with drawing.  The color comes next never before the value.  After this the sky was keyed in.  All the other values are compared with the sky. 

Below are some skies painted by John Constable. I often also make sky studies for reference using them in later paintings.

Below are a few paintings on panel that the skies were borrowed from smaller sketches of the sky that were done plien air. 

128 South

36x48

Oil on panel

Sky over Land

36x60

Oil on panel

Hay Bales

24x24

Oil on panel

The sky above looks from the image as if there is too much cerulean blue.  In truth there is more ultramarine but the photograph doesn't reflect this.  My studies of sky's first began  in Orvieto, Italy; a medieval hilltop village in Umbria.

Below is s photograph I took there of the sky moving above the ochre tufa of the buildings.