Life and Movement
Jenny Aitken advises on how understanding waves, tone and light on water creates a dynamic composition
At the beginning of my journey as a professional artist, I knew that I wanted to paint the sea. My family comes from the Channel Islands, and I’d always been in love with the wilder coasts of the U.K. I did some sketching outside, but since I was a photography graduate I mostly worked from my landscape photographs. I’d learned a lot about composition through photography, but I felt that my work was lacking in life and movement.
Early on, I bought an inspirational book by E. John Robinson with the lengthy title of Paint the Sea in Oils Using Special Effects.
It was exactly what I needed. I avidly studied the paintings within and copied several, developing my understanding of waves, tone and light on water. This gave me the confidence to start studying the sea from life. His final quote stayed with me: “All it takes is awareness, dedication, and the pleasure of much, much painting.”
Since then I have worked in and out of the studio, through the good, the bad and the ugly days, always trying to learn something from each painting. One very valuable lesson I learned was that if I’m overtired or ill, it’s just not going to happen! But most of all I learned that the best lesson for a painter is live observation of your chosen subject. Studying the colours and tones in the real world is so different from the blue-tinged, flat screen or print. Many cameras automatically increase the contrast and saturation of images, so life study is invaluable for accuracy.
Working with changing light in tricky