paintings | Helen Colledge

Kentmere reservoir – watercolour sketch on paper, 5″x7″

When you have to walk quite a long way over rough terrain (steep slopes, bogs, rocks, long grass, bracken up past your middle and reeds) to reach your painting location of choice it is a lot easier to carry the means to make a small sketch or study than it is to drag a big easel and a couple of huge canvases with you (although I am working on that!) so, so far, I have tended to do a lot more work of around 6″x8″ and 9″x12″ when painting out of doors.

Working up smaller pieces into big paintings is quite a challenge and involves using the mind’s eye and thinking yourself back into the place where you made the original sketch. The sketch needs to contain enough hints to take you back there and you also need to remember what inspired you about the scene in the first place. Some locations just have something about them – an air of mystery and a feeling of anticipation, as if an event is about to happen. I like places that scare me a little. It helps if they are a bit remote and slightly threatening in atmosphere. I like it when nature seems so enormous and powerful in a place that I feel I am just there on sufferance – the hills could rear up at any moment and shrug me off, the clouds could envelop me and spirit me away, or the rocks could crack open and – who knows??

Earlier this year I made a visit to Kentmere Reservoir – a body of water at the end of a long, long valley which took some hours to reach on foot. Once there you are confronted by what seems like a natural theatre – the water makes the stage and mountains surround it on three sides like backdrop, stage scenery and wings. There is no continuing (unless you want to walk behind the reservoir and climb through the mountains) and it’s a long walk back to the nearest village. So, you are safe and not safe. Free in the middle of nature and trapped.

I sat in the middle of the dam and painted a quick watercolour sketch. The light was odd and the day was coming to an end. Golden patches of sun moved across the mountains as if they were carrying out an evening performance and the shadows loomed very dark. The play of light on the water made it look very deep and extremely still. The atmosphere was magical and if something had risen from the lake it wouldn’t have been at all surprising.

Back in the studio, the watercolour had enough in it to allow me to attempt a larger oil version. It has had polarised reactions from those who’ve seen it, who seem to either get it or not, but it speaks to me and has convinced me that converting watercolours into oils is a worthwhile experiment.

Kentmere reservoir, oil on canvas, A2

Another large painting I’ve been working on (still unfinished) from a series of small studies, all 6″x8″ oils, is shown on the easel below. I’m hoping to finish it soon – but I’m beginning to realise that paintings have their own built-in deadlines and they can’t be hurried, or delayed for that matter because they then end up overworked.

Mysteriously, as I took the photograph the dog ran out of the room in fright (I’d already taken three previous pictures without causing a disturbance) and a spooky orb has appeared on the picture hovering over the painting of Kentmere!

easel with Kentmere painting at the top and work in progress below

Towards the end of 2013 I had a phase where I went out painting every day, no matter what the weather. Sometimes it poured down and I had to hide under a tree with rainwater mixing into the paint on my palette. Other days it was incredibly windy and, on days where we were away from home, I would sometimes find myself in a busy place trying to hide from passers-by.

Only a few of the paintings weren’t duff (duff, adjective, meaning inferior, worthless; from duff, noun, meaning something worthless, first known use: circa 1889) which made me question the value of forcing yourself to paint, regardless of what’s in front of you. The best results seem to happen when you feel excited about what you’re doing, rather than trudging along as if you’re practising scales on the piano, but maybe the trudging is necessary in some mysterious way. Perhaps it prepares you for the times when you feel enthused and stores up skills that you can call on then. Who knows, really? Painting is a very mysterious business.

I managed to do this plein air experiment for 54 days in a row until the weather became so relentlessly awful that I gave in. People had become used to seeing me trundling up the hill with my pochade box every evening and had been speculating as to what was inside the peculiar wooden case, which looks as if it should contain something with dials, wires and antennae rather than comparatively dull oil paints. I never did work out how to answer the question: “What’s in the box?” If I told the truth people were invariably disappointed because they’d imagined something far more exotic. If I made up something or refused to say I felt guilty for being, perhaps, pretentious.

Out of all the 54 days I mostly painted in oils, starting with small 6″x8″ pochades and then swapping to watercolour for a while when I ran out of materials. Finally I did some bigger 9″x12″ paintings – still fairly small in the grand scheme of things but it wasn’t really the weather to hang around for long and I wanted to complete the pictures in one sitting before the light disappeared.

Some of the results that weren’t on the “completely duff” pile are below: