Jacobs Point-August

I'm going to be posting my way through a small backlog of completed paintings, while getting set up (mentally and equipment-wise) to resume my daily oil exercises. This one is the most recent completed landscape, again Jacobs Point. I miss warm weather.

This one was painted on a really rough-woven hemp canvas from HempTraders.com. I love painting on heavy canvas, but my slightly frugal soul rebels at paying upwards of $70 US per yard for linen. Hemp canvas is nearly as strong as linen and is only about $15 US per yard. Its staple, or average fiber length, is about 20 cm as opposed to linen's 25-150 cm. Cotton, by contrast, maxes out at about 6 cm. Supposedly Titian liked hemp canvas for his larger works and I'm happy to follow in those footsteps. I prefer to mount my canvas on board in any case, since I tend to abuse the canvas and really dislike it if it gets flabby during the painting process.

This was also the first larger piece I've painted using the linseed oil/chalk medium that I've come to favor. I'd read about it from several sources, notably Francisco Pacheco's "Art of Painting", but it's gone into pretty thoroughly on Tad Spurgeon's site. Even though I've got a larger, airier studio now I still prefer to paint without stinking up the joint, and the medium also does such wonderful things to the paint that I'd favor it in any case. Basically, it's just a mixture of linseed oil and powdered chalk or marble, and you can vary the quantities to vary the thickness and flow. It also adds a stringiness to the paint that I love, similar to the behavior of white lead. Add to that the fact that its translucency allows for some delightful color effects and I'm hooked. Of course, it works best with linseed oil that you've refined yourself. Yes, I'm geeky enough to refine my own linseed oil now. Honest, it's better. Really.

These trees form a nearly straight line out toward the end of Jacobs Point. I assume they rooted in that way because of a ridge of drier land, perhaps originally a sand bar. I've got reference photos of them in all weather, including a notable day when I had to wade out in a Winter floodtide to take the pictures (no outdoor sketching that day). Standing near knee-deep in brackish water with a thin rime of ice on top was a bit of a trial, but I found that if I stayed reasonably still, the water that had overflowed the tops of my boots warmed up nicely. That was the day I resolved to buy a good pair of tall neoprene hunting boots, suitable for long walks in low temperatures and waterproof to their tops. Mine are by Kamik and very, very toasty.

First Post, And an Explanation

First off, welcome to my blog. I've had a website for years (www.nickjainschigg.org) but after a number of changes to the software I used to build it and the aging of the overall design, I've decided to relegate it to an archive and continue to post my work here. Yes, that is my real name. It sometimes strikes even me as somewhat preposterous. In the unlikely event that I learn PHP, MySQL, XHTML and the rest of the alphabet salad that makes up contemporary Web-design, I suppose I may redesign that space, but in the meantime....

I've Been Working on Landscapes

The area I live in has a lot of salt-marshes, and I've become enthralled with painting them. One in particular, Jacobs Point (no apostrophe) seems to take a lot of my attention. Perhaps because it's a nature preserve, perhaps because it's so conveniently close, but it's also gorgeous. I've done a number of paintings of the place, and have plans for many more. I've settled on a standard dimension for the pieces, too--two feet by four. The panoramic proportion seems to suit my sense of landscape design. I suppose it's because, growing up as I did in New York City, the broad view was always both rare and exotic, confined to such things as Central Park, Riverside Park, tall buildings with large windows, and Summer vacations.

This one is called Jacobs Point-September, and was inspired by the way the different types of grass brown over at different speeds, and by the way the few trees out at the end of the point cast long shadows over the marsh in late afternoon. This clump of phragmites reeds caught the light quite dramatically. The Warren Land Trust has been trying to return the Point to its original plant species by increasing the salt-water flow through the marsh. This will push the freshwater reeds back closer to the mainland and rather extensively reorder the painting possibilities of the place. At the moment the reeds, being so tall, create backdrops, walls and curtains that restrict the space in interesting ways. I'm looking forward to seeing how the local spartina grasses affect the overall look. I can only presume (and hope) that they regain some of the appearance that Martin Johnson Heade painted in his saltmarsh pieces, notably Newburyport Meadows.