John Hicks Artist and Lecturer
Sepia Garden, green raw umber with linseed oil on canvas
30 cm x 21 cm (September 2001)Detail To the artists' materials shop L Cornelissen & Son in Great Russell Street, to look for safer pigments than the toxic soots and ash of the Dark Garden. This wonderful shop still supplies ground pigments in sealed paper bags that could have been made up a hundred years ago: "Burnt Green Earth", "Burnt Vine Black, (obtained from vines discarded after the grape harvest), and the medium for this painting, "Greenish Raw Umber".
The colours from this pigment change according to how it is mixed: with more linseed oil, it produces a warm, transparent rust colour but shifts to cold, magenta brown when added to flake white. Sadly, I didn't blend the oil well enough so this painting gradually slipped off the canvas before it dried. I didn't care for it much at the time anyway as it looked like a porridge Van Gogh, so I chucked it away. But the photograph has retained the markmaking and paint surface so well I'm tempted to return to this medium, possibly without a representational subject. The painted impasto frame is important, shifting the emphasis to the painted surface.
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