A copy of a Peter Hayward painting from the 1960s. The title from the pictures found online said ‘Fabulous New York City Street Scene. Signed lower left.‘ This was a copy in acrylics, a request for the living room wall.

Size was important. My usual small paintings would not satisfy my commissioner. Luckily I had a largish (50 x 70 cm) canvas with a wooden backing frame from a craft store, a birthday gift from some years back that had been abandoned in the back of a cupboard. The great thing about acrylics is they’ll paint on just about anything, no special surface preparation required.

As this was meant to be a straightforward copy (possibly part of my training as an art forger) I had no qualms about doing a copy of the basic outlines using a drawing grid and a pencil transfer to canvas. The proportion of my canvas was slightly different to the original, so I had to add some extra sky in Photoshop, which didn’t seem to affect the composition too much. Though in writing this post and finding the links to the original auction pictures, I found some extra pictures of the original painting in its frame that I had missed which show slightly more of the left and right edges of the painting. It’s a small difference, but it takes away the slightly awkward tangent of the round sign on the right next to the side of the frame.

Too late now. It’s done and on the wall.

Another potential problem with copying paintings is matching the colour. By strange coincidence, some months back my wife had returned from a charity shop with a large framed print that she couldn’t resist, also by Peter Hayward. The picture looked oddly familiar. Then I realised it was the same print that had been on the dining room wall in my grandparent’s house. It was one of the first pictures I remember looking at as a child. The trees looked weird. Why were they bending over like that? And why did the tree trunks disappear off the bottom of the frame? At the age of five I couldn’t understand the perspective. But I remembered the woman with the red coat. I thought it was somewhere in France. But it was another New York street scene, probably Greenwich Village. This picture, which was larger than the one I was painting, allowed me to compare the colours and study the thick impasto technique that he used. Of course, I’m relying on the colours in the print being accurate, but they matched the ones of other prints online.

After it was painted, I asked in the NMA Discord if anyone recognised whereabouts in New York it was. Someone came back straight away: It was the Jefferson Market clock tower. I could explore the surrounding streets with Google Street View and eventually found this view from West 10th Street.

The red brick, the fire escapes, the cornices on the buildings all looked right. The tower in the distance looked too small, but how much of that is down to the wide angle lens on the street view camera and how much is due to Peter Hayward taking artistic liberties? As Stapleton Kearnes said, you can’t observe good design into a painting, meaning you’ll probably have to change the scene in front of you to make a good composition.

The hotel on the left has gone. Further research revealed that the large building next to the clock tower was the Women’s House of Detention, or The House of D, demolished in the 1970s and replaced with a garden. See this article for a comparison of then and now.

The scene in those old photos feels quite different from Peter Hayward’s view. I’m glad I didn’t see those pictures before I started painting. The whole exercise was an attempt to reverse-engineer what he painted back to what he was seeing (or wanted to see), and to reproduce his technique to some degree. He seemed to be painting fast, with thick impasto, large areas of pallet-knife-flattened paint, edges moved over with another layer of thick paint. My copy didn’t have that speed and generous paint application. Perhaps you had to be on the street, capturing the light before it changed, getting the paint down quickly and efficiently, to get that distinctive look of a Peter Hayward painting.

A copy in oils on panel of a painting by Edward Seago.

Seago was a prolific painter of landscapes. Stapleton Kearns has written extensively about his methods on his blog, which is well worth a read.

I started with a charcoal sketch to get the feel of the composition. I think the composition is instantly appealing, with those unusual tree angles and the light-dark balance. The eye is naturally drawn around the scene and off towards the distant trees and sky.

Seago’s style is very loose and painterly. He painted very quickly with brushy, textural strokes, and it was important to remember this when making this copy. It’s a style which can’t be reproduced by fussing around or tentative licking with the brush. This was especially true for the foreground snow where the textures of the grasses could only be achieved by a confident, definite stroke. A palette knife was useful for many of the effects.

I let the first pass of paint dry before drawing the trees over the top, though Seago probably did this wet-into-wet.

I might have oversaturated the colours in this copy. Seago’s colours are more muted and greyed down in the original painting, though two separate online references have different colour casts. Another painting of a similar scene [The reed bed — Winter] has different colours again.

These master copies really are useful for trying out different approaches to painting. The different styles force you in to new ways of seeing and translating. And while examining the surface of the painting can reveal valuable insights into the artist’s methods, so much more can be learned from ‘acting out’ a bravura brush stroke.

A not-too-slavish copy of Head of a Woman by Orazio Gentileschi. This copy is about a third the size of the original, and was painted with a limited palette of just ultramarine blue, transparent oxide red and titanium white. I first heard about transparent oxide red (PR101) from Terry Miura who uses it instead of umbers, and I think it’s becoming one of my favourite staple paints, not least because it mixes well with ultramarine to create a surprising range of flesh tones. The only downside is that it’s so tempting to leave the glowing orange when really I should be muting the colour down.

I haven’t done an overlay check of proportions with this one as that wasn’t really the exercise (though I did play around in Photoshop with a photo of the half-completed painting to identify an overly bulging eye). The challenge was to see if I could capture anything of that arresting and inquisitive gaze.

This started out as an afternoon painting session in the garden. It was a sunny day, I wanted to paint in oils — and I didn’t want to rely on another photo. So I set up a small box easel and began to paint a self-seeded poppy growing out of a plastic pot. There was only one chance to do this as after a few hours the last of the petals fell off.

At the end of the session I wasn’t particularly impressed by what I’d done. So I experimented with thumbnail acrylic sketches and digital overlays to see if I could transform what I had into something more interesting.

The result (top picture) looks somewhat Victorian, and the short-lived suburban poppy has been hammed up with the drama of the fading light into a vanitas. (At least, that’s the story I’m telling myself.)

These are copies painted in oil in a sketchbook based on hand studies by Bouguereau. The thick sketchbook paper will take oil paint if first covered with a layer or two of acrylic gesso. Any leftover paint can be spread on top of this to create an oil ground for the next sketch, but it’s not necessary. This was another way to use the intimidating Moleskine, even though it seems a bit odd to put oil paint in a sketchbook.

As ever, the challenges were to match the values and hues while at the same time trying to model three-dimensional form, all by using buttery oil paint. The hues tended to be somewhere around orange—slightly more red or purple in some areas, more yellow in others—but all of of the hues were quite greyed-out or desaturated (low chroma). Bouguereau himself somehow managed to make flesh tones look natural and almost translucent (see this link for a discussion on this topic) yet his colours are not a dead grey.

On the dimly lit shelf, my version looked a lot more smooth and natural than when brought out into the light. Bright light shows how rough and sketchy the paint blending really is, as you can see if you zoom in on the photos above. Studio lighting is something I really need to sort out, as painting in the dark often fools me into thinking I’ve done a better job than I have.

I noticed that too, when painting the puppy portrait. The painting viewed in natural indoor light on an overcast day looks very different to the same painting in direct sunlight, as you’d expect, but it’s not just the colours that become more saturated, the edges become harder and more noticeable.

Click for larger image.

Anyway, it’s all good practice. To see some extraordinary oil paintings in sketchbooks, have a look at the sketcbook tour videos by Cesar Santos.

A typical mid-session mess.

For various reasons, I usually paint in the second smallest room in the house. My ‘studio’ working surfaces are a few book shelves (covered, predictably, with books) and a small table which is home to a computer, modem, keyboard, mouse mat, graphics tablet and a cup of tea. In short, space is short.

Out of necessity I’ve found various ways to cram the messy paraphanaelia of oil painting into as little space as possible. There’s enough space on the table for a glass picture frame (my palette) which when not in use can be balanced precariously on a section of my CD collection (the bad ones).

I’ve found that using glass as a palette is the easiest way to mix paint and the easiest to clean. I turned the lining cardboard to the front to create a neutral midtone. At the end of the session any extra paint is gathered up with a palette knife and transferred to the bespoke paint stick which was cut to fit in the frame. Large amounts of unsullied tube paint can be kept in separate blobs, but everything else is mixed up into a pile of mud. The stick is then wrapped in junk-mail clingfilm.

After the bulk of the extra paint has been saved, a few sheets of kitchen towel and a small blob of hand soap will complete the clean-up, no solvents necessary. In fact, I rarely use solvents for any part of the painting process, so even in this small room there is only the faint smell of linseed oil.

I don’t bother cleaning the brushes. Instead I get the worst of the paint out on a kitchen towel then dip the end of the brush in a mixture of safflower oil and a dozen drops of clove oil. This combination is very slow drying and will keep the brushes supple and in good condition for at least a couple of weeks before needing another dip. At the next painting session, just wipe off the excess brush dip and carry on painting.

In this small space, the easel is put up wherever it will fit. The lighting… well, that’s a problem I haven’t really solved yet. I want to get a consistent soft-box setup so I can draw the curtains on the sun beaming uncontrollably through the west-facing window. But that will be the subject of another post…

To varnish or not to varnish. Some painters don’t like the glare and shine of gloss varnish, preferring a matt or satin finish, or not varnishing at all. There are matt varnishes which contain a small amount of wax to take away some of the glare, but for paintings with dark areas this can seem like the worst of all worlds: there is still a sheen of glare (though not as much as with gloss) but the deep tones become cloudy due to the wax. Maybe it works well with high-key paintings.

Varnish is there to protect the surface (it’s a removable, replaceable clear layer) but it also brings out the depth and vibrancy of the original wet paint. It also evens out any patchy, sunken-in areas, which is where I find it most useful. Some pigments sink in more than others (ivory black and burnt umber seem to soak up all the oil) and mediums added to the mix can alter the final gloss. Thick impasto can have a glossy sheen next to paint thinly applied with a brush.

It’s a minefield of confusion which I attempted to clear with systematic testing, but like many of these experiments I ended up throwing various combinations of paint and varnish on the canvas in the vague hope that something useful would come out of it.

Here’s a painting of a rose (this was originally going to be a post about painting a rose from life, with the various challenges that presented) with a background that contains large areas of ivory black. It looked deep and dark when wet, but as you can see from the photo, it sinks in really noticeably to a dull matt finish. So much of the oil is soaked up that the paint doesn’t even feel particularly well bound to the canvas, as you can see from the top-right edge where the paint was lifted during oiling out.

I was going to go in to detail about all the various combinations of paint and the effects of thickness of application, oiling out, layering, and so on. But you’re spared all that and here’s a picture instead.

Click for a larger image.

The conclusion I reached: just apply a layer of gloss varnish at the end and all the problems are solved. Except for one: whilst sunken-in areas regain their depth, any areas that are already very glossy become even more glossy, so there’s still some unevenness. The portrait at the top of this post had glossy areas where I’d used stand oil in the paint mix. Adjacent areas were relatively matt. The gloss varnish evened things out a little but not completely. I tried applying a number of coats but they all seemed to dry with the same result. In the end, in a spirit of experimention and desparation, I poured a pool of varnish over the non-glossy areas, hoping for an evenly-glossy final painting. It didn’t work, but I quite like the photo.

Things to try in future experiments: lightly abrading the very glossy areas to take down the sheen before applying the final varnish.

Here’s Mark Carder with a video on how to varnish a painting. However, if you’re using Gamvar (as I did) the application needs to be thinner. See here for Gamblin’s varnishing instructions.

This was a bit of a shock. I’d never come across this before. This is an old oil sketch I made back in 2014 on postcard-sized gessoed acrylic paper. It was kept for a good part of those four years in a stack of other similar oil sketches.

I took it out recently to find yellow-brown splotches all over the painting, and the whole picture had a colour cast. At first, I thought oil from the back of another ungessoed sketch had soaked through the paper on to the surface of this one.

I wasn’t particularly concerned about this painting—it was just an experiment to try things out—but if I’m using a technique that is flawed then I need to correct it.

It’s easy to get a bit obsessed with archival methods for making a painting, and as someone once said, there are paintings that will last a hundred years that should never have been painted. But, I would like to make objects that will be around for at least a few decades without falling apart.

I looked online and discovered the phenomenon of dark yellowing. As the name suggests, the linseed oil in paintings kept in low light or dark conditions can go yellow and darken dramatically. The cure, thankfully, is simply to expose them to light again.

I put the cloud sketch on the windowsill for a couple of days and the yellowing disappeared. If only all oil painting problems were as easily fixed.

[I remember this picture being hard to photograph when I was writing the post four years ago—the colours would shift with every shot I took. Preparing these photos was even more difficult as they were taken a few days apart with different lighting conditions. The top photo doesn’t quite convey just how noticeable the yellow splotches and colour cast appeared. It really did look as though the painting had decayed and deteriorated.]

A copy of a photograph taken over a century ago by Félix Thiollier, possibly of his daughter, Emma. As far as I can tell from the translation of the French Wikipedia page, he developed his own prints and sometimes altered them using acid, or by drawing over them with ink or gouache.

This was a chance to just experiment with creating light effects using loose brush strokes and rough scraping with a palette knife. The cheap canvas surface was good resistance for the sharp corner of the knife and at times it felt like I was channelling Timothy Spall.

The original photograph has an unreal beauty and it’s hard to know how to add to it with paint. In being documentary, photography sometimes has the trump card over painting in that this moment actually happened. There’s a power to that which no amount of paint handling can recreate.