White Daisies

In her second feature from 1994, Charmian Edgerton explains how a pattern can help to describe the form and teaches us to handle a complicated design.

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Pastel still lifes

Confront your average group of confident ‘still lifers’ at their local evening class with a still life draped in rich, glorious pattern and, as often as not, even the most well-balanced will disintegrate into a shivering wreck.

I have a lot of sympathy for these nervous souls, as I used to be the same. Searching my favourite hunting grounds for paintable ‘objets d’art’ I would ignore the patterned for the plain and choose traditional linen over intricate lace.

I now regret missing all those wonderful bargains because as my own confidence grew I realised a very important fact – pattern really helps to describe the form of any object.

Imagine an armchair covered, for example, in mattress ticking. Some stripes will curve around the arms; other stripes will flatten nicely across the seat to give a horizontal plane, and more stripes will helpfully curve the chair back. Now, put like that, doesn’t pattern sound more possible? Pluck up your courage and sketch the nearest patterned chair. Don’t worry about perspective. If you create the pattern convincingly, the perspective will look after itself. Learn to look and look again. The secret is getting the pattern tonally correct.

Having completed that exercise, confidently I am sure, it is time to have a cup of tea with the master of pattern himself, Jean-Édouard Vuillard.

I have a soft spot for Vuillard as the surface qualities of some of his oil sketches have a close affinity to the marks of pastel. Look carefully through a book on Vuillard and you will see patterned form described in every conceivable way. I am always finding some treat, whether it is in the curve of a patterned shoulder or an area of wallpaper.

Pastel Chalks

Summer Breakfast and my Chocolate Cup

Go back a couple of centuries and you will find further inspiration in the work of Rosalba Carriera and Maurice Quentin de la Tour.

Rosalba Carriera (1675-1757) is remarkable for her low key palette and her attention to subtle lace work, and Quentin de la Tour (1704-1788) is technically quite astounding. His rendering of embroidery has to be seen to be believed.

I am always painting breakfasts and I can only think it is because I never eat them.

I always love the idea of such a civilised start to the day but the reality is so different that the nearest I ever get to it is within a painting. Perhaps that is why my breakfast paintings look a little wistful and Summer Breakfast and my Chocolate Cup, above, in particular, is nostalgic for another more elegant age.

There is nothing quite like pattern to breathe immediate atmosphere into the dullest of paintings. Take away the Edwardian lace cloth and you would have quite a different picture.

Detail from Summer Breakfast

For the painting above, the initial colour base was blocked in with a varying tonal range of pink violet and pink orange chalks.

The colours were gently smudged over the whole surface to give a background of prevailing colour.

These warm complementaries were deliberately chosen to contrast with the strokes of cool ultramarine and cobalt blue. They give a certain shimmering quality to the painting.

Throughout any picture I carry a very simple colour wheel in my head and mentally refer to it all the time. Thus the brown eggs were blocked in with tones of blue, and the pale yellow cup was originally the palest of violets, and so on.

I approached the painting of the lace with some trepidation. There was so much of it! However, taking a deep breath, I blocked in the deep red orange of the chenille tablecloth that lies under the lace.

I then loosely indicated the broad pattern shapes of the lace with medium tones or purple and blue.

Choosing a selection of pale yellows (cadmium, lemon and yellow ochre), and pale violets and turquoise tones, I dotted in the broader details.

Very slowly, and only when I was satisfied that I had completed all the underpainting of the cloth, did I break my very palest of yellows, greens, violets and blue chalks into tiny pieces to paint the fiddly bits.

Look carefully at the detail of the egg and eggcup; throughout the painting I have emphasised the use of atmospheric colour, and the blue of the pattern is reflected in the ‘local’ colour (brown) of the egg.

A word in your ear: tempting though it may be when painting white lace, don’t reach for the white pastel. You will find yourself in deep trouble!

Summer Stocks and an embroidered Cloth

Summer Stocks and an Embroidered Cloth and White Daisies, above and below, are all about folds and how two quite different types of pattern make it much easier to study their behaviour.

In Summer Stocks, the embroidery emphasises the starched folds of the cloth. It is often very difficult to stop embroidery ‘floating’. To prevent that I paint the design in bright tones which I then rough up, sometimes smudging, and always stroking through with a hard pastel.

In Daisies, the lace was underpainted with very cool blue greys, and Prussian blue was used in the deepest shadows.

I organised the composition to emphasise the whiteness of the flowers and the folds of the doily. There are echoes of the dark viridian green of the leaves in the folds of the lace.

Having sprayed the painting with fixative in order to help give the pastels more grip, I used the pattern thickly to describe the folds in complementary colours, and again, no white chalk was used.

Another hint: always search out the reflected light within the folds and the warmest colour tones will be in the part of the fold closest to the picture plane.

White Daisies

Pastel chalks are surprisingly versatile when it comes to pattern making.

Those new to pastel might find the pastel sticks clumsy to use initially, but with only a little experience you will find them useful for making different marks for all types of patterns.

The sticks can be used from every angle; side strokes will quickly evoke mass and the ‘point’ can create dots and dashes of broken colour.

For very detailed work the pastel sticks may be broken into fine points and the resulting fine lines and dots can be blended with a stump or torchon. Feelings run high about torchons. I abhor them, but pattern is one of the few occasions when they are of use. In my opinion though fingers are the better blenders.

When faced with a complicated pattern, such as a Turkish rug for example, the wails of the pattern phobic are truly heart rending. “What shall I paint?” and “What colour should I choose?” The answer to both these questions is simple. You half close your eyes and you look at the offending object. With your eyes half closed the tonal values will appear more exaggerated. The overall colour of the rug will become obvious and certain areas of the pattern will appear more dominant.

Hat with Summer Basket

Paint the background to the rug in a slightly lower key than the original colour, then pick out the strongest colours and shapes.

Work slowly and thoughtfully with very little loose strokes, completing the picture with tiny little dots and dashes only when you consider it is nearly finished.

A word of warning – if you find yourself using tiny bits of chalk and that wretched stump when you are only halfway through your painting, you’re in trouble.

Picnic.

It is always useful to compare two pictures that are similar but not the same.

Look carefully at these paintings. I used the same rug in each picture. The rug’s ‘local’ colours, i.e. the real colours, are a pale cadmium yellow and a light blueish reddy purple.

As soon as the pink scarfed hat and the basket of stocks were put on the rug, the red stripes looked more red-pink.

The blue scarfed hat, on the other hand, ‘cooled-down’ the red and emphasised the blue tones.

You will now realise, I am sure, that you cannot isolate your pattern from your still life if you wish to achieve colour harmony within your pictures.

Summer Hat.

I chose to write this article on pattern intrinsic to objects, rather than to discuss the pattern of light and shade, but I can’t resist including this picture, above.

The painting shows how very useful it is to have a dark toned, patterned background (whether shadow or wallpaper).

In this case the shadow helps to ‘throw forward’ the hat and basket.

A little tip: the most boring of still lifes can be transformed by including a richly patterned scarf in the background. Do that, and you will be following in the footsteps of Cezanne.

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Further reading from this series:

Click here to read part 1 in Charmian Edgerton's Pastel Solutions

Click here to read part 3 of Charmian Edgerton's Pastel Solutions