Painting the Essex landscape

Discover more from Clare on her website, www.clarewilde.com

Wilde Essex - In touch with the landscape and how to make your own paints with artist, Clare Wilde

The Essex landscape is traditionally underrated by artists in favour of more classically romantic areas.

The landscape here is being lost through constant building of housing, roads and related sprawling infrastructure at an alarming rate. If people do paint Essex, they tend towards the obviously cute bits and the character, listed buildings.

However, swathes of Essex have a romantic beauty all their own - a quiet, magical bleakness, a gentle and peaceful ancient heart, but you have to stop and be aware with all your senses to experience it – rather than just being simply handed an immediate wham-bam drama.

I have lived in Essex for most of my life, and walked and ridden thousands of miles here. I am intimately involved with the storm-bruised skies, blazing summer sunsets, the hazelly-brick clay and the history of the land – where mammoth’s teeth were dug up, forgotten iron-age sites, tumuli nestled in the landscape, decayed roman roads, green lanes, hollow-ways and droves, and the sites of lost and destroyed farm-workers’ cottages, medieval barns and manors pulled down after the last war.

In my latest series of work, I am deliberately working on a small scale in order to ask people to really look, to draw attention into quiet, dream-like vistas that first appear relatively empty but if you take the time to really see, are filled with detail and colour.

I am seeking to evoke, rather than describe, and asking the viewer to attend more closely to the easily-overlooked and really experience the landscape - in effect I am taking a still-life approach to the essence of the world around us.

I hope that through being asked to notice deep beauty in these simple lines, people may learn to look more slowly and carefully at the world around them, and perhaps develop a deeper respect and love for the land instead of seeing it simply as a commodity.

I spend a great deal of time outside and every day I see a thousand paintings in the changing shape and light of one cloud, casting shadows on the meadow below; the light in a puddle with birds’ footprints in the mud beneath, in a field that once had a name; the kaleidoscopic colours of a single tree. One star in the early night sky, the wrinkled bark of our ancient boundary oaks, the gentle mists and fog with its land-enfolding shifts and drifts. I am constantly aware of how connected I am to the land, and how insignificant – if I spend the rest of my life painting, I will never have time to come close to trying to evoke the beauty around me.

I also make many of my own paints and use as many natural materials as possible, particularly pigments dug from the earth, to paint the earth.

I use ochres dug from the 7,000 year old ochre mines at Clearwell Caves, Epping yellow ochre, Mudlark Verdigris (made from found copper on the banks of the Thames), Suffolk chalks, a ground blue stone called Vivianite which was discovered in a Cornish mine; powdered Iron ore, natural woad blue from Somerset, genuine Indigo, oak gall and walnut inks, ground slate greys and powdered English willow charcoal, to name just a few.

Handling materials that have been used by generations of painters for thousands of years is an alchemical process. Where I do use synthetic pigments, I favour medieval colours like Smalt (ground blue glass), Sepia and Caput Mortuum (an iron oxide), and use oil paint made from pigment reclaimed from cleaning water.

I work in a mixture of hand-made oil paints, inks, dry pigment, charcoal, graphite and pencils made at the Derwent factory in the North of England and, when I can get them, I love to work on found surfaces.

I love making my own paints because of the process, but also it cuts down on packaging and if you use natural pigments, it cuts down the production of synthetics and packaging. I also love the process of using earth to paint the earth and charcoal to paint trees.

My usual working process is to underpaint in acrylic and ink, use pencil for detail, and oil last for highlights.

So, whether I am using oil or acrylic, the paint is made in a simple way.

MAKING YOUR OWN PAINTS

To make paint, you simply need pigment powder and a binder.

Pigments can be ground from clay, stones, barks, slate, charcoal and many other natural materials.

Soft materials can be tested by simply rubbing on paper to see what colours they produce. Harder materials can be rubbed against a stone or brick.

I always look for natural pigments first, and you would be surprised at some of the colours you can source.

I love those from Clearwell Caves, the Societe des Ocres de France, London Pigments from Cornelissen, and Natural Earth Paint from the USA.

Etsy is a good source of small, independent suppliers of earth pigments. Jackson's Art Supplies now do their own line of synthetic pigments and Kremer pigments are excellent, I use some synthetics to get colours I don't yet know how to make.

Most pigments purchased I use just as they are, in a fine powder. Sometimes they can be grittier so you may want to grind the powder a little more for a smoother paint.

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Top Tip

Some people use a glass muller to grind pigments, I use an earthenware kitchen pestle and mortar.

Whether you want to make acrylic paint, which can be diluted for watercolour washes, or oil paint, you simply add pigment to the correct binder and mix.

ACRYLIC - for acrylics I always used Liquitex or Sennelier acrylic binders, but now Natural Earth Paint have just started producing a plant-based binder and I'm switching over to that rather than using a plastic-based binder.

OIL - for oils I use refined linseed oil. Safflower oil is also very clean and won't affect the reflectivity of the pigment. Some natural pigments have little particles of mineral which shine and glimmer beautifully, it is these little bits of magic I prefer not to grind out.

Top Tip

When using linseed oil your brushes will need to be cleaned using Eco-Solve or Zest-it, which has a lemon scent.

To mix, you simply do as you would for adding liquid to powder for baking (or mixing cement!): make a little well out of a small amount of powder (I mix mine on the top of old yoghurt pot lids), and drop in the liquid a little at a time, mixing until you have the consistency you like.

I use an old palette knife to mix mine as it helps to press out and big lumps of pigment, although I also enjoy a naturally lumpy or textured paint.

You can add Gum Arabic powder, which is a natural resin from trees, to the oil paint to make a creamier texture; I always buy from ethically and sustainably sourced and supplies.

I experiment a lot; it's interesting and you learn as you go, some things work, some don't, and there are some interesting surprises.

Top Tip

My main tip is to start small; a very small amount of pigment goes a long way.

If you mix too much for one day, you can put the paint into either the freezer (if not going to be used the following day) or into little jam-jars. The 30g size you get in tea shops are ideal and you can usually get them from for free as they are generally just recycled. These will keep paint fresh until you've used it up.