“The Race” walkthrough
Today I thought I’d take you through the process of creating my painting “The Race”.
The inspiration for this painting came from an interview I saw on the BBC website with the guitarist and ferrarista Chris Rea. He was describing his first experience of watching Formula 1 on TV as a child, the Monaco Grand Prix of 1961. He asked his father what the strange cars were on the screen, and his father simply replied “Squali…” (sharks).
So I wanted to paint the Ferrari 156 and particularly Wolfgang von Trips, even though he didn’t win this event. Some paintings are illustrations about what happened in a particular race, who was the winner or what was the famous thing that happened in that race. This painting isn’t one of those, it’s just a romantic representation of a tragic driver in a beautiful car.
I started by thinking about where on the circuit I could portray the car. I tried a few sketches out of different places, thinking about what direction the light would be coming from and how I could combine the shadows of the car with the background to make a composition. After a few false starts I saw a photo of the view looking back up the hill from the Station Hairpin towards Mirabeau (the Avenue des Spelugues is the real name of the street) and I drew the thumbnail sketch below. I did it with a black pen and a grey marker pen. It grabbed me when I picked it up again later on so I developed it a bit further.
The next step was to try to connect all those shadows together to make a balanced composition. When I’m doing this I am working out the composition on two levels. One level is about making interesting patterns with the most basic tones (black and white). The other level is about arranging the real-world objects like the car, the wheels, the kerbs etc in the best way possible. The two things, tones and objects, are two different compositions simultaneously on the same canvas.
To arrange the tones what I do is make some scribbly thumbnail sketches with a pen reducing the objects in the picture into two tones – white for the areas that the light is falling directly on to, and dark for the things that are in shadow, both the form shadow where the object turns away from the sun and the cast shadow where another object is blocking the sun. If you can link all the shadows into one or two connected inky pools it helps to unify the picture and drags your eye around the canvas.
At the same time I am thinking about objects in the scene and what I want the centre of interest or focal point is, so I can place that thing in the best position in the picture. The best place for the focal point is usually slightly off centre, both horizontally and vertically.
The focal point could be anything, you could play tricks and make a petrol cap or a tyre tread the focal point if you want to. However the most natural centres of interest on a racing car are a) the driver’s head and b) the nose of the car. Those are the things which, everything else being equal, the viewer will look at first. As you can see I didn’t try anything clever this time and put both the driver’s head and the nose of the car slightly off centre in the picture, the head in the upper left and the nose in the lower left.
In the rightmost of these three thumbnails you can see I’ve settled on the idea of having the car filling most of the viewpoint, slightly to the left hand side with the wheels off outside the picture frame on the left. I think that enhances the idea of the car rushing out of the picture at you in a barely controlled way. You can also see I’m also starting to think about making the top surface of the car as the lightest area of all in the picture, to attract your eye to that point. I like the S-shape of the road in the background which invites you to look up the road to see what’s there, and then back down the road to the driver’s head.
With these two thumbnails (and lots of others) I’m further developing the pools of light and dark tones, mostly connecting them up, but using all of the page in the arrangement. Is it a pool of dark ink on a white page, or a pool of white on a dark background? Either way it makes an interesting shape, deliberately there’s a circle of dark shadows with the driver’s head off centre, and a blob of shadow within the circle, off-centre – that will be the ventilation hole which was a feature of this car on what was a very hot day. Can you still see the form of the car? Note that the circle of shadows is not complete, there’s a gap at 2 o’clock that invites your eye in and out of the circle. And there’s a dark shape in the top right corner of the picture to create some tonal balance, which I know I can turn into the shadow side of the wall that runs up the street.
This is only a very rough scribble, but it forms the structure of the final painting. I know at this stage if I keep this strong light/dark composition in the painting, it will probably be alright.
I did a more careful drawing in pencil next, just for fun and to rehearse some of the more subtle changes in tone. I want a sharp contrast between the dark tones and the light tones in some places, but for the dark and light to merge together in other places. We call these lost and found edges, it’s important to have both in the picture. There are lost edges on the left side of his helmet and at the tops of the tyres, but found edges where Mr Ferrari cut the air holes into the top of the chassis and where there are reflections along the side of the chassis.
Are there more sketches involved than you thought?
Notice at this stage I hadn’t thought of putting any other cars in the background. Probably laziness on my part.
The next thing was to think about colours. The car is red of course, but I like my pictures to have an overall colour theme. If you put every colour into your picture it would seem disorganised, that’s not a composition. A musical composition uses a scale, which means only 7 out of the 12 possible notes in the octave have been used. The fact that you are not using some of the notes is important. It’s the same with a painting, one way to think of it is to select one bright colour, two medium-bright colours, and all the rest shades of grey or brown. It’s also important to have both cool and warm colours in the composition, making sure to include more of one than the other. In this attempt I’ve gone for a Ferrari red, with a bit of strongish yellow and a contrasting blue-grey, and the rest is a warm grey (otherwise known as brown). I wasn’t over the moon with this attempt, but not to worry, that’s why we have lots of goes at it.
The next two are better, particularly the one on the right. That’s the one that got me inspired and got my juices going. It’s a background wash of cool and warm grey/brown, with the deep shadows splodged on top. This thumbnail is about 2×2 inches (5x5cm) by the way. Probably took about 10 minutes.
I started work on the actual painting. The painting is on a piece of hardboard and I prepared it in advance with gesso, which is a kind of white undercoat that is quite thick and leaves nice ridges where I applied it with a brush. Once the gesso was dry I copied the approach used with thumbnail above and swished on some grey and yellowy-brown washes, thinned with turps, and radiating a bit from the centre of interest behind the driver’s head to suggest a receding road. I did this part standing out in the garden to help get my arm going a bit.
I don’t bother with a pencil drawing on the canvas or anything like that, I just go straight in with the paint and copy the preparatory sketches. I do a kind of loose drawing with the paintbrush to begin with but that’s all. A pencil sketch would just get covered up with the initial wash, and in any case if I am accurate with a pencil, I can be accurate with the brush too.
There seems to be two schools of thought with how to go on with a painting. One says you start in one corner and work your way across, bringing each bit to completion as you go. The other is more about getting paint all over the canvas early on, and bring it all into focus working on all of picture at the same time. I’m very much in the latter camp. I work on a bit here and a bit there and only put in the details towards the end.
As I proceeded I found I needed to do some studies of certain corners to get them right. If there’s a particular bit of detail to do it’s best to figure out how it goes before you start messing about on the painting itself, that way you get the painting right as efficiently as possible. I paint gesturally and with a sweep where possible, and it helps if I am confident about the details of what the thing looks like, so often I need to make some careful pencil studies if I don’t have suitable photo references. I use a long brush and stand as far away from the canvas as possible whilst still being able to reach it. I stand and address the canvas like a fencer, not like an engraver. I try to think of David Shevlino when I’m painting like this, he has a very dynamic aggressive technique that I’d like to copy, although I’m not sure I succeed very well.
I wanted to show the driver’s gloved right hand on the wheel to show he was about to turn left around the Station Hairpin, complementing the tilt of his head. I couldn’t find any reference photos that helped me out, so I took a photo of my wife holding a broom handle and used that as a reference instead. I think the driver’s hand in the final painting is one of my favourite details.
As the painting was nearing completion there was something about it I wasn’t happy with, something I couldn’t put my finger on. At this point I often take a photo of the painting and print out several copies on cheap copier paper. Then I get a pen or pencil and start scribbling experiments on the print outs to see what I can do. On this sheet I tried putting some other cars in the background and instantly realised that’s what it needed. The other cars give the viewer something to look at, a point of interest, and they also increase the sense of recession and drama.
Researching what other cars were in the race and might have been behind von Trips is all part of the fun. I went for Jo Bonnier and Maurice Trintignant, because the colours didn’t clash with the overall scheme and because von Trips lapped them both, so I figured they must have been just behind him at some point in the race!
Even though those two cars have a shadowy side, the pronounced aerial perspective means their shadows don’t interfere with the original design. Aerial perspective means the way that tones become lighter and greyer in the distance. Et voila, here is the final picture.
You can buy limited edition giclee prints of this painting on my ebay store or my etsy store, or by contacting me directly.
