Un Pigeonnier Troglodyte en Périgord

I’ve been working on a large oil painting of the cliffs. As I’m not certain about the entire painting, I’m not going to blog it for the instant. But here is a crop of it. If you read my long posts about ‘how to draw rocks’ & the prehistory here in the Dordogne, you will know that I’m fascinated about certain elements in this non-humanised landscape.

Chaos I guess, that does something to the imagination.

I’m groping towards a way of painting this. The academic way of painting the light & shade on rocks seems to me to risk diminishing this chaotic aspect. Exactly that which I like.

Well… I say non-humanised landscape lightly, as here in this particular spot, there’s a house built into the rock-face, hence the amusing address ‘Biicorne 2 bis’ – the bis being French for ‘a’ such as in 13 a Duke Street.Right in the middle of this crop, you can see a ‘pigeonnier’ or a dovecot. A troglodyte’s dovecot!

photography in painting

Observe also how I’m using photoshop to crop a detail & zoom in on the postive elements in the actual painting. This will help me identify the next step. This is another example of how photography inter-reacts with the painting process. A direct example of my previous suggestion that photography can be used to help make visible, to suggest, to dream & imagine using digital images on the computer. Read more about photography in painting in this blog’s category.