Painting techniques of the masters
John Constable (1776 - 1837)
In the early stages of my oil painting, way before pet portraits were part of my repertoire, I found great inspiration in Constables work and in particular, the way he created his dramatic skies. He managed to capture them with accuracy and, at the same time, evoke a constant movement. Standing in front of his paintings you can almost see the clouds pass before you.
Constable grew-up in Suffolk, an area that had a great influence on him and where he would find constant inspiration. Many of his later works being created from early sketches and childhood memories. Constable was influenced by Rubens and, although having had a formal art education, gained much of his technical expertise from copying the Old Masters. One contemporary recalled Constables' duel pre-occupation with nature and the Old Masters as: 'No one perhaps has given a greater look at studying nature than John Constable, but he told me he seldom painted a landscape without thinking how Rembrandt or Claude would have done it'.
The amount of time Constable spent painting outside is debatable, as the practical problems of working on large canvases in the open air would have been great. He would work on the whole together, beginning with a faint dead colour in which the masses were laid in, and proceeding with the details gradually with allowing one part to advance beyond the rest until the whole painting was finished.
For Constable "chiaroscuro" (the effect of light and dark) was an effect to be attained at all costs and, in the pursuit of this, he evolved an expressive and unfinished execution, including impasted flecks of white which offended many of his contemporaries. This was especially true of his works after the 1820s. Delacroix commented: 'Constable says that the superiority of the greens in his meadows is due to the fact that are made of a large number of different greens. What gives a lack of intensity and life to the verdure of the ordinary fun of landscape painters is that they do it with a uniform tint.' - This was one of Constables major achievements.