Erik Tiemens

These atmospheric cliff studies by Erik Tiemens are in gouache not oils.

Where it is impractical to make on site studies in oils, gouache and or watercolour is a quick and convenient medium. The studies can be used to make larger studio works in oils, but they also stand as wonderful works of art on their own.

Erik is an internationally renowned landscape painter and award-winning film concept artist.

Erik's website

Paul Lewin - British 1967-

Carn Trevean Cove, Cornwall,
34 x 34 cm,
mixed media on paper

The artist has rendered the cliffs in loose, transparent washes; the water in fine, clear, solid detail. Too much fussy detail in the cliffs would only compete with the detail of white foam and reflections, reducing the impression of dazzling, moving water. Indistinctness also gives the impression of distance and immensity to the cliffs. The background washes are probably watercolour; the bright white areas could be gouache or acrylic. These contrasting textures can also be achieved in oils with the use of solvents to create washes.

Check out this artist's website here.

Of his working method the poet Christine Evans has written:

His relationship with landscape is intense; he seems absorbed, almost subsumed into it, driven by a restless energy that is characteristic of the sort of places he is drawn to - the extreme edges of land, jutting promontories and tidal shores where frontiers between land and sea are blurred and perspectives ever changing as the sky. His practice is to complete a painting at a single sitting if possible. Sometimes a piece will resolve itself quickly, in a couple of hours or so; more often, he will be working out in the open for five or six hours or until the light goes.

William Trost Richards

View of Cornwall, 1880, 23 x 37 inches

Arthur Suker - English

After the Storm,

64 x 128 cms

More Cliffs.

Air humidified by mist and spray increases the desaturation of tone with distance.

Cliffs

Joseph Berges,
Cliffs at Etretat,
1919

Stanley Cursiter, Blue Day, Yesnaby, 50 x 60 cms

The cliffs in the distance are lighter in tone because the intervening atmosphere desaturates the tones of objects as they recede into the distance. Warm colours (lower frequency wavelengths of light) are lost first, therefore high frequency blue light is all that remains from the most distant objects. The area taken up by flat seawater is relatively small in these compositions. The cliffs have much more visual and psychological weight that a flat plane of water; if they occupy only one half of the composition, it can look unbalanced.

Edwin Ellis

Coast Scene

Walt Kuhn - American

Ocean Cliffs, 1914, 24.75 x 29 inches
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The cliffs are nearly far enough to the right of the composition to require some counterbalancing object on the left. This nearness to a point of imbalance gives the image a modernist edginess that works with the subject matter of stark cliffs. The light tones and colours of the cliffs, which are similar to those in the sea and sky, lessen their visual weight so that the small area of contrasting tones in the lower left corner is enough to act as a counterbalance.

Louis Auguste Lepere - French 1849-1918

Falaises au bord de la mer
(Cliffs by the Sea)
102 x 76 cm

This work looks as though it may have faded substantially, but the calm neutral tones produce a kind of timeless monumentality, and the sculptural arrangement of cliffs enclosing a small area of seawater is fascinating. Massing - the design of abstract shapes of light and shadow - is what characterises the great paintings of the old masters, not just deft brushwork or high quality hand-ground oils (indeed, this painting may have deteriorated due to having been painted with unstable pigments).

Seascape painting, like the still life genre, has been diminished in the public imagination because of an excess of cliched compositions. It's refreshing to see seascape painters who have looked beyond the obvious views of sand and waves for something that has interesting abstract design qualities. This is not to say that there are not original compositions of sand and waves to be found.

Stanley Cursiter - British

In the Orkneys, Westray





Cliffs, Orkney

Waves Breaking on Cliffs, Orkney, 34 x 40 inches

Bill Anton - American

Laguna Coast, 10 x 12 inches

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Square-ended brushes are good for painting coastal rocks.

Ray Roberts - American

View Towards Childrens Pool,
24 x 30 inches


Beachcombing, 20 x 24 inches


Davenport Morning, 12 x 16 inches

Davenport, 24 x 30 inches