Thoughts on night painting, revisions

As scientists, we are constantly having to revise documents, starting in graduate school with the supervisor making edits, then as we submit manuscripts to journals and get long lists of changes to make. On occasion a manuscript is completely rejected and we go back to the drawing board or find another journal to send it to. I only sent my paintings to one art competition, about twenty years ago, and never hear back from them! So with my art, I seldom make revisions unless its the winter and I can not finish the scene on location or its dried strangely. For these night paintings, which I completed last night, I was thinking about how to improve them and tried a few things. This one was the easiest to fix, I used a combination of green umber (PBr7) with orange (PO62) to apply a dilute wash around the moon and blend into the sky a bit. Now the moon has almost the correct glow around it. Next time I will use that combination. In the original version, the scan is still on the previous blog, I used yellow ochre but it dried too pale.  

Circus tent with moon b, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, July 2025

 

In this one, the central building was a little too black so in this version I lifted some of the paint from that section to give a better sense of shape and moon-glow effect. In reality, the sky was lighter than the building, but the trees were darker than the building. Its a neat painting, and the success of the small sign in the bottom right gives me hope I can do a bigger and better version one day. 

 Moon and Farine Five Roses b, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, July 2025

  

This was one of my favorites and Cilei liked it too. I just lifted some of the green-black from the trees to make the glow better, and made sure to keep the river water in the scan which got cut off in the scan from yesterday. Revising these paintings was a useful exercise, it was mostly a way to trouble-shoot the paintings and see if I can bring my night paintings to the next level. After thousands of paintings over 35 years my day paintings and sunsets have really improved, and so have my night paintings, however, painting at night is a magnitude harder then anything else. Especially when its snowing! One successful night painting, and it was surely a cold and snowy night was Skating Rink Cyan.  

 Expo 67 dome and moon b, watercolour 6 x 7.5" cold press, July 2025 

Discussion on Hiroshige's 100 Views of Edo 001: Nihonbashi Yukibare

 

Hiroshige's 100 Views of Edo 001: Nihonbashi Yukibare (from https://www.hiroshige.org.uk/)

If you follow my blog you know that with few exceptions I only post my own artwork, and more recently it is almost all 'hot of the press' so to speak. In this blog, I wanted to discuss Hiroshige's print Nihonbashi Yukibare from his famous series 100 views of Edo. You see an image of his original print from the excellent website hiroshige.org.uk. In real life it would be about 39 x 26.5 cm which is the Japanese Oban format, and they are all composed on the vertical instead of horizontal. This was the series that put Hiroshige into the elite category of artisan in Edo (the old name for Tokyo), it really did represent his peak output. He was the first to compose landscapes on a vertical format since traditionally landscapes are done on a horizontal format. It was quite the sensation, in mid 1800's imagine seeing this big colourful landscape print showing a popular bridge in Edo, mount Fuji in the background, and the ships and stores along the river. He often composed winter scenes, and you can see how expertly he designed the snow features on the trees, hills, boats, bricks and roof tops. These are wood block prints so Hiroshige made a drawing and gave instructions for the wood block carvers and printers who would churn out hundreds or perhaps up to thousands of prints for sale by the publisher. 

The reason this print is so exciting is that it represents a cross roads of influences spanning the globe. Prior to the Dutch colony which was established in Japan around in the 18th century (1700's), Japanese artists were mostly influenced by Chinese buddist art which consisted of a 'floating world'. The Chinese artists had objects like mountains, paths, trees and people, all floating in amongst clouds without much of a clear horizon line or sense of landscape per say. It was the great Hokusai who first entered one of the Dutch trading colonies in Japan and learned from their artists how to paint through the 'Dutch lens' as he called it. Dutch painters were used to painting expansive flat scenes with windmills and boats tightly composed on a horizon line. Fast forward to the print under discussion and we see elements of all those influences. The pinkish clouds just below mount Fuji at the top represent the 'floating world' which translates to Ukiyo-e the name of this style. The mountain line and realistic looking perspective comes from the dutch influence. Thus, Hiroshige was able to fuse together the decorative and 'flattened out' traditional Japanese style with the more accurate and earthy Dutch style to produce these unique prints.