32 Artists&Illustrators
Prior to a trip such as his recent stints in Russia and
Scandinavia, Giff will prepare maybe two dozen plywood
boards, each about 40cm square and covered with a white
Crete primer and then one of a range of coloured oil
grounds. Dark purple grounds are usually used for night
paintings, orange ones for cityscapes and mauve ones for
snow scenes. “It kick starts you a little bit,” he explains.
“Those colours will shine through in a little way and bind
the whole thing together immediately so you get the feel
of the painting earlier, which is useful when it is cold.”
Time is always of the essence. Even when mixed with
his trusty Lukas Medium 5, the slow-drying nature of oilsmeans that Giff can often only paint
a single layer on location. He will prep
things a little by blocking in some
colours and shadow shapes. Then,
when the sun hits the required point
in the sky, he will “just really go nuts”,
working quickly with the oils.
A video posted on his Instagram
account (@andrew_gifford_artist)
back in September shows him making
a frantic 10-minute oil sketch of a
Swedish sunset. “The essential thing
out there is to get a sense of the
actual colour and light in the sky.
A photo never quite gets it.”
He further increases colour
vibrancy by keeping his brushes clean
at all times and using a palette that is
at least as big as his board or canvas,
so that there is space for mixing.
To carry paintings home, Giff places
plastic tile spacers (the ones used for
tiling bathrooms) between the wet
boards, which he then wraps together
to hold them in place. Back in the
studio, these smaller paintings made
on location will either be worked over
quickly, keeping a sense of the
original colour but enhancing the
brushwork and transitions, or he will
use them as the basis for larger
paintings, where he can develop or
expand the colours further. Scaling
up, however, requires far more than
simply recreating the same scene on
a larger scale. “You can’t just paint a
sketch with a small brush and then
paint the big canvas with the same brush. You’ve got to
handle the marks totally differently.”
Abstract artist Mark Rothko famously liked to paint in a
brightly-lit studio, but then have his works hung in dim-lit
conditions – an approach Giff has adopted. “It means when
I paint darks in the studio, I can really see them properly.
And then when those darks are lit normally, they’ll really
just glow.” This interest in the more technical, logical
aspects of painting is something he credits to his engineer
father, “a total scientist” in contrast to the artistic nature
of his mother’s side of the family. A voluntary lunchtime
course at art college that taught how paints were madeABOVE Silver
Birches near
Stockholm, oil on
panel, 42x28cm