001. Franz Marc:Liegender Hund im Schnee

My copy of Liegender Hund im Schnee

Franz Marc painted Liegender hund in schee in around 1911. The picture features his dog - a Siberian sheepdog named Russi without a care in the world asleep in the snow.

The original is an oil on canvas measuring 62.5cm by 105cm and is currently on display at the Stadel Museum in Frankfurt.

Franz Marc: Liegender Hund im Schnee 

The attraction to me in copying this was two things. The first; the structure and shapes used to define the dog and secondly the colours.

Where I am learning, I tend to start a painting by laying down a 3 x 3 grid first. I am very aware of the importance of training the eye, and given the different aspect ratio of the canvas I was using, I jumped straight into this picture.

I wanted to get those colours down first, and as I was studying the picture I was seeing all these reds, purples, greens, blues and yellows. My collection of colours at this point was not that big, for yellow I only had a CadmiumYellow and for blue just Ultramarine. But I did have a good selection of reds and a couple of greens, so I set about mixing purples, putting down greens and reds and going in heavy with my one yellow and blue. At the end of my first session, the painting was looking like this.

First pass trying to work out the colours 

I was wrong. Very wrong.

Firstly, Franz Marc was not the type of chap to wake up in the morning, go to the palette thinking I will use this pigment today. By 1911, he had already developed his symbolism in the use of colours; Yellow represented feminity and sensuality, Blue belonged to spirituality and masculinity and for materiality and the Earth - Red.

As I looked at the original more, I began to realise that the majority of the painting is just yellow and blue and I feel a bit daft pointing this out; Mixed with a very very high level of skill. What isn't yellow and blue (the area underneath the dog) is red. In hindsight, I would say it is a crimson red.

So for my second session on this painting, I put all my paints back in the box except for my Cadmium Yellow and my Ultramarine blue and started to paint over what I had already done.

The difference was instantaneous and from my point of view amazing, it now felt I was lifting the dog from the canvas as I started to go from blue to green and into the yellow. I can't control it at the moment, but as someone who is learning it is very satisfying to get that taste of what can be done.

This is the first painting after a break of twenty years that I am happy with. Yes, there are a million things wrong with it, I can live with that.