Annandale Distillery is a splendidly-restored commercial whisky distillery about a mile north of Annan town. It is sited in a valley-bottom on one of the tributaries to the river Annan.
As subject-matter for a painting it holds out a lot of promise. The architecture is varied and unusual, including a lofty chimney, a curved building, and a roof structure that one would probably classify as a cupola, not seen anywhere else in Annandale that I know of. The stone is a beautiful colour.
There are challenges though. One is the scale. The distillery as a whole comprises several large blocks of architecture arranged around a central space. One way for the painter to tackle a big object is to get far enough away from it. The obvious direction to go with the distillery is East, into the field where the horses usually graze. Unfortunately this field has a curvature and a banking that cut off the line of sight to the lower part of the buildings, as can be seen in the upper drawing above. No other viewpoint is free of visual obstacles.
This does not mean that a good painting using the distillery or parts thereof as the chief compositional elements cannot be done from the available vantage-points, for there is plenty of compositional potential even in the upper parts of the distillery buildings, and of course the painter reserves to himself an ‘artistic licence’.
Artistic licence means that, where the real scene does not present in a spatial or tonal arrangement conducive to the composition of a good painting, then the painter organises a rearrangement on the canvas. This can be mistaken for ‘making it up’.
The difference between invoking artistic licence, and merely ‘making it up’ is that artistic licence prioritises the composition of the painting first and above factual reporting of a scene, whereas ‘making it up’ might do neither.
Anyone familiar with New Abbey or Lochmaben can see the degree to which J.M.W.Turner used artistic licence to get a good composition for his studies of the abbey and the castle when on his Dumfriesshire tours of the 1800s. Turner’s approach of making dozens of sketches from all directions, then designing a composite that retains enough that is true to do justice to the model, might be one to test out if attempting to paint Annandale Distillery.