Friday 6 July 2007

Another Beginning


King Street (start)
I promise to start posting some finished pieces of work Real Soon Now, but for now I'm in a getting-them-started kind of mood.
At the Art Club yesterday, I worked on a painting begun at home earlier in the week. It's one to go with the picture of South Shields Metro station, which I've now brought home so I can look long and hard at that tree. The image above is where I started at the Club.
What I like about this image, in particular, is the way the green Metro bridge cuts across the street and forms a counterpoint to the main thrust of the buildings. I may seem to be dotting about in terms of subject matter, but it's my colour experiments which are of most interest to me at the moment, and I'm quite pleased with the way the use of colour is coming along.
This is how I left it when I came home:

King Street (second day)

7 comments:

jafabrit said...

I live on King Street, but it doesn't look at lovely as this. I like the softer yellow sky.

harry bell said...

Hah! The King Street in South Shields doesn't look as lovely as this either.

In the first stage, I just knock in a general idea of the colours I want (or sometimes their complementary); after that, it's a question of refining, balancing, adjusting ...

Anonymous said...

This painting of King St is looking very interesting, I like it a lot. I love the way at first it reads as an abstract,the shapes just grab you, and then it registers that it is a street...i enjoy that in a painting. I will check your blog often.

harry bell said...

Thanks Sally - please do come back again.

Anna said...

I'd have been content with it in its start state with just a few rough edges knocked off. That yellow sky punched the building blocks forward so dramatically.

But No 2 is great also - especially the wet pavement. It is so interesting to see them evolve.

ian gordon said...

Beautiful colour. And composition.

Reading below I think your impressions of the Summer Show at the Royal were broadly in line with mine. Although I think you were kinder to Hockney. (I think I would have liked the small canvases to join up far less).

I'm liking these pictures of yours with the walways over the road. The way they cut into the formal perspective of the street is really interesting.

harry bell said...

Thanks, Ian. Leafing through the RA magazine, I see that Hockney painted the big picture in batches of ten canvases, the most he could take in at one time. And he spent each evening looking at print-outs of photographs of the day's work, so he hasn't entirely eschewed the use of photographs, it seems

Re the South Shields pictures, it was the bridge (it's actually the Metro railway line bridge) cutting across that attracted me to these views in the first place. Glad you share my interest.