WIP - Holy Island Water Tower

 

WIP - Holy Island Water Tower

(oil on canvas, 12 x 12 in)

Not a great day at the North of England Art Club yesterday. I put this painting back on the easel to resume work on it and squeezed out some fresh paint onto my palette.

Then I noticed that a bottle of Liquin had fallen over and leaked out quite a bit of the contents into the bottom of my paint box. Liquin sets like a particularly sticky toffee. So, scraping out the Liquin as best I could, I started to clean the residue with white spirit and soapy water.

Almost done, I knocked over the inside tray, spilling all my brushes and tubes of paint onto the floor. My back is giving me real trouble at the moment, so by the time I’d dried off the paint box and picked up all the brushes and paint, all I was fit for was storing the painting back in the racks, putting away the easel and going home.

I haven't been back since, which is a situation in need of remedying.

Water Tower on Holy Island (WIP, second pass)

 

Water Tower on Holy Island (WIP)

(oil on canvas, 12x12 in)

A little more progress on this oil painting yesterday, mainly making changes to the foreground and developing the tree and foliage, but it feels slow.

Water Tower on Holy Island (WIP)

 

Water Tower on Holy Island (WIP)

(Oil on canvas, 12 x 12 in)

An afternoon with my oil paints at the North of England Art Club, concentration only interrupted by a man installing a blind directly over my easel. 

Rooting around in my paint box, I uncovered a tube of Mars Red and have now remembered how pervasive the colour can be. I'll have to remember to exclude it when I return to work on this.

Annual Show

Clouds over Holy Island
(Oil on canvas, 12 x 16 in)

Sunset, Holy Island
(OIl on canvas, 12 x 16 in)

I dropped these two paintings off today at the gallery on Westgate Road. They'll be going up later today when the North of England Art Club's annual show is hung.

Private View is this coming Friday, 18.45 to 20.00:

Driftwood

Driftwood (Charcoal and pastel on cartridge paper)

In an idle moment in the studio yesterday I came across a bit of scrap paper and decided to see what I might make of this image of driftwood I'd seen on Holy Island. The paper was a bit lacking in tooth, so the pastel didn't take well, but I think I see something here that may work its way into a painting.

A Good Day Out

Saturday was a very satisfactory day. The Holy Island pictures were lined up for the client to choose one and - gratifyingly - the choice proved difficult. She liked all of them for different reasons and waited until it was time to go before making her choice: Evening, Holy Island.

At which point I got a pleasant surprise. Her father decided to buy Orange Sunset, Holy Island.

If you're reading this, Cat and Laurie, I hope you get many years of pleasure from your paintings. Many thanks for commissioning this project and ultimately for choosing the works you did.

Four Skies - Holy Island

Orange Sunset, Holy Island (Oil on canvas, 12 x 16 ins)


Evening, Holy Island (Oil on canvas, 12 x 16 ins)


Sunset, Holy Island (Oil on canvas, 12 x 16 ins)


Clouds over Holy Island (Oil on canvas, 12 x 16 ins)

The plan was to finish these yesterday, but like many of my good plans, things got in the way, so I was forced to work on them today with the likelihood of their not being dry by Saturday. And Saturday is when they're to be shown to the client.

The bad news is that it was a gloriously hot sunny day today and I had to work in the studio. The good news is that I was able to stand them outside in the garden where the sun made short work of drying them perfectly.

These photographs are not colour perfect, I think, but they're close enough. I wonder which one she'll choose tomorrow. Which would you?

And One Makes Four

Holy Island 4 (Work in progress)

It's time to return to the Holy Island sky pictures and move them along, but I always feel three in a series is never enough, so yesterday I began a fourth.

The plan is to complete all four by the end of the week, so over the next few days they should all be appearing here. Watch this space.

Clouds over Holy Island

Clouds over Holy Island (Oil on canvas, 12 x 16 ins)

It's tempting to go on fiddling, but I think in this case it's time to stop. The clouds were complicated and it wasn't always easy to keep the colours from becoming an overall grey, but now I believe I'm happy with this one.

Holy Island Progress

Holy Island I (work in progress)

I suppose it must be much great to be a fast and furious painter of skies like John Houston, but I'm not. I take my time, building up the subtleties and nuances of colour. Which is not to say that one way is better than another, or to denigrate John Houston's work which I really really like; it's just different.

Anyway, this is where I left this today.

Third Holy Island Picture

Holy Island III (work in progress)

A bit more cloud structure in the sky in this one. It'll give me the opportunity to play with quite a varied palette of pastel colours.

Onto the Island

Holy Island I (work in progress)


Holy Island II (work in progress)

I know what you're thinking: Not more new ones! When will he ever finish something? Well, this is how I prefer to work. I have a lot of work to do in the next few weeks and I find that getting the paintings actually begun is the best way of moving forward. From the initial blocking in, I move on to getting done most of the work, then bring the paintings to their final state by putting in small delineations, points of light, etc.

Whether or not I should be showing these two at this stage, however, is a moot point. A comment on the previous post suggests that I'm very brave to do so. There is a danger that you can't see what I can see in them and you may wonder how they''re going to turn out. In this case, I'm erring on the side of giving information about their construction. The paintings are the result of a commission to provide a painting of Holy Island and what I've decided to do is make several at one time. Expect more of these in the coming weeks.

Holy Island Boat Shed

Holy Island Boat Shed (oil on canvas panel, 5 x 7 ins. Private collection)

I hope you all had a good Christmas. I certainly did and must thank Andy and Helen for giving us such a great time in Cambridge. And the Boxing Day revels with Helen's folks were much appreciated. Thanks guys!

The secret commission I spoke of a while ago can now be revealed. It was this small painting of one of the famous boat sheds on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, with the Castle in the background. I did it as a Christmas present for Andy and Helen.

It was interesting working on such a small scale again. When I first started painting, I did quite a lot of paintings on this sort of scale, especially while Northumbria Gallery were running their Small Works shows, but it's been a few years since I tackled one. Doing this one, and reflecting on the increased problem of storing large pictures in the house, has moved me further in the direction of a renewed interest in small works, I think. Hidden away, but lying dormant, is my Other Blog, Art from Tyneside, set up a year ago during a period of interest in the Daily Painters Movement. Maybe it's about time to get that project off the ground. Watch this space.

Home from the Island

Lindisfarne Castle from the Harbour

I was wrong about the weather. Although there was a strong wind blowing a lot of the time, we also got a fair bit of sunshine and by the end of the two days I'd adopted my "caught by the sun" beetroot look.

As is often the case with short holidays where others make the agenda, it proved difficult to do any sketching , so I opted for taking as many photographs as possible. There are certainly potential paintings in some of those, and the walking we did round the island made up for the lack of any sketching.

On the way back from one of our walks , I noticed a thrush behaving oddly on a window sill. He was jumping around, looking in through the window and tapping on it. Moments later, an old lady came to the door with a bowl in her hand and her dog scurrying round her ankles. The thrush, rather than flying away, jumped down and ran to the door where the lady threw food to it from the bowl. The dog and the bird ignored one another. Apparently this is the fourth year the thrush has come to her house for feeding. The natural world continually surprises me.

Lindisfarne

Holy Island (Rotring ArtPen, sketchbook)

I was last on Holy Island (Lindisfarne) in November 1996. It was a cold wet and windy day and the visit was only fleeting, but I managed to get this sketch done,despite the ArtPen beginning it's journey into clogging scratchiness, a journey from which it never recovered. Frustrating, disappointing and so far, despite advice from all quarters of the Interweb, non-reversible.

I'm off to Holy Island again tomorrow, this time stopping overnight and I had hoped that the weather - such a delight over the last week - would serve me better and perhaps let me get some more sketching done. Of course, as luck would have it, the weather has changed again for the worse, so I may find myself desperately searching for shelter on what is, as I recall, a rather barren island.