Winter's Jar

Winter's Jar

(acrylic on board, 24 x 24 cm)

In an effort to get some things done before the next meeting of the Newcastle Painters Group, I pressed on and completed this small winter landscape, featuring another of the pharmacy jars I saw in the Fitzwilliam Museum. The landscape itself is a view of hills in Little Langdale, where I went on one of my painting trips ten years ago. The snow, of course, is pure invention.

I'm really quite pleased with this picture and was glad to find it met with a favourable reaction at the Painters group meeting.

Winter's Jar WIP

Winter's Jar WIP

(acrylic on board, 24 x 24 cm)

One of the problems with sticking too closely to Gateshead Art Society's programme of suggested activities is that I seem to be ending up with quite a few unfinished paintings. This is certainly not a new situation for me in that I've always liked having several pictures on the go, but the number of unfinished ones is growing.

This came home to me yesterday when I found myself starting yet another. The suggested subject this week (and last, but I wasn't there last week) was "Winter". Using a photograph of a hillside in Little Langdale, adapted to show a covering of snow, I've added another of the pharmacy jars I saw in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

There's a long way to go with it and I'm not entirely sure it will work the way I thought it might, but for now I'll take it forward.

Oil Pastel Workshop

Across the River WIP
(Oil pastel on grey mount board, 11 x 11 in)

Another Friday afternoon at Gateshead Art Society, another interesting workshop led by my old friend Tony Montague. 

I've used oil pastels before but not to any great extent and I did find it a little frustrating not to be able to cover greater areas faster. This picture represents about an hour and a half's work and you can see I'm nowhere near covering the grey mount board. I don't want to cover all of it, of course: the board was chosen for its colour and some of the grey will show through the finished image.

As is often the case, I had to make a frantic search for suitable imagery for this afternoon session and I eventually found this image in a set of photographs I took on one of our painting weeks away. This one was in Little Langdale in 2007, and you might be able to guess that I chose it as an addition to my current fascination with paths through woods.