Mint Street Parade

Mint Street Parade

(acrylic on board, 25 x 25 cm)

In December I had trouble with very visible Sharpie lines on this panel but solved it with a layer of thin paper. Last week I pushed on and thought I'd finished the painting. 

I was a little dissatisfied with what seemed to be simply a street scene with a man standing there with his shopping bag and I'm always acutely aware that the good folk of the North East don't like buying pictures of places they don't recognise and Mint Street is in Lincoln.

My admiration for Carel Weight suggested an addition. In many of Weight's paintings there are mysterious or unexplained events, often taking place out of the picture, and into my head jumped the idea of a passing parade. Hence the balloons.

Oddly, when I showed this picture to my friends at the recent Newcastle Painters meeting, no one noticed the balloons and my little joke was lost.

African Currency and a Sharpie

 3 pages of African Currency
(Black Sharpie in 14 x 14 cm sketchbook)

As an experiment, I took on holiday a new small Seawhite sketchbook and a black Sharpie. I know nothing about Sharpies except that they're very popular, so I thought it would be worth a try. The Seawhite sketchbook says on the inside sheet "ALL-MEDIA CARTRIDGE PAPER". I've used them before and had no trouble with them, but when I tried the book and the Sharpie together in a museum in Malaga, I found they didn't much like one another. The Sharpie bled through the paper easily and unless I worked very quickly, I found I was making drawings like join-the-dots. 

I gave up and took photographs instead.