Laying Cable

 Laying Cable

(acrylic on canvas board, 8 x 8 in)

If you're a painter, are you ever surprised by how your paintings turn out? I know my many interests feed into my work and with this I probably detect the influence of children’s book Illustration. A good deal of this must be to do with the switch to acrylic paint which lends itself to bright clear passages of colour.

Corner Garden, Majorca

 Corner Garden

(acrylic on linen panel, 30x30 cm)

Finished yesterday, I think this painting represents for me a search through memories of holidays past at a time when another trip abroad seems far off.

The view is based on a photograph I took in Alcudia on the island of Majorca in September 2008. The weather was a bit mixed and Alcudia is not at all colourful, but as always, I enjoyed my time abroad, so as the painting developed, my memory and imagination heightened the colour.

Trees and Mausoleum

Trees and Mausoleum

(acrylic on board, 30 x 30 cm)

This is the painting I worked on last week to get it ready for the Newcastle Painters Group meeting on Saturday. I had to fight my natural inclination to use brighter colour, but I thought it important to maintain the mood and sombre colour seemed appropriate to do that. So it is that most of it was achieved with raw umber, Payne's grey, unbleached titanium and sap green. Only the sky was allowed a little variation to include cobalt blue, ultramarine, cerulean blue and more Payne's grey. This may not be obvious from the photograph because of reflection into the camera lens. I hope the eventual varnishing will help with that.

[I'm not very happy with the title - Trees with Mausoleum may be accurate but falls short of the more poetic title I think it probably deserves. Serious suggestions welcome.]

Whitby Fudge Bar

Whitby Fudge Bar
(Acrylic on board, 20 x 20 cm)

This the second of the two small paintings finished today and to be sent to the Bondgate Gallery show. Like the previous one, it offered a lot of fiddly detail and took several attempts to get a sky colour that I liked. As the awning is a cold blue (and yes, it had to be blue - no other colour would do), I needed to get a warm sky behind to make the picture work. For a while I wrestled with a pale purple but gave up on it as being too difficult to get the tone right without being very chalky - a problem with acrylics, I think.  In the end I opted for what you see - cobalt blue.

Maritime Trust in Colour

As is now quite often my practice, I've been trying out colour combinations on my Sketch Crawl drawings, using Photoshop. I find this much easier and less worrying than hand colouring sketches and I do get to a result I like quite quickly.

I feel certain there's a painting in this coloured version of the Maritime Trust boat shed.

Circle Grounded

Sketchbook Circle Partner A has returned my book without further additions. Quite where we go from here, I'm not sure, but the Administrators are aware of the situation and are trying to make new arrangements.

Meanwhile, I think it's safe to post my own recent pages in my book. Those who were quick enough to see what I posted before being asked to delete them, may remember that much of Partner A's pages consisted of hands. I took that as a lead and made these new pages (one of which is an elaboration of my line-drawn page). This is my idea of a sketchbook conversation and how I see the work of the Circle progressing. The last one above takes the theme of the hand and adds the bowl that I used in the very first page of my book and, of course it also appears in the hand of the woman in the first page shown above.

And just to round things out, here's how I changed one of my pages by adding further imagery and colour.

On Course

I think I mentioned when beginning work on my wooden heart, that I'd signed up for an online painting course. It's with Este MacLeod and it started this week. Este's paintings are nothing like mine; her background is in textiles, she paints in an abstract manner and she uses acrylics, on this course Golden Fluid Acrylics. All of which I thought would throw me out of my comfort zone and maybe give me a push in a different direction.

It already feels like it's working. There's that old feeling of finding water unpredictable and uncontrollable and relief to find that she uses mostly acrylic medium to thin her paint. But not knowing, and finding out how paint and colour will behave is a getting-back-to-basics strategy and is truly fascinating.

At the top of this post is one of the colour exercises and here's a couple of pages of fanciful flowers put together, quite quickly, from deconstructed fruit and veg.

More as things unfold.

Sketchbook No.2 (#5)

In the Boatyard, Funchal. 10 August 1992 (Mixed media in A5 sketchbook)

Drawn the same day as the previous post, this is a pair of a huge tanks normally floated in the harbour to keep ships from bumping into the harbour walls.

It was probably a mistake to favour the dark local colour of the tanks when drawing this. I should have simply concentrated on the linear and tonal qualities.

A Week in Staithes (4)

Yellow Houses at Staithes 
(Disposable fountain pen with watercolour pencils in 21 x 26 cm sketchbook)

No wind abatement, so by now I was looking for places where I might get a bit of shelter. Half way up a path that climbed the south side of the valley, I found I could look across the roofs to the other side.

I really liked the yellow houses over there, so I was disappointed when the lines from the disposable pen ran into the yellow pencil and spoiled its purity

A Week in Staithes

Staithes Roofs (0.8 fine line marker in 21 x 26 cm sketchbook)

As I do every year, I went off at the beginning of the month for a week's "painting" with some of my mates from the Art Club. I put that in inverted commas, because it's rare for me to get anywhere near some paint. Mostly, it's a couple of sketchbooks and some favourite pencils and pens and maybe a slosh of watercolour and a smudge of coloured Conte.

I honestly thought this year might be different.  For one, in Staithes  I'd be amongst buildings, which should mean I'd not be hunting for the odd twisted tree to provide some structure. Buildings, after all, are my thing. So it did seem as if I might at least get out the tubes of gouache I take along every year.

But I'd reckoned without the wonderful British weather. The north easterlies blew straight in off the North Sea and up the Staithes Beck valley. Although the torrential rain we'd been promised in the forecast didn't materialise, and the sun shone quite a bit, it was bitterly cold - one night saw temperatures drop to -6C!

But I set off with a good heart the day after we arrived, climbing up the side of the valley to look down on the town. From there I could see Westgate, the house we were staying in  That's it in the centre of the drawing, just across from the former chapel now housing the Captian Cook and Staithes Museum.

Surprisingly, the wind wasn't too bad at the top of the valley, so I was able to spend a couple of hours working on this drawing. I thought about adding colour, but I was coming to the view that I might do without colour or tone in the sketchbook on this trip, so I left it as it is.

Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Saint Kevin and the Blackbird - Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Nothing has to be a particular colour any more than it has to observe external laws of perspective. Rather, a painting is a world apart with an internal logic created by the painter. It is one thing to know this, and to accept it in the work of earlier artists, but quite another to do it yourself. Such is the nature of education now that children routinely copy pictures by Van Gogh or Picasso, often painting a bit each then putting the pieces together in a wall-sized collage. The belief seems to be that they will thus acquire a shortcut to the methods and insights of those ground-breaking artists. On the contrary it's like putting down the answer to a mathematical problem with no idea why, except that someone more mathematical than you has told you the answer. Until you understand through repeated practice and experimentation how and why to break rules, even the unwritten ones, all you will be as an artist is a facile imitator.

Rex Hartley (from What is a Still Life in Clive Hicks-Jenkins)

Clive Hicks-Jenkins is one of my recent discoveries. I first came across his very interesting blog, then followed on to his website and finally bought the book about his life and work. The book contains 11 essays about various aspects of his work, including paintings, drawings, and book illustrations and is well worth reading.

I was particularly taken with what Rex Hartley had to say about the use of colour, which I've quoted above. As he says, "It is one thing to know [that colour in painting can have it's own internal logic] but quite another to do it yourself." I have to constantly remind myself of this.

Four Balconies, Crete

Four Balconies, Crete (Oil on board, 12 x 12 ins)

Saturday's not usually a painting day for me, but while Pat's away having fun in London, I thought I'd press on with Finishing Off. Here's one I don't seem to have touched for just over three years. Maybe it's because I've strengthened my colour sense in the intervening years, but today it moved along very well. Well enough to reach completion, in fact.

Oh, I do like it when things go well, don't you?

A Yellow Wall

A Yellow Wall (oil on canvas, 40 x 40 cms)

Back to the Club again, after a couple of weeks away and despite a bad weather forecast. Determined to finish this painting which has been hanging around for quite some time, I settled on a figure in a window as the focal point through the arch. It makes this something of a companion piece to The Orange House.

When I came out of the Club, the wind was rising to a gale and by the time I got home my trouser legs were soaked through. I don't like winter.