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)

 

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.

Water and Oil

I recently agreed to take part in an exhibition by the North of England Art Club at the Bondgate Gallery in Alnwick, the theme of which will be the rather vague "Northumbrian Scenes". There are two restrictions: the paintings must all be 20x20 cm and must all have a fixed selling price of £50.

Having agreed to get them ready by 12 May, I was dismayed to find that the date for handing in has changed to 28 April to allow for their framing. So the last few days have seen me hunting for images to fit the brief and suitably sized boards on which to paint them.

The studio still isn't really set up for oil painting, so I'd have preferred to work in acrylics, especially as I've just invested in a new set of Atelier Interactive Acrylics and would like to see how they perform. But the boards I found already have old oil paintings on them and acrylic over oil paint isn't a very good idea.

Another problem: most of my oil paints are still in the studio at my old house, so I found myself painting with a set of 8 Van Gogh water-mixable oils. Inevitably the colours aren't really those I would have chosen but they provided me with enough colour to cover over the old paintings.

This is where I got today with my two images which are, incidentally, scenes from Holy Island.

Small Piazza Painting

Piazza (work in progress)

I never tire of painting bits of Venice and my impression is that people never tire of seeing paintings of Venice. This first stage went quite quickly but proved difficult to photograph. In part, this is because, on a whim, I decided to use gold oil paint in the mix for the main building. It reflects very well, of course, but rather too well for the camera. Once it's covered (no Gustav Klimt here!), it should be easier to photograph.

Northumberland Fells

Northumberland Fells (oil with collage on canvas, 30 x 30 cms)

Another useful day, adding one more small landscape to my store. I just need to "do ten more" and find somewhere to show them.

The Side, with Snow

The Side, with Snow (oil on canvas, 36 x 36 ins)

I finished this, the second of the bigger pictures yesterday, although I'm still waiting for some of the white paint to dry. I had it out in the garden sunshine for an hour or two, while I hacked away a year's accumulation of brambles, but the sun seemed to make very little difference.

After that I stood it in front of the radiator all night as I continue to pander to the idea that heat will help, even though I know in my heart of hearts that oil paint dries by oxidation rather than evaporation. I'm supposed to get it to the gallery today, but I suspect I may be able to delay until tomorrow. That would be a good thing for a number of reasons, not least the weather forecast for today, which is truly horrible.

Two from Brighton

Brighton Cafe (work in progress)


Brighton Cafe 2 (work in progress)

For the last two days I've been earnestly trying to finish these two small paintings. I made the unfounded assumption that because they were small, I could get them done quicker than a larger painting. Very silly. Despite my use of Daler Rowney's excellent Alkyd Medium, some of the paint simply isn't drying and all attempts to work on them has resulted in lifting and smudging.

So here they are for you to look at: works in progress.

Back on the Grand Canal

Vaporetto 3 (work in progress)

I returned to this other vaporetto picture yesterday determined to move it along. I've knocked in rather roughly a new background which I think will work well. At the moment it needs pushing further back and the columns, balconies and windows need development, but it looks OK today and I'm not disappointed with yesterday's work.

I'd have preferred to work on it again today, but there's still a tackiness to the paint, so I'll have to be patient and turn my attentions elsewhere.

More about Chadbourn

My SiteMeter continues to show people coming here to read what I said about Alfred Chadbourn. For those who want to read a little more, I recommend an article by the late Charles Sovek, in which he expands on Chadbourn's use of three values. Sovek himself was an accomplished painter whose style closely resembles that of Chadbourn and his site, now maintained by his family, still holds many of his pictures and, more especially, his other interesting articles from The Artist's Magazine.

Old Town Hall

Old Town Hall (oil on canvas, 12 x 14 ins) SOLD

This is how it looked when I handed it in yesterday. I'd come to the conclusion that there were too many colours fighting one another, so I dispensed with the purple sky and opted instead for one made from ultramarine with a little cadmium orange in it (both colours used in the rest of the painting).

I also managed to get a little work done on one of the Vaporetto pictures. These will represent my main occupation in the next few weeks, if I'm to have sufficient work ready for the show opening in April.



Caught in the Spotlight (work in progress)

Pushing on

Vaporetto 2 (third day)

I decided I need to push on with one of these vaporetto pictures and get it to a conclusion. I have no real idea of what any of them will look like when complete, so having one finished could be very useful.

I started today's work by glazing over the water with a greenish-blue mixture of phthalo turquoise and raw sienna, then scraping it lightly off again with a palette knife. It's a little dark now, but I think it's working better as compositional band between the vaporetto roof and the canal-side buildings. When it's dry, I'll think about dragging over some blue again to re-establish the waves.

The figures are coming to life a little more, although I have no intention of making them very realistic. What I'm after is an understanding of the space they occupy, and gradually working over them, changing their position slightly, altering the colour build-up, gives me that.