Tower in the Woods

Tower in the Woods

(acrylic on board, 12 x 12 in)

I finished this painting fairly recently and took it along to a meeting of the Newcastle Painters' Group last weekend where it was warmly complimented. Silly, I know, but I needed that confirmation that my work, slightly changed by methods and medium, is going well.

Photographing artwork is difficult at this time of year, with the light quality being seriously reduced, so this is the best I could manage under the circumstances. I'll try for a better quality photograph in due course.

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.

Lost in the Woods

Tower in the Woods WIP

(Acrylic on board, 12 x 12 in)

Thinking I was on a roll with these woodland path paintings, I decided to try this one, based on a conflation of two photographs taken in Croatia. I've always liked  the idea of finding deserted or derelict buildings in the middle of woods so the Romantic in me was pleased. I think perhaps I would have liked it to have become darker, more sinister, but my sunny personality won out as always (winky emoji).

Initially, I'd planned to paint it on one of the more recent 8x8 inch canvases but then decided the subject deserved something a little larger, hence the 12x12 inch panel (incidentally cut from one of the many paintings I've had to destroy in the last year). Yet, as I've often found to be the case, the change in scale, even this small a change, proved awkward. By restricting the available area, the smaller sized paintings made me more economical with the shrubbery; given the relatively broad expanse of the new support (I exaggerate), I ran amok with wild and florid bushes and tree tops.

It was all too busy. What I've done now - and the photo shows where we are at the moment - is draw round the main clumps of bushes with a green Posca Pen and flatten out the shapes with darker paint within those outlines. It already looks better, so I'll try to reassert some of their solidity without, I hope, making it all too busy again.