Sacré Bleu!

Steps - 10" x 14" - Watercolour on Paper

This is one of a series of pictures of people on steps and a forerunner of the painting 'Looking Down Some Steps' (see the blog entry 'Keep it Simple' - 12 December 2011). It was painted after a trip to Paris in the early 1980s. This was based on the steps leading up to the Basilique du Sacré Coeur in Paris. I accentuated the shadows and made the grassy slopes more geometric. I also divided the page exactly in half using the straight edge of the steps' wall and tried to pull the whole thing back together with colour and the diagonally placed pigeons and shadows.

Keep It Simple

Looking Down Some Steps - 20" x 30" - Acrylic on Canvas

 These steps are in Brighton, Sussex where I lived for several years in the 1970s but I painted them much later while I was living in Dorset. I had several photos of these (and other) steps which I was working from. I like this type of view, looking down on the subject from a position where the viewer is not quite standing on the ground. I became interested in shadows on steps when I was doing a series of paintings near the Sacré Coeur in Paris. When I remarked to a fellow artist that I had tried to keep things as simple as possible he looked at me as if I was mad, but it's true, in all my paintings I am trying to keep things simple.