Empty Deckchair

Empty Deckchair - 11" x 15" - Acrylic on Canvas

This painting is one of six that will be on show in the upcoming Royal Society of British Artists exhibition at the Mall Galleries, London - 29 February to 10 March 2012.

One of the, perhaps less obvious, influences on my painting is the work of the Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858). I especially liked the natural way that he made people part of the landscape. His figures are often partly obscured - maybe passing behind a tree or crossing a bridge with an umbrella against the rain - and no more or less important than the landscape they inhabit. As a young art student I discovered that my widowed neighbour, her husband had died in the late 1950s, had a complete set of Hiroshige's woodblock prints of the 'Fifty Three Stations of the Tokaido'. She kept them wrapped in newspaper in the cupboard under the stairs. Whenever I visited her and asked to see them she would fetch them, give them to me and leave. When I had finished looking at them she would return, and put them back in their place in the dark under the stairs. They were very beautiful and I spent many hours studying them. She told me her husband had acquired the set while in the Far East at the end of the war. I asked her why she didn't display them. She simply said, "Jim was a prisoner of the Japanese, I can't bear to look at them." After that I didn't like to ask to see them again.

Taking a Photo

Taking a Photo - 10" x 14" - Acrylic on Board

This painting is one of six acrylics that I will be showing in the forthcoming Royal Society of British Artists exhibition at the Mall Galleries, London - 29 February to 10 March 2012.

Somewhere in New York

Pool # 3: Igor Somewhere in New York State - 10" x 14" - Watercolour

This is another portrait that demonstrates my reluctance to paint likenesses. Igor, and his wife Irene, were my hosts when I first visited New York City. They lived in Orange County NY. Igor introduced me to the CD and the Apple Mackintosh computer so it must have been 1984. He also taught me how to speak American. They took me to visit friends who lived in the Catskill Mountains, somewhere in New York State, and that's where I painted this picture.

Cross Channel Ferry

Ricky Asleep on the Cross Channel Ferry - 10" x 14" - Watercolour

I don't do many portraits. I like doing them but tend to concentrate on everything except getting a likeness, which, to be honest, is a bit of a weakness in portraiture. This one was done from a series of photos of the painter Ricky Romain (http://www.rickyromain.com) on the Channel ferry en route to Paris. It was a short trip but I came away with many ideas for subsequent paintings, including several of the steps series already included in this blog. At the time I was reading some short stories by Honoré de Balzac and during the trip I visited the August Rodin Museum hence the passing similarity to the statue of Balzac by Rodin. I especially enjoyed painting the vinyl seat and the wall: I used a toothbrush to spatter the paint through a paper stencil to get the cork tile effect.

Zut Alors!

Man on Steps - 10" x 14" - Watercolour

This was my father's favourite painting, another forerunner of “Looking Down Some Steps” ('Keep it Simple' - 12 December 2011), and painted at about the same time as the previous painting entitled “Steps” ('Sacre Bleu' – 27 December 2011). For my part I always wanted a raincoat like this (it was a Humphrey Bogart thing) and it reminded me of a dreadful pun in an old Bonzo Dog Do Dah Band song, 'Big Shot':

“Have you got a light, mack?”

“No, but I've got a dark brown overcoat!”

The steps were in Paris although I don't remember where. There are a lot of horizontal lines and the painting is divided into thirds, horizontally and vertically. In the preliminary drawings I experimented with the shadows following the diagonal, but it looked wrong so I changed it in the finished painting. The palette is very limited: earth colours, alizarin crimson and ultramarine. Most of the painting is done with layers of washes but the foreground steps use a wet into wet technique. I like the way the shadow changes colour and become less sharp as it moves away from the figure.

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.