The Angels Wanna Wear My . . . .

Red Shoes and Sleeping Dog - 24cm x 30cm - Acrylic on Canvas

I used to like an Elvis Costello song - "The Angels Wanna Wear My Red Shoes" - I even bought a pair of red, patent leather shoes which I am pretty sure some angels would have desired. The shoes were too small and hurt my feet but I wore them anyway. I made the painting along with a handful of others with the intention of showing it in a new gallery near Montreal in Canada. I delivered it last week. I didn't play the song once while I worked on this picture but it was in the back of my mind almost all the time.

Hastings College Stole My Deckchair

Hastings College Stole My Deckchair - 29cm x 39cm - Acrylic on Canvas

 I was always going to call this painting "Hastings College Stole My Deckchair". On finishing it I worried that the title might be libelous but good sense (?) prevailed and I kept the title. I used to have a deckchair which I used as a model in many of my paintings, often with friends or family sitting in it. Foolishly I lent it to my son who wanted it for an installation which was part of his 'A' Level Graphic Design Course final assessment. Needless to say when I went to the college to collect his art works after the exams were over, the deckchair had gone. I blamed the college hence the title.

Harbour Entrance

Harbour Entrance - 23cm x 30cm - Acrylic on Board

This is the final painting of the series based around Rye Harbour. I often find that I paint several paintings at the same time around a particular subject. This subject, these paintings were special to me in many ways. While working on them it felt like I was fully engaged in what I was doing for the first time in a long while.

"These landscapes of water and reflection have become an obsession." - Claude Monet (1840-1946) 

Channel Markers

Channel Markers - 27cm x 19cm - Acrylic

John Constable recommended that artists should sketch or paint the sky everyday. Here he goes into some detail about why:

"The sky is the ‘source of light’ in nature, and governs every thing. Even our common observations on the weather of every day, are suggested by them, but it does not occur to us. Their difficulty in painting both as to composition and execution is very great, because, with all their brilliancy and consequence, they ought not to come forward, or be hardly thought about in a picture…"
(John Constable from a letter to Rev. John Fisher, 23 October, 1821)

Port Marker - 22cm x 29cm - Acrylic on Board

The forth of the series of recent paintings of Rye Harbour. I was once told by a teacher not to place the subject of a painting in the absolute centre of the picture. Good advice of course but since then I have always liked doing just that, not so much out of contrariness as out of curiosity although the former plays a part.

Rye Harbour III - Acrylic on Board - 17cm x 22cm

The third Rye Harbour painting. I don't usually paint so many pictures on the same theme at the same time but here I was trying to find what it was that I liked about the place. The building with the red roof belongs to the farm beside the river and I have been told about riotous parties being held inside, as befits a building with a scarlet roof (it's cadmium red in the painting). The building has become a bit of a local art cliche with many artists painting it but I had to do it nevertheless. Presumably it is painted red because it's on the port side of the channel. The painting works for me mainly because it's so simple.

Rye Harbour II

Rye Harbour II   17cm x 22cm   Acrylic on Board

This is the second of six paintings of the channel markers near Rye Harbour, looking from the east, across the river, towards Winchelsea Beach and Pett Level. I have always like this area, it is empty, almost desolate, with the meandering River Rother canalised into a straight line. The colours and the slightly DIY look of the port and starboard markers appealed to me.