Two Paintings of Sidmouth

Well this blog is called paintings-art so some paintings should appear here once in a while, it is somehow inevitable.

I have painted three pictures over the course of the last few winter months of 2010. Two of them are landscapes, the first being a view on the beach of Sidmouth looking west towards Higher Peak and the second being a view from the Peak Hill side of Ladram Bay looking west towards Budleigh. Both are painted in oil and measure 40cm by 40cm.

At one time I thought that the first painting was finished and hung it on the wall indoors to have a look at it. In the low winter light it appeared to be almost completely black and it was fairly obvious that I was going to have to lighten it considerably. In the end it became a sort of very early morning in winter scene, as if it was only just starting to get light. It still looks a bit dark in the photo but is actually a little bit lighter than this.

The second painting came out a lot slower, and I watched with some dismay as the tide rolled out and back in again as I attempted to get the large cliff to work. The first big cliff would somehow overpower the rest of them, so the famous red cliffs of East Devon are now in part a murky Paynes Grey due to a shadow falling on them, but it did seem to work and you have to know to walk away if a painting seems done. Sometimes I have gone in to just alter a tiny detail and somehow ended up mucking the whole thing up, which is all part of the fun.

Seeing as winter (which seems to start October/November, looking at watch..March) is almost gone I am hoping to be able to paint for longer again, as the 'studio' will not be so much of an icebox. Hurrah for spring coming soon and more painterly stuff and also other things.

Drawings from My Book

Drawings from my book, if you are interested in buying a copy email me and i'll steer you towards it.

Painting and Driftwood

I haven't put one of my paintings up for a while so here is one that was finished not that long ago. As usual it has a long working history and was started on a piece of wood that I picked out of a skip in about 1992. The red part at the bottom dates from about this time whilst the rest of the paint was applied over the course of the following years. The white part in the middle was the last paint to be applied some time about a year ago and finally it was framed earlier this year - not the fastest of working methods.

Recently I have been experimenting with oil paint again as a bit of an exercise and to go in a different direction for a little while. A lot of what interests me about painting is to try new techniques out if I get too comfortable with a way of working, for instance a lot of my earlier paintings were based upon spontaneous line drawings and I became very content with the quality of line work, so as to take myself on a bit I attempted to paint entirely without lines to see where that would go. Maybe I just like making things difficult for myself, I don't know. When I get to a place where I think "oh I can do that now" this seems to lead me to "Well , I can do that now, what can't I do?" so a lot of it has been about working on the things that I find difficult or cannot do easily.