This shows the working process in the studio. I quite often paint over old work. I have had this one in the studio for a long time & I didn’t like it. It seemed too mechanical & also as I painted it when I was very ill it just reminded me of that time. I had an undiagnosed chronic sub-dural haematoma & I was trying to finish work for an exhibition!
This shows the development of a new painting. The painting isn’t finished & I will post the next stages at a later date when it’s finished!
Collages with watercolour which I did today. They are small scale & from sketchbooks.
Abney Hall & various drawings from travelling between Stockport & Bolton.
It has been a beautiful spring day in Cheshire & it was lovely to hear the combination of birdsong & church bells in a walk around Abney Hall in Cheadle. I didn’t do any drawing, but it is in my memory now & over the (soon to be lost) Easter college break I might try & revisit as the trees are mature & the hall is wonderfully quirky It is mid Victorian & mixes both the Gothic & the Romanesque.
A couple of weeks ago I took a bus ride from Stockport to Bolton & made drawings from the windows. Here are some of them…….
Work in progress.
These are not properly resolved & some are only just started. I have already changed the orange one (not for the best) but hey that’s what painting is all about, taking risks. Watch this space for changes & developments….when I get chance to go in the studio again.
Out & about on a bus travelling from Stockport to New Mills drawing what I could glimpse from the bus windows. The colours were lovely but unfortunately I can’t paint fast enough. I sometimes take photographs but rarely use them as reference material, maybe as reminders.
These are recent large scale paintings the left one is 60”X60” & the right hand one is about 72”X60”. Sorry I’m still not comfortable with metric, I think I was in the last year of the Primary School to learn everything in imperial. I just cannot visualise a painting in metres.
Still not really sure if they are finished but I am at a loss at what to do to them & the next series might be quite different anyway.
This striking building is Our Lady & the Apostles, Shaw Heath, Stockport by Edmund Kirby. It certainly wants you to notice it. It looms up as you travel towards Stockport from Manchester & dominates the local skyline with its fiery hot red brick. An extraordinary building.
This is one of the pitfalls of working at home as opposed to the studio. A pile of watercolours is not the best place for Django my cat to sleep; at least they were dry!
I nearly always have a sketchbook in my bag. I like to record things very quickly, often when I’m travelling on the top deck of a bus. The completed drawings are something of a montage of observation.
I sometimes get some funny looks & once I was challenged by a bus driver who thought I was a bus company spy, but generally no one notices.
The drawings remain to refresh my memory & parts are reused in bigger drawings, paintings & prints.
