From an early age and throughout my life I have always carried a sketch book, or found some paper to sketch something that caught my eye. Mostly now lost, but this is from my pre-university life in West London, sketched from across the road with the detail carefully drawn in later at home.
Whenever I have been sitting in a café or bar, on a train or in a park, I have drawn what I see. My most usual subjects have been people, and it’s interesting how a person often seems to know when they are being studied and then look over, like this guy. It’s the same with my street photography, people always know. My patients were particularly sensitive to this, and had to learn to how to deal with it.
It is fairly recently, in Nimes in 2019, that I started painting “pictures”. This was an early use of gouache, forseeing Brexit (now Covid), and the characters are taken from photos I took on a Normandy beach. The waves took me a long while to work out, I studied a lot of paintings and photos of waves and water.
On a hot Sunday in Montpellier, I was sketching people sitting on benches. The woman in red was watching me watching her. Later I put them together into another gouache painting.
But using bigger brushes, bolder strokes and acrylic paint, I tried to free up from tight illustration. One hot Sunday evening at an accordion and dance street festival, I took photos and drew people making music and dancing.
Following my contact with Chris Clements and the oil portrait workshops, still using acrylic and still nervous of oil, I painted a portrait of a carpet-seller in Montpellier from photos. He had been delighted to be photographed. I then had a quality print made and gave it to him. A lovely guy. We bought two carpets.
I have always drawn and photographed people, and wanted to overcome my anxiety about getting the technique right by experimenting with a more expressionistic use of colour.
We had a local bar when living in Paris, and I often drew and took photos from tucked in a corner. All human life was there, making music, dancing, flirting and drinking. This man’s unusual shape caught my eye.
And I did a rough painting afterwards, on paper, no big deal, but including the dog who always occupied a stool. I deliberately tried to keep the brushwork loose. Still acrylic. It helped me to gain some confidence in using paint.
I started looking in detail at the work of painters I admired. Chris had encouraged us to copy from past masters to learn their techniques. This is obviously from Breughel but I replaced the hunters with travellers from the 21st century, visiting the painting. Still in my acrylic safety zone.
All the time whilst I was beginning to learn about paint, I continued to take photos. This was across the bay near Montpellier, towards the Camargue. The colours of the sky are always interesting here, but this was a particularly spectacular sunset. This charged environment encouraged me to shift my focus from line to colour.
And therefore when I loosely copied one of Cezanne’s paintings, I used oil on canvas, looking at pure colour that is not an attempt to reproduce a photo but to represent the emotional response to the light and shapes. Why paint if it is better to take a good photo? I think this painting was a landmark for me, shifting me away from the need to get a good copy through paint but to create something else.
Still studying and copying paintings, this is from a painting by Gauguin, that forced me to shift from focussing on form to colour experimentation.
So that then, after a visit to Giverny and Monet’s garden, I was able to be looser with the colour and less worried about line and detail.
I painted this from a photo I had taken of a discarded chair. I worked hard on painting the old wooden background. But I began to fret about the chair, less interesting than the wood. So I went down to London between lockdowns to study Van Gogh’s chair. Ah, there is the visceral use of paint. I am still in the foothills!
This painting arises out of Covid, the overwhelming threat. And the freedom to paint the hills any colour that worked for me, and expressed the emotion of what I was painting.
At about the same time, last summer, we walked up Kinder Scout in the Peak District. I took lots of photos and painted several pictures afterwards. This painting was entirely done using painting knife with oils. The day and the wind had released something, and I felt more free.
As we locked down again, I found that I wanted to paint beauty and calm, not threat. This from another photo taken in the Lake District. When I put in the first horizontal line and the touches of the hills, I stood back and realised that I did not need to fill the canvas but the large empty space held its own narrative.
Still looking for beauty, and to immerse myself in memories of France, I painted this from a photo, with some additions and simplifications. I used medieval yellow, and enjoyed using complementary colours for shade. Technically I am reasonably pleased with it, and I enjoyed its narrative.
But I realised as I thought about what to do next that I was going around in circles. I painted another French street scene, in Paris, with too much detail. I felt I was going backwards. So I then picked a large canvas and did this painting with minimal under-drawing. From a freezing winter climb in the Lakes, I used a palette knife and applied paint loosely, largely ignoring the photograph after the first rough composition. I feel that this is another landmark painting for me in my journey which is only just beginning.