Thames

Tower Bridge, London in early light

/ davidrpharmer / Leave a comment
Tower Bridge in early light

The original is actually brighter than this photograph. Annoyingly I couldn’t get the reproduction any lighter which is a pity

Tower Bridge is always a good subject. It stands across the river as an entrance to the Pool of London. It doesn’t seem so long ago that cargo ships docked here and loaded or discharged their cargo. The bridge became an icon of its time, when London was a hub of international trade. In my lifetime, with the advent of containerisation, traffic moved downriver to Tilbury, and the London docklands wound down as far as shipping was concerned. It became a financial centre instead, important obviously but perhaps not quite so stirring as shipping

I am grateful to Fietz Fotos for their permission to use their reference photograph. It really was a study in orange and blue. I have painted Tower bridge several times over the years, but not in these colours, so it was still challenging enough and seemed to take me quite a long time

There still is a real exhibition planned which I have entered. This will be at Denbies Winery near Dorking and starts on June 21st. If it isn’t cancelled at last minute, as it was at Christmas, this will be my first real show since lockdown 1. Online sales have been good and one must be grateful, but there is something of a buzz about a real exhibition.

We will keep fingers crossed

Windsor Castle – the finished painting

/ davidrpharmer / 9 Comments
Windsor castle on the Thames

The finished item. Quite a lot of trees, relieved by the building to a certain extent, but nevertheless the greens took some sorting out. Mostly they are a mix of sap green with something else. Quite a lot with raw sienna, which is the one I use mostly for vegetation, and works I think for the lighter trees.

The boats have been useful, bringing in some red to relieve all that green, and also stop the eye going off the page. As I said in the last post, I have used sepia ink for the shadows on the castle. I was a little hesitant about that, but seems to have worked out ok.

I seem to be working my way through the list of paintings that I always wanted to do and couldn’t find the time. Lockdown plus very wet weather does keep us indoors a lot. Looking back at these favourite places does make us wonder if we’ll see them again. Vaccination programme seemed to be going well, but now they have found two tested positive for the South African variant, in our village, without them going to South Africa

Oh well. More incarceration

Looking Back at Old Work

/ davidrpharmer / 2 Comments
The London Eye

Do you ever look back at really old stuff? I don’t do that often, but I think it’s a good exercise to do sometimes. Sometimes you can see that you have improved, although looking at some of my old work, i sometimes wonder if I have.

That aside, I found this picture of the London Eye, which was a very good example of rescuing a painting from the jaws of disaster. This had been a much larger painting, crossing the Thames and including the Parliament buildings and some river boats as well,

. Frankly the end result was a mess and I put it away, thinking to reuse the back of the painting for some rough work later on. At another time, someone was talking about cutting down an old painting and using what was left as a presentable picture. I though of that Thames picture and ending up cutting the centre out, leaving out the rubbish, and concentrating on the image shown, which although not perfect, was not too bad.

The final image wasn’t much bigger than a postcard. It centred on the London Eye. I thought it worked well. So did the person who bought it.

So the moral is. Discard nothing until you’re sure there is nothing worth retrieving