Canals

Copenhagen Canal and other paintings

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Back in the summer, we toured the Baltic. At one time we did eight shore excursions in eight days. Even by cruise ship, we found this tiring because of our age, especially my wife who has walking difficulties, so we might not attempt this sort of holiday again. Copenhagen was just one of the stops we made in Denmark

Touring the canal system was fun. i like painting boats and this was just one scene that I snapped for reference. Quite a lot of light and dark in this shot. The sun was very bright especially on the buildings in the background. Deep shadows were cast by the trees, which accentuated the boats. The figures on the canal side were reduced to silhouettes. It took me several glazes to get the water to be an acceptable colour, whilst at the same time still looking transparent. This was more of an exercise about light against dark, than anything else

I have been commissioned to paint this church, the village church of Pyrford in Surrey. Ancient yet still in use as a parish church, it is set in a tranquil spot, and is quite charming. The lady who commissioned it no longer lives in the area. Her parents are buried here, so a meaningful place. I always feel very priviliged being asked to paint places that are so important in people’s lives. I am working on it at the moment and will post the result

This is how the painting turned out. I have put sunshine into the painting as the photograph was taken on a very dull day, so the colours are brighter. The lady who commissioned this painting was very pleased, which is always a relief

I have another commission now, quite different to the last, This one is a wedding venue, which I get asked to do from time to time. This one involves marqees and the newly wed couple strolling in the grounds around a lake, so quite a lot of different things to worry about, Still it’s good to have these commissions coming through as sales from my gallery are poor at the moment. Times are hard everywhere still and doubtless will be for some time

Gondolas, and other recent paintings

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I’ve been off the air for a while. I had to get a new PC as part of an upgrade, and of course, nothing was where I remembered it. I couldn’t find my way back into my blog, or not at least to the page where I coud write something, and I can’t pretend the seemingly helpful robot was any use to me. Anyhow after a tortuous journey I can now post again

As I have been away for a while I thought I would just do a compendium of more recent paintings, just to catch up, and start with one called Gondolas. Always a favourite subject, and this view with San Giorgio Maggiore in the background I have painted and sold several times. This shot is completely different to any that I have done before

I have also been painting some views of my local village, something I have neglected in the past. This shot I put on the village website and received over 150 hits. I am pleased to say that a gentleman in Canada ,who used to live locally, bought it, Always that extra buzz when a painting makes a long journey

This view just shows some of our shops, so being a village we only have indepemdent shops which is a nice relief to seeing brands all the time. In the background by the trees is the bridge over the canal, which was cut in the late c18. In fact the village grew up around the canal. The name St John’s came from the church which was built here as a Chapel of ease for the villagers

The hub of the village is the coffee shop which was started only about ten years ago and provided a much needed meeting place and alternative to the nearest pub.

I have been getting commissions which is always nice. A more recent one shows a country house hotel called Gravetye Manor, which I have painted before. This is a different view in evening light commissioned by a guest who had a meaningful stay there

This is a mistake but I will leave it there. An old shot of Venice. I will now try and find the shot of Gravetye Manor

Succesful this time. An evening shot with the last of the sun catching the roof tops, so it worked well

There are others but I will leave it there. I am not long back from a trip up the Baltic as far as and including Helsinki so quite a lot to digest. I am going to try and put a post together about that voyage. On the art side, we went to Skagen on the northern most tip of Jutland. Artists in the c19 were attracted there by the wonderful light and their work is just breathtaking

I am going to try and be more regular now that I have got back control, and am grateful for the help I have received

Painting of my home village

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This is the centre of my local village, St John’s near Woking. The name St John’s was taken from the local church, built in the c19 by the then rector of Old Woking, as a chapel of ease for the village inhabitants. Quite a long walk to church otherwise in a century when no one had transport.

The village is mostly Victorian, and although surrounded by suburbia, does still retain its village atmosphere and integrity. Life started here in the late c18 when the canal was cut through open heathland. In the distance in my picture, the road makes a hump, as it crosses the canal. This is Kiln Bridge, where as the name suggests bricks were made from local clay, and these were used in the building of the canal. The canal was intended to link London with Southampton, but only reached Basingstoke before the railways were built and superseded canals. This was still a time when war with France was a possibility, and inland links with major south coast ports were desirable.

Today the Basingstoke Canal is maintained by Surrey and Hampshire County Councils. There is some leisure boating but not much. Wild life proliferates and the towpath is used for cycling and walking.

This is the very first time that I have painted my own village. I don’t know why. I put this painting on a local website and had more than 240 hits. All complimentary, I am pleased to say. No offers to buy though.

In the middle of the picture is our comparatively recent coffee shop, which has become the hub of village activity. Walkers and shoppers meet there to relax and catch up. We never had that before and it is a very welcome addition. We do have a pub but located going out of the village, so not so convenient. We have most shops so a useful selection.

At the bottom of my lane, we are blessed with a green open space, called St John’s Lye. Lye, lea or leigh means a green space. It is common land and so protected although we did have to physically resist Woking Borough Council who wanted to build a village hall on the Lye to replace the one that was starting to fall down. Eventually common sense prevailed and the new hall was built on the site of the old one. The Lye is available to all age groups for spontaneous activity including dog walking.

And so you have it. Not a place that many know, but loved by its local population

Painting a local Scene

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Barges gathering on the Basingstoke Canal

The Basingstoke Canal runs through my village of St.Johns in Surrey. There is very little traffic nowadays as the canal doesn’t go very far, and the short distance there is, is punctuated by locks. Occasionally there is a gathering of barges which seem to tie up mostly at St Johns, where there is an old wharf

The canal was cut in the late c18. The intention was to link London with Southampton but the advent of the railways cut this short. Today the canal is a haven for wildlife and some leisure activities.

It is very near me, and I have painted there often. There are so many subjects. It was nice to go back recently and hopefully capture this meeting of barges and their owners. The colours are always fun and add to the atmosphere

Maybe I should walk along the towpath more often

The Swan Painting at an Interim Stage

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Swan Painting about halfway

Well, some work has been done on the background

I have used successive coats of darker and darker green amongst the reeds and grasses of the river bank. Towards the end I was mixing the green with a dark blue still trying to get that feeling of deep shadow amongst the reeds

I have now removed all the masking fluid, which took me a little while as there was a lot of it. Also I had to go carefully in case I tore the paper. I am happy to say that I didn’t , which was good because often when masking is left on for a while, it can prove difficult to remove.

The result is still a mess, but as I always say, finish the painting

The swans need tidying and finishing in detail. The painting is about them after all

Likewise the reeds where I have gone back to the white paper, need finishing in a light but realistic colour, raw sienna probably or a pale green

If I cannot get sufficient definition using just watercolour, then I could use some gouache or even pastel if absolutely necessary

Swan Family on the Basingstoke Canal

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Something near home this time.

The Basingstoke Canal runs through our village, and originally ran as a branch from the Wey Navigation, and ended up in the town of Basingstoke in Hampshire. It was cut in the late c18 by navvies or navigators who dug canals by pick and shovel in those days.

The intention was to link London with Southampton by inland waterway, which would prove a vital link in war time. The advent of the railway stopped the canal in its tracks, and it lapsed into disuse

Rescued by enthusiasts comparatively recently, the canal is in use by leisure craft, not going as far as Basingstoke due to a tunnel cave-in the 1930s but nevertheless, still offering a valuable resource to the area.

Needless to say, the canal offers a haven for wildlife. Generally we have a family of swans near the village most years, and I have painted them in the past. The photograph above is one of many that I have taken, and I am going to work with that.

The swans are feeding off the reeds in the bank. Reeds are more tricky to paint in watercolour than swans in my opinion. So many shades of green. So I am going to try something different for me and use masking fluid almost like paint. This came to me from the last exercise with the glass jars. This is as far as I have got

Not too easy to see what I ‘ve done I know but basically I have done a pencil sketch of the swans, and then masked them off with the Frisk liquid which is blue and easier to see than the natural. I have also done a few strokes for grasses and highlights in the water. When that was bone dry, I put a very wet solution of green into raw sienna around the birds

The green went bone dry overnight and today, still painting with masking liquid, I have brushed in many more reeds and grasses. Hopefully after I have put darker green over the top of these, and that dries, then removing the mask will reveal light green reeds against the dark or so I hope. All this because you can’t go from dark to light with watercolour. I may still have to do a rescue job with body paint but I hope not

That is the theory. I hope it works. You shouldn’t really leave masking fluid on for too long for fear of tearing the paper when you remove, so this is risky but different.

New Haw Lock on the Wey Navigation Finished Painting

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New Haw Lock Finished Painting

This painting refers back to one of my rare outdoor painting trips with the Pirbright Art Club, when we went out to New Haw Lock on the Wey Navigation. An ancient waterway, the Navigation connects Godalming with the Thames, and is part river and part canal system, which is why it is called a navigation and not a canal.

The lock-keeper’s cottage is easily the worst house that I’ve ever drawn in my life, and I should be ashamed. Well I am. I have managed to crop out most of it and just left enough to give some colour and relief against the trees. The proportions are wrong. Perfectly correct when I sketched this scene on the day, but somehow when I enlarged and transferred the sketch both proportions and perspective went out of the window. I don’t know where my head was that day.

As I was about to leave, these two girls arrived to open the lock gates. Here they are opening the sluice gates to fill the lock with water before opening the gates. I photographed them quickly thinking they might be useful to put in the picture, as sometimes these scenes can be improved with the addition of one or two figures.

In actual fact, they became the picture, as I pushed the house more and more out of sight. Part of me still considers focusing on the two girls completely, without including any house at all, but can’t decide on that. The two figures are sharper on the painting than they are in the photograph

I’m busy getting paintings together for another exhibition in the Leatherhead Theatre in October, so would like to include this one, if I can

Looking forward now to working on something new, as I have been working on New Haw Lock for some time now and could do with a change. As for what I shall do next, I think I will do another long panoramic picture, probably of Langstone Harbour, which I have done before but not as a panoramic. The last one that I did, of Bosham, I sold recently from the web site, so could do with something else.

New Haw Lock the drawing ready for painting

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Girls on New Haw Lock 2Girls on New Haw Lock

Since the last post on the subject of New Haw Lock, I started to come off the idea of just painting the lock keeper’s cottage with the lock gates. It was a little bit cliche d. very attractive and very popular but I decided to put my sketch aside, and ran through the photographs that I had taken during the course of the morning

There were many of them on the camera and also on the phone camera which was quicker to use if anything interesting came up

These two girls came up as possibles. They had jumped off their boat whilst boyfriends did the steering, and each manned the winding mechanism of a lock gate, really putting their backs into the work. I picked the best action shots that I could find, and compiled them into a drawing

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I am sorry that the drawing is faint and I hope you can make out the figures. I drew them freehand from the screen onto tracing paper, and then moved them around the paper until they looked right, I hope.

What I like about them is that their tops are bright white which will stand out against the deep shadows behind them. It was a very hot day, one of the last of our heatwave, and they are wearing baseball caps with big peaks, which we nearly all wear nowadays as they are so effective against bright sun. So no faces to draw which is for me a great bonus.

This may prove to be a bad decision. I have actually started the painting and I will not publish an interim as it is such a mess but will post the finished item, no matter how it turns out

If anyone missed my previous post, this came from one of my very rare plein air painting days next to New Haw Lock on the Wey Navigation in Surrey. An ancient waterway from the c17, it connected Guildford and then Godalming commercially with the Thames right up to 1959. It still does but only for pleasure craft nowadays.

Plein Air Painting at New Haw Lock

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Something I rarely find time for is painting outdoors, but recently did, with our local art group at New Haw Lock, which is one of the many locks along the Wey Navigation in Surrey. The Navigation dates from the c17, and made the river Wey navigable by cutting canals across the meanders and shallows. Thus this mix of river and canal made the Wey navigable for barge traffic from Guildford to the Thames. Amazingly this traffic by horse drawn barge went on until 1959. By then the navigation had been cut through to Godalming in the south, and had been especially useful in carrying gunpowder from nearby Chilworth Mill through to the Thames and on into the Port of London

During the c18 the Wey Navigation linked with the River Arun, and on down to the south coast, but that leg was short lived and proved uneconomic to run. That section fell into disuse, although some sections have been revived by conservationists

In the picture, one of the many lock keeper’s cottages, very charming and very paintable still. New Haw is somewhat underrated and is easily missed when driving by.

We found shade to sit, as the day was hot and became hotter towards midday. The morning was enough for me, so for about 2-3 hours during which time, I worked out my composition, and just sketched putting in the shadows which of course changed quickly. Photography helps the sketch book and I recorded several stages. It is my intention to finish the painting in my “studio”, but for the moment need to finish my Alhambra painting

I shall look forward to painting the New Haw lock. This is a typical Surrey scene and a typical Surrey cottage. I will attach my drawing. I regretted afterwards only taking an A3 pad which didn’t give me enough space but at home i can use a half sheet which will enable me hopefully to include the lock in its entirety

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Now all I have to do is to decide whether or not to include the foreground tree which obscures much of the cottage but nevertheless provides some interesting lights and darks