UNUSUAL FIND

 

I have today been sorting out the chaos that is/was my studio. In one drawer was an empty carrier bag which I nearly threw away, but first glanced in to find the ‘original’ of the first artistic Pen & Ink drawing I ever did.

The scene is of Cothele House in Cornwall, and I see it is signed Oct 1979. I thought I had drawn it when I was in Germany. However, the last flight from the UK I made was to New York and return with Mrs. Thatcher (according to my Flying Logbook), in December 1979.

I can only conclude that, I knew I was going to Germany in the January 1980, and that I was going to start pen & ink drawing as a hobby. In preparation I bought some pens. I had thought I would try my hand, and used the cover of a National Trust bag as a reference.

Interesting, for me anyway, is that most of the shading lines (hatching) in my drawing are vertical. Thereafter, I invented my own system, or so I thought. Later, my stuff was printed by a very old and traditional printers in Roermond, Holland. They informed me that the liked my style as it was the way the Dutch artists drew a century before. They were pleased and I was flattered.

AUSTRIA

 This one is for two dear friends who came to Austria with Patsy and I in 2015

FIRST LANDSCAPE _ FINISHED

 

FIRST LANDSCAPE ... Enter the Train

I'm really enjoying the freedom of landscape painting: no need for 'deadly accuracy'. I'm used to spending over a hundred hours of exactness on my larger Pen & Ink. Also portraiture calls for exact likeness.

Although the train calls for Pen & Ink accuracy, it's not too demanding.

aide-mémoire: The canvas is 70 x 50 cms (27.5 x 20 inches approx) 

 

FIRST LANDSCAPE 2

A quick update. Just starting to draw the train in pencil at the bottom.

MY FIRST EVER LANDSCAPE

I have never painted landscapes before but focused mostly on portraits and still life.

The Mountain Landscape Painting I’m starting, has happened by chance. I was looking for a great photo of a steam train to paint … I found one. Now the one I found had no information with it, so I searched for a matching photo with text. I found many similar but not the same.

I turned to videos and found what looked like a match and so I played it. It was an exact fit. The video starts a little roughly, but it turned out to be so good that I sat mesmerized from start to finish. It’s well worth watching.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ww0_-j1CJc

Just to round off the story, my daughter Louise is married to Carl who hails from Colorado (originally from Chicago). He has travelled on this train and took his sons when they were boys!

Durango & Silverton Railroad, Colorado
Acrylic on Stretched Canvas
(27 x 20 inches)

Believe it or not, this is a Railway Train (Railroad Locomotive) painting.

Zephyrinus can you email me please, I lost your contact details in a computer mix-up.

SSSSsssteam Heat!

What a battle, that smoke and steam have given me....

At last this painting is finished, it's about 70% of where I was trying to get to. The strange lighting in the reference photograph works because we know it is a photograph. Trying to replicate it on a large canvas, with my limited abilities, moved from too bright to too dark via a canvas of  mud.

To finish it off I've got flash reflection off the front of the engine - makes it look much too light. I'm really going to take photography more seriously.

 Having said all that, it has really got me back into painting: I could feel the brush beginning to take over instead of me pushing it stiffly about.

I feel I have moved a little closer to rehabilitation after a two year break.