A day in Bath
Corner of Royal Crescent, Bath.
Good times. Early May, the sun is out; now just listen to that blackbird sing. And the swifts have arrived – for me one of the most joyous occasions of the year. It was absolutely great to be back out with a group of local painting friends this week too. Townscapes the subject, and the attractive city of Bath the location.
Big, grand buildings with columns, corbels, windows, walls and linear perspective (yawn!). Seriously though, it’s good practise and thankfully there were some nice, organic trees to be had too.
This first painting seemed slow going, and I felt quite restricted by the subject. I don’t think I’ll ever be a huge enthusiast of doing architectural painting or drawing. The sunlit ‘Bath stone’ (a local pale yellow-ey sandstone that Raw Umber was made for) was very bright, and with hindsight I think I should have made the background sky a tone darker for some stronger counterchange between the two. I turned the phone box into a red one from the modern grey variety. In fact it was one of the old phone boxes, just re-painted grey. (Why did they do that?)
Sunny corner of Bath, near Victoria Park
Post-lunch I decided to take a more ‘cavalier’ approach towards the buildings and the whole painting process, and the resulting second scene doesn’t bear much resemblance to the reality of the subject. I drew out out some general perspective lines at various heights to cover the wall, building tops and road, then just made up the rest with the brush, based very loosely on what was somewhere down the road in front of me. To be honest I thought this was going terribly and was almost willing it to fail, so I stuck in the 2 figures very quickly indeed. Should have taken a bit more time over that detail, as when I then added the darks to the tree at left the painting seemed to have something. Now it also has a rather tall, slightly odd shaped dark figure!
You live and learn. And I’ve learned (again, and again) that you need to keep faith with a painting until the end; even if you start it with a cavalier attitude! And next time I’m doing a townscape en plein air I intend to start off in the same manner.
(Incidentally, how many faces can you see in that tree trunk? There’s a bit of a devil in there, with horns)
Interesting that even good professional artists see weaknesses in their work I find the figures in your second painting perfectly acceptable for mid distance works. I did spot the face in the tree!
I always find your thoughts on your work fascinating to read and quite instructive.
Thanks Stephen, I appreciate your comments and very glad you find something of interest in my blog.
Certainly there are always parts of any painting that could have gone better. I mentioned the figures,but in fact there are plenty of other bits I could moan about as well! I was throwing the paint on in that piece, with very little faith. It is interesting to see, with more objective eyes, that the overall result was not nearly as bad as I had thought at the time. Still pretty rough though!
Thanks for all your comments, as one has too observe, make shapes that will work out in a composition with light, balance, value, then color! Plein air judging these elements, it can be a bit overwhelming. Your comments in trying to put all these elements together, helps me keep the faith!
Thanks Meg – I appreciate it. I could of course amend the painting to increase the counterchange, but I prefer to leave alone as what happened on the spot. Hard to explain why in a brief way, but there are some good reasons, I feel.