plein air at last

There'll be more on that big painting later as I'm still re-working it... but for now I'm posting a couple of oil sketches I did outdoors at the weekend when the weather was finally good enough to take my pochade box out for a spin. The first sketch was in Richmond park, the second in Petersham -unfortunatley I didn't get time to finish it before the sun went behind a huge cloud. The colours are great for painting at this time of year - the grass is turning yellow and there are berries on the bushes which break up the greens. We've also been having some dramatic skies which are very inspiring although I found the 8x6 size a bit small to capture a full sense of it.

March morning, River Thames near Petersham

Here's a painting that I started in March this year but then didn't get a chance to work on until yesterday. After two days of work on it I've got to the point now where I'm not quite sure what needs to be done to finish it so I'm going to leave it facing the wall for a few days and take a break from it.

The inspiration for this sort of scene comes from Monet's paintings of the river Seine at Argentueil, but of course he did it much better than me.

I've copied Monet's work from plates in a book I have and I'm always surprised to see how desaturated the colours are. He also altered some of the colours from those seen in reality to create a harmonious overall effect.

2 months off..

I've thought about changing the name of my blog as my contract ended on Friday and I've saved up enough money to be a full time painter for a couple of months. But then again, if you add up the hours over the whole year I'm still only part time in total so I've decided to stick with the title for now. If only I could get good enough to ditch the 'part time' forever!

Painting in the gloaming

It's pretty difficult to see what you're doing when you're painting in the twighlight. Recently I bought myself a small pochade box and I fancied trying it out. This afternoon the sky was filled with spectacular towering thunder clouds and before they all drifted away I managed to catch one in the distance being lit up by the evening light.

I found my pochade box has a useful feature -the lid in which the painting boards sit can be laid back horizontally. This helps in low lighting because if it were vertical the board would be completely in shadow and impossible to see.

Even so, it was still tricky- the clouds moved, the light faded, so after about 5 minutes I switched on my daylight lamp and finished the sketch from memory. Its very rough and ready and If I did it again I'd start with the light down the right hand of the cloud and work out from there as I think this would have helped establish the relationships more accurately.

Chelsea Art Society Open Exhibition

I have a couple of paintings in this year's CAS open exhibition. The exhibition runs until Sunday 21st June and full details can be found on the CAS website.

more clouds

The sky is the one thing that seems readily available as a subject to study. And if you live in Britain, clouds are too.

Here are a couple of oil pastel studies of clouds I made yesterday.

Clouds from Marble Hill Park 1st June

Wow, I managed to sketch two days in a row, (not bad for a part-timer). This time from the other side of the river looking back towards the Petersham 'back meadow'.

That little wispy blobby cloud at the top only lasted a few minutes and then evaporated away. Unfortunately I didn't take a reference photo to capture this, but took one at the end about an hour later. It's strange that a little cloud has formed in the same spot. And that band of cloud at the bottom often seems to form in the same place too. It hovers over the Petersham back meadow making it a frustrating place to sunbathe.