Terrifying
Well this Sabbath Sunday saw more Project: Cathedral procrastination I’m afraid, but with good reason. A parent of my partner had planned to cycle the 20 odd miles over to our house with a friend of his to take advantage of the good view that the wall in front of my house offers of Lincoln’s Grand Prix cycle race.
The rapt audience (including one hang-over):
Having never seen such a spectacle myself – except only fleetingly and over a few hundred heads & shoulders last year when I obliviously got caught somewhere in uphill Lincoln between the race course and where I had intended to go – I decided it might be worth a look.
And a spectacle it was, especially in the early laps where the peloton were large & tightly bunched. The noise and they swooshed past was really quite something!
However, I soon tired of taking blurry pictures of cyclists against a streaked green privet hedge, and decided to wander further up our road to where it bends, hoping for a little more drama. Noticing an approachable looking official in the middle of the road (whom I now know as Jordan, a cycling enthusiast and thoroughly pleasant chap), I asked if I could stand behind him. He consented:
And I was promptly nearly flattened:
And then almost run over again:
And again & again & again:
I did manage to avoid getting run over by this cyclist however:
Though I did envy his helmet.
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Wrong Words
I found a larger picture of one of my still-life paintings from last year which is also featured in the banner at the top of this blog:
“Wrong Words” – Oil on panel, 140mm x 250mm
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Aquarelle
For an oil painter, I am fairly well obsessed with watercolour – especially as a means to just throw some colour about without really worrying about the outcome. It’s quite relaxing really after painting so tightly all day. But anyway in a strange fit of I don’t know what I bought this piece of hideous plastic:
I was totally enamoured with the fact that it had a in built water bottle type thing, meaning I’d have to carry less with me when I go “en plein air” with my watercolours. Out, then, I did go, only to find after returning home my bag & its contents thoroughly drenched due to the sheer rubbishness of the kits only selling point, and my picture all smeared & ruined leaving me resigned to have to continue lugging my large, metal studio palette around the great outdoors again:
But then I found this admittedly too expensive little beauty but, with some shameless flirting with the shop’s sales lady, got myself enough of a discount to justify buying it:
So now I can tramp around the landscape armed with a much lighter bag full of my colours & kit & stuff, to paint my fun but very epigonic watercolours.
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“Whatcha readin’ for?”
After a dark & dreary day of painting which resulted in nothing more than a few wasted hours, the best I can show you is more Project: Cathedral teasing:
If you squint at it, you can just about make out the snowflake!
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Irrelevant Editorial Aside:
The saddest thing about Russell Brand’s “My Booky Wook” - apart from the fact that I’ve just read it – is that he cites more than once the great Bill Hicks as a strong, early influence on his own work. If you take out Brand’s adolescent hijinks & legendary carousing, I suppose the two do have profligate drug use in common, but beyond that? Nope, I’m just not seeing it.
Anyway I listen to Hicks often when I work, and find that despite knowing his material completely by heart I still on occasion have to stop due to laughing too much to continue painting. Having Brand’s stand-up comedy coming on iTunes would probably stop me working also, but only for the moment it would take to switch it off.
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Four Zeros
You know it’s bad when you are painting so tightly & detailed that a brush this size starts to feel too big:
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They are Sceptre Gold II size 0000 watercolour brushes. I’ve no idea how the daft nomenclature came about but you can be certain that anything below a size 0 is really, really tiny. So small in fact you can’t even see the hair in that photograph above – there is some I swear:
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But like any new brush they take a little practice to use – especially if you are using them with a medium they aren’t intended for. With practice though you soon find out that despite them having about twelve hairs, each only what 3 or 4mm long, you can do all sorts with them, including make a surprisingly wide brush stroke. Such width doesn’t go far when the hairs hold so little paint, but the ability to do so is useful.
Where it shines though for me is at blending on a teeny scale. Used cleanly, and after splaying the hairs a little with my thumb, you can get glassy-smooth transitions in a minute area with superb control. This is what I use it the most for, because (also surprisingly) it is not actually so good at applying* paint at such a small scale. For that you need a rigger. On which more later because much as I’d like it to, Project: Cathedral isn’t going to paint itself.
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*Hopelessly Didactic Aside: Why you would need to be actually applying the paint at such a small scale is beyond me any way since all drawing, form-turning with value & colour work should already have been addressed in the much bigger shapes, using commensurately sized brushes. At this scale you ought to be merely tweaking & refining what you’ve already laid down – surely?
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Reject
This years B.P. Portrait Award rigmarole took a back seat to Project Cathedral procrastination, and so passed by largely unnoticed. Except for the hole-in-the-wallet side effects the award induces – what with the entry fees climbing each year, the framing of the work and the lugging it down to London on the train and back &c., &c. – which once added up is quite and chunk of change especially when you aren’t really sure if the whole competition thing is worth it in the first place.
Sour grapes notwithstanding though, here was my entry this year – a rather solipsistic infinite portraits of myself!
Thankfully I didn’t have to paint quite as many hands, the viewing angle solved that potential nightmare. Here then are the two of the two and a half I did have to paint, close up:
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But so with nothing better to do this particular reject now hangs on a lonely hook I found existing almost unviewably high on my studio wall, with the picture in its occasional occupation as a hat stand:
Widow’s Peak
Or – Happy Birthday to Me!
My luthier girlfriend bought me this:
Which will probably go a long way toward frustrating me due to his general other-worldly-ability with watercolour, and probably not go anywhere near as long a way toward the improving my own water-colouring.
It certainly will improve the look of my bookshelf however, which already groans under the weight of Sargent literature:
That snazzy red trolley though does in fact literally groan under the heft of that lot – and I’ve still yet to get hold of this & this…
Post Script:
Actually – ignore those last two. I’ve just bought them.
Restart
H -Hour & D -Day – and so it begins anew. This blog takes over the previous incarnation, from which I took a rest for over a year whilst my painting went through somewhat of a transitional stage. I still have those what nearly 5 years worth of posts, archived away and I may, in the future, re-instate some of the better ones – for posterity, for nostalgia and of course to cringe unbelievably at how I used to be.
