Plein air painting - Arundel July 26

Myself, Rich Newman, Bill Donohoe and Paul Allen went to a spot just outside Arundel (after a good hour of location hunting) in West Sussex to paint en plein air. Three of us were using oil and Bill was line and watercolour. I gave my board an imprimatura of a mix of acrylic white and Van Dyke Red in the studio before I left and painted the initial stages with a rag to block in the main shapes, the first coat being Burnt Sienna thinned with Liquin. This dried quickly in the heat and breeze so I was able to use a rag again to add the initial colours before working on top with a brush using thicker brush strokes to complete the picture. The bottom of the painting is a bit unresolved as the tide came in and obscured most of the foreground!

Shelter

Here is the latest small painting, "Shelter" 12" x 12" oil on board. Looks like I am continuing with the seaside theme for a while longer.

Another painting as a finalist in International Artist Magazine

"Cuckmere Meanders From Seaford Head" has been accepted as a finalist in the "Seascape, Rivers and Lakes" Challenge competition in International Artist Magazine and will be published full-page in the October/November 2012 issue. 18" x 36" oil on board.

Evening Promenade

Another "affordable" painting of the seafront called "Evening Promenade". All these small paintings have their own section in my newly-organised website called oddly enough, "Small Paintings". 12" x 12" oil on panel.

A First - One of my paintings goes on sale on eBay

A first to my knowledge anyway, somebody puts up one of my paintings for sale on eBay at £1495.00. It is actually the second oil painting I ever did and is called "River Diner" dating from 2005. It has just occurred to me that shouldn't I be due a portion of the sale price as Artists Resale Rights would surely apply to this sale (if they sell it!)?  I can't imagine the seller, if I could find them, would be very amenable to giving me a proportion of their sale price money though....

Seafront Moon

I wasn't happy with the previous painting, it looked a bit boring which has led me to conclude that small paintings need to have more impact to make up for the lack of size. For me that means more colour and  contrast so I decided to paint something with more of these qualities, "Seafront Moon", another result of my nocturnal rambles along the Brighton and Hove seafront.

Lagoon Afternoon

The next one in my two-day paintings series, this one set near Hove lagoon on the seafront. The blue in the sky is much stronger in the painting but doesn't come across in the photo. The size of the paintings in this series so far is 12" square.

Time Out Of Season

This is the second of my small "affordable" paintings, "Time Out Of Season", again of Hove seafront and again a variation of the red/green complementary axis. I thought I would give a scene of a dilapidated seafront scene in off-season a more optimistic feel by painting it in sunshine. Of course there is another subtext to this, the sun finally comes out when everybody has left and it has all been closed down with the hope that maybe next year will be better!

Waiting For The Sun

I need to make some sales, that is the bottom line. It looks like I didn't sell any paintings at the Medici Gallery which leaves me with £1000.00 in framing to cover, let alone make any sort of profit. I have sold a few small pictures this year which gives me reason to think that people are only spending a limited amount on paintings at the moment and maybe they would buy something if it didn't push their budget too much. I think too that subject matter can be important particularly to an artist that is not really established yet so I need to make my work more accessible...and affordable. Recently I have been very taken with the work of William Wray and find it very interesting how he makes potentially very mundane urban scenes attractive and desirable by use of colour and atmosphere through a very painterly impressionistic style. I am fortunate in that I live on the coast of South East England where I have access to a very particular urban environment that many people relate to, even those that do not live here. So I am embarking on a series of small works, each one taking two days to paint and no more (unless I am glazing colours) of my local environment initially whereby working small enables me to put a lower price on the work without compromising myself in terms of the hours spent/what I can charge ratio. This is the first of them called "Waiting For The Sun" which seems very appropriate at the moment in terms of our dire Summer weather!

Monday Afternoon Life Session - 2 July

Frankie was this week's model, her props being a guitar and a hammer(!?). Didn't get round to painting the hammer. I am now keeping the background simple and more graphic allowing more time to be spent on the figure in the allotted 50 minutes.