Madurai Rickshaw Ride

This was a tricky one to paint. I am trying to get across the feeling of being in the back of an autorickshaw going down a street in Madurai although it is a typical street familiar to anyone that has been to India. Because the view is from inside a quite cramped space with a driver in the front that in reality takes up a large proportion of one's field of vision, I had to compose it in such a way that in order to get in the views from each side and make sure that the necessarily centrally-placed figure and interior didn't dominate I had to make the driver smaller, open up the view through the front and distort the roof angles at the sides to get to see the maximum amount of street detail. It would not normally be a good idea to have a centrally-based composition in one-point perspective so in order to mitigate these potential problems I made each side of the street very different to each other, tried to link the interior and background through colour so they merged together and painted the interior in soft focus in relation to the street to mimic the way the eye would see it; all of these were necessary to deal with the compositional conundrum. This is the seventh painting of a series based on my trip to South India last year that I hope to exhibit as a group but have no idea at this stage where. There is a step-by-step progress of this painting on earlier posts on this blog. 36" x 18" oil on board.