Streets Are Paved With Gold - stage 2

After yesterday's block-in using a rag with Burnt Sienna and Dioxazine Purple thinned with Liquin and turpentine I managed to get some tonal colour on it this morning before I go away for a few days. With a mixture of Dioxazine Purple, Magenta and Burnt Sienna I used a brush and the side of a credit card to   put in some more rough shapes that will hopefully sit under the proceeding layers of colour and give the painting some grittiness and texture.

Streets Are Paved With Gold - stage 1

I feel I need to move away from a more straightforward Fantasy style and content and get back to something more contemporary, an American street scene. I have opted for an upright panoramic format as it will complement the design of the picture, the whole composition is about the reflection of golden sunlight that will track vertically down from the sun that will be positioned above the pavement on the right where there will be the silhouette of a woman in the distance. The traffic lights will offer scope for some nice red or green reflections that will track down the left. It will be the colours that should connect with the current fantasy thread of work that I am undertaking for exhibition at Illuxcon later in the year as I intend to use a certain combination of pink/purple and yellow/orange that I came across in the last painting. I have to be away from Tuesday to Friday this week so unless I can get some work done tomorrow morning the next time I will be able to work on it again will be on Saturday.

The Sultan's Favourite

"Fatima, the Sultan's favourite concubine of the seraglio waits for his attentions on the raised terrace that  overlooks the palace and surrounding oasis town. A hot wind blows off the desert in the sultry late afternoon offering little relief from the oppressive heat that has forced everybody else in the palace to seek shelter until later in the day. Naked apart from some jewellery she drinks mint tea on a fine Persian carpet from a small ewer after smoking some apple shisha in a narghile brought to her by one of the eunuchs. Her thoughts drift to the evening ahead, languid but forever trapped in the gilded cage of the Sultan's Harem......."
OK as you can see, I have decided to paint an Orientalist picture with nods to Gérome, Ernst and many other painters from the great era of Orientalist art in the late 19th century. I wanted to do a picture with the sun behind instead of contre-jour which so many of my paintings use as it's main lighting. I wanted rich bright colour using lots of reds, oranges and yellows for a hot almost oppressive atmosphere and thought it would be nice to paint an Orientalist fantasy. Fantasy this very much is of course and have made no attempt to veer away from the fevered imaginations of those previous, very European painters who never had any access to Ottoman harems and palaces and as such they indulged in very male fantasies of naked women lying around in opulent interiors at the beck and call of indolent Caliphs and Sultans which of course was a far cry from the reality of life in the seraglio. This proved to be a very fiddly picture to paint and is the nearest to what I used to do many years ago as an illustrator and as such is to me a one-off exercise which has been painted purely with a view to exhibiting it at Illuxcon in September. 39 1/4" x 15 3/4" oil on canvas. There is a step-by-step progress through this painting in preceding posts on this blog.

The Sultan's Favourite - stage 10

Nearly finished now,  I put some more work into the foreground today including the pavilion. I just need to finish the figure, the billowing material and then any final glazing that needs to be done. 

The Sultan's Favourite - stage 9

More work on the foreground today, still not sure about the tiled area but managed to make a start on the table and nargileh and pretty much finished the carpet bar some glazing at the end. This is quite a fiddly painting!

"All At Sea" - Store Street Gallery exhibition

I have six paintings in a group show at the the Store Street Gallery, 32 Store Street, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 7BS. It is an exhibition of marine and coastal themed work by six artists called "All At Sea" and runs from 17 April to 10 May 2014, the Private View is Thursday 17 April 6 - 8 pm.

Here are five of my paintings in the show (the sixth one will not load!):

The Longest Day

Out Of The Blue

Time To Go Home

Here Comes The Night

It's Nice To Get Out

The Sultan's Favourite - stage 8

Started work on the foreground terrace including breaking up the area of blue tiles, some indications of stonework on the floor and a start on the carpet. I decided to have a shadow coming in from the right to give some variety to the foreground and it also helps to lead the eye into the picture. I also corrected the perspective on the raised platform where the pavilion sits.