Tag Archives: painting

January Sunset Abstract

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12"X9" Watercolour on paper

OK, bear with me. I know it has been a long time, I stopped calling myself a "Daily Painter" some time ago but I have really fallen off the waggon recently.

Life has kinda gotten in the way of my painting and I have also been feeling very dissatisfied with my "style", such as it is. I plan to ease myself back into it gently. First of all, I will try to post at least once per week. Secondly, I will be doing much more experimenting.

I have always wanted to be an abstract expressionist but I am pretty hopeless at it. I cheated shamelessly with this one, starting with a fuzzy photograph, taken from a moving vehicle, I blurred it further in Photoshop and cropped a bit that I liked. I then used this as my reference. I should have used better paper but I am too cheap to waste good paper on an experiment

I have doctored a few more photos that I will use the same way. I am hoping that this will get me back into the groove, because the thought of sitting down and painting another bowl of fruit is leaving me cold right now.
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Grand Union Canal

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7"X5" Acrylic on board

Anyone who has been following this blog may have noticed that I haven't posted anything for a couple of months.

Believing as I do in truth in advertising, I stopped calling this a "daily painting blog" some time ago, but I really did mean to continue with a "two or three times a week blog". I have been doing some sketching, and I am working on a linocut, but generally I am just uninspired, I really need to move in a new direction.

However, I did shoot a few pictures during my brief visit to London last month and I hope to take some paintings from them over the next couple of weeks, before I lose the mood.

The Grand Union Canal connects London and Birmingham. This section is somewhere in North Kensington, lots of houseboats along here, all apparently inhabited and in running order. It might be an interesting way to live in the heart of the city but I wonder what it is like in the winter. My sister lived in one about 40 years ago, I seem to remember that it was pretty damp.
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Morning Walk

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7"X5" Acrylic on board


Still in Rincon, looking north-east on "Sandy Beach" at about 6:45 am. This is a surfing beach but not too many are here this early in the day.

With practice we learn to paint certain subjects. I have never been a big fan or the Bob Ross method, "this is how you paint a tree" but nonetheless we learn that certain conventions work in certain situations; one kind of brush, a certain mix of paint. Palm trees are almost entirely new to me and I am realizing that it might take me a while to learn how to paint them. So far they all seem to look like feather dusters.
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Snowdrops

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6"X4" Watercolour on paper And now for something completely different. It is time to get back to matters closer at hand. I haven't been working much in watercolour and I thought that these little snowdrops, almost buried still in last year's leaves, would be a good place to start. I used some hand made paper that I bought at the Tate gift shop last year, it makes a change and I really need to practice more, especially doing deep saturated colour like this one. I see that I just acquired my 50th "follower" and I now occasionally have over 80 subscribers according to Feedburner (the number fluctuates wildly, but rarely goes below 75 and has been as high as 82). I find myself  to be both gratified and somewhat intimidated by this. I hope you all find something interesting here, I haven't been posting as regularly for the past few months as I did in my first two years, but perhaps that is a good thing!
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View

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7"X5" Mixed media on paper This might well be the last of the Puerto Rico paintings, although I do still have quite a few sketches that I might post sometime. Spring is well advanced here in the Niagara Peninsula and I really must get back to painting some local scenes. This is the view behind the laundry, painted while standing at the railing on the porch. The white roof in the distance is a condominium, locally referred to as the "Iranian Embassy". It is quite hideous but fortunately Rincon's beach front buildings are not too tall and there are still plenty of magnificent views. The tree on the right is called an almond, although it is nothing like the almond trees that grow further north which are similar to apricots or peaches. This tree is deciduous but goes through a very short "winter". While I was there its leaves turned red and dropped off but the new leaves where already budding on the branches before I left. In the foreground you can see the distinctive leaves of bananas and papayas.
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Pools Beach Sunset

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7"X5" Acrylic on board Pools beach is a great place to watch the sunset. This one gave me a bit of trouble, I wished I had attempted it with oil instead of acrylic, too hard to blend. I called this Columbus Rock in another post and my sister asked me how I knew that was what it was called because she didn't even know its name. Now I am doubting myself because I found it on a rather inaccurate tourist map and I think Columbus Rock might be a little further along the point. Apparently, Christopher Columbus went ashore on November 19, 1493 somewhere on the western shore of Puerto Rico. It certainly could have been anywhere along the coast and would probably have been on one of the Caribbean beaches where the surf is less daunting.
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Maybelline 2

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7"X5" Acrylic on board Here she is again, in her favourite chair. Lovely afternoon light coming through the west window, no glass in the windows, just storm shutters. I haven't painted as much as I had intended, other stuff getting in the way. The beautiful weather has inspired me to do Spring projects and gardening.
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