I was experimenting. With ways to work from travel photos, freehand watercolour and taking inspiration from one of my favourite watercolour illustrators, Dorry Spikes, without well, you know. Wholesale thievery. Which I hope I didn't do completely.
I seem to be quite glued to accurate drawing with perspective and all. Maddening, since I'm not even interested in making that kind of picture. I'd much rather not draw what I'm trained to 'see' but it's hard to lose, that traditional way working. So here, to come up with something looser, I just put in few lines for the beach and the mountain, and then started populating the page with teeny houses, beachgoers and agave plants at random and freehand over a few days. Like a jigsaw puzzle, and equally satisfying.
The painting is based on photos I took of Praia de Sao Juliao, a beach town about an hour's drive from Sintra, Portugal. I have a fantasy about spending a time in simple seaside place like this one summer.
Oh, how I would read on my shaded lounger, take early swims in the tidal pool before anyone was up, sift through the flotsam and jetsom, make friends with the cats outside the beach restaurant. Where I'd have the set lunch every day. Ah. To be in one simple place and learn its rhythms intimately, to watch the families and locals come and go. With the gentle Mediterranean sunshine all the while.
This guy is in the churchyard next door to our house. Resolutely spring delicate and fluttery no matter what. Drinkers brawl in the recesses of the church building, school kids toss another empty fried chicken box amongst the graves, bikes flash down the lane - and still, the flowers. Clouds of them, saying hello to the gentle sunshine.
Charcoal and colour pencil on cartridge paper.
Back in Hackney this week, where the mercury dipped below zero this morning and the windows are streaked with fat droplets of condensation as they slide down the panes.
This was painted somewhere in the Karoo outside Laingsburg. Wonderfully hot and dry and vast and ancient, those scenes unfolding along the road.
It all seems more than a million miles away, though I painted this last Wednesday. In the car, heading home after a trip to the Baviaanskloof and little Karoo via the Breede River.
Oh, places of my heart.
These were made on the road back from the Kalahari in South Africa, done in the car on the long, beautiful road between Brandvlei and Calvinia on the R27. I've always wondered how it would be to paint those huge landscapes, at least now I have made a start. Such a great way to really see, to notice more of the changing colours and forms and textures of the countryside. The textures out there are something special - the small, dry karoo bushes, the ironstone koppies, the smoothness of mountain ranges far, far in the distance and the fenceposts marching forever towards the horizon. I'm a fan.
From our trip to the Southwestern USA, a drawing made very much on the road, in the car and on the move.
