I have just returned from a two week holiday. Sylvie, my wife was attending a conference in Holland and I just hung along for the ride. Later, we took the train to Paris and then visited her mother in Brittany, France.
I didn’t look at the exact location of my wife’s conference on the map. It was in a place called Noordwijkerhout. A farming region, flat as a pancake, south of Amsterdam. Small towns dotted around but mostly just farmland. No windmills. What could I paint? A field? A field that once had tulips? And, they had been harvested weeks earlier …
It’s fascinating how, when one stares long enough at a seemingly mundane landscape, one can find beauty. I did my best to capture it. I had walked around for hours with my easel. It was late evening when I settled for this scene.
Tag: meldrum art
Grey day in the archipelago
I painted this from an old photo I took 15 years ago. I can’t remember where it was, somewhere out there in the archipelago. It was a grey day, it was peaceful, this is all I know.
The evening light of summer
The sailing season begins soon.
Practising my clouds
All I want to do right now, is paint and improve.
Earlier in the week, I painted this watercolour. It’s an exercise more than a finished piece of art. I just wanted to practice my clouds. The sea, I wanted to practice that too, the sea is so hard to master.
I need to improve my compositional skills as well. Placing an island dead centre is not a good idea. So when I’ve mastered the clouds and the sea, I’ll start trying to improve my compositions. That will keep me busy for a while.
You can only laugh. I was just putting the last touch to the painting when I lost control of my brush. It jumped up in the air, spinning like a circus knife in front of my eyes. It hit the page, sable first. Splat!
I had just loaded the brush with Vandyke Brown moments before. The glimmering sea had lost its shine. Now there was a dark brown whale in my watercolour.
Later, I painted over the crime scene with opaque white. The sea sparkled again. It would never be perfect, but it’s finished.
The Coast Road, Malahide, Ireland 33 x 23 cm
The Stockholm Archipelago
New addition in the studio
Now that I’ve started painting in the studio again I treated myself to a new palette 😀
It’s from Korea, Mijello : 24 Well Plastic Palette with Airtight Lid.
Last week I painted three watercolours. Initially, I was really happy with all of them but after a while I gradually changed my mind.
I had just finished reading a lovely book about Edward Seago by James Russell. Seago was an excellent English watercolour artist that was very successful in his lifetime but was disliked by the critics. “He painted picture-postcards” a critic once said.
He was a landscape painter, he painted the countryside around him. A typical watercolour would be of a summer-blue sky, rolling hills and shadows dancing on the fields while animals grazed. He liked sailing boats too so you can understand that he inspires me a lot. His watercolours were very pleasing to the eye.
So this is the question, should I worry about my watercolours looking like picture-postcards? Maybe I should paint more watercolours like the one featured here. I painted it to counteract the three pretty watercolours. It’s of Poolbeg Power Station in Dublin Bay, Ireland. A quick sketch (30mins) 28x18cm.
Your thoughts please. 🙂