Oil Painting 59 - Still life with oil lamp

A gift from mother this oil lamp has proved surprisingly useful when abandoning the world of mains electricity. It can also be mesmerising to watch, although writing this makes me question our decision to live without a television.

Trying to sum up this years experience in a series of paintings has guided me towards wanting to paint some of the few objects that occupied our limited space and have made the journey with us, and in turn have me tackle a few still life paintings which I haven't explored much at all in the last few years. 

The ceramic piece behind the lamp is a hand thrown faceted bottle vase with a celadon blue glaze by a talented potter and good friend Alex Shimwell. http://www.theridgewaygallery.co.uk/ArtList.aspx?artistid=149&artworkid=3008

As this is my first venture into still life for some time I do not feel I can talk with any real authority. I spent a lot of time at college looking at Paul Cezanne's still lifes ...

Still life with bottles and apples - Paul Cezanne

... and the obvious Van Gogh is never far away...


Still Life Glass with Wild Flowers - Vincent Van Gogh

Source: wikipaintings.org via Rob Pointon on Pinterest

Outside of brushwork and colour use I have not really abstracted the subject a great deal. I have enjoyed the dark band of the edge of the table mat the lamp is sat on bouncing around the frame forming strong diagonals but in honesty this was not premeditated and just something I began to exaggerate as the painting developed. What is interesting for me is that when you 'zoom in' to a relatively small scale inanimate subject and leave the composition quite sparse it exposes / lays bare your treatment of the paint, your handwriting, or 'style' for want of a better word.

I often liken an artists gesture to that of a singer's voice, Van Gogh's mark-making is so very individual and distinctive. I can only hope through work and love of the craft that a similar iconic visual language comes through in my work.

Source: wikipaintings.org via Rob Pointon on Pinterest

Oil Painting 58 - Winter Scene from the bow

Quite a small canvas I wanted to reflect the warmth of being inside looking out to the cold snow covered landscape. I dipped in and out of this one over about four sessions whilst also working on Oil Painting 59 - Still life with oil lamp. A snowy landscape is such a fleeting sensation and the view and reflecting light had altered dramatically with each visit but I feel there is enough visually for the subject to work, the warmth of the varnished oak inside contrasts nicely. This interior exterior contrast painting reminded me of a previous called 'Kitchen Window at night' painted outside looking in, on a trip to Provence after a night unable to sleep because of excess beer and bread.

Other artists that spring to mind that I am sure have had an influence in this manner of work are Edward Hopper voyeuristic painting looking into domestic scenes from outside,

Source: wikipaintings.org via Rob Pointon on Pinterest

or Henri Matisse's views through balcony windows.

Source: wikipaintings.org via Rob Pointon on Pinterest

Oil Painting 47 - Gloucester Docks IN PROGRESS

This is my first of many Gloucester paintings, we will be having a Year of the Boat exhibition in the Waterways Museum in May 2013 and shall be doing more work in Gloucester in the build up to that, but I wanted to get started whilst the boat was in the area.

Oil Painting 45 - The Copper Beech at Tewkesbury Abbey

After our time at Worcester Cathedral we waved it off into the distance as we joined The River Severn and set off down towards Tewkesbury and Gloucester. Suddenly our previously long 60ft vessel didn't seem to be holding it's own, since leaving the canal, alongside the packed yacht clubs and cruisers on this big river. You become aware of a flow and require an anchor, and worry what all these enormous mooring poles are for - surely the river level doesn't change that much? 

The locks have grown in size and our boat now seems vulnerable and a silly shape. The river locks are all about the rope-work apparently which shouldn't be a problem for me having already invented at least 150 different rope knots, whilst being on the boat, just don't ask me to repeat one.

We were soon whizzing downstream (more the rivers doing than impressive navigation skills) and despite an embarrassing incident trying to moor with the flow rather than against it at Upton-on-Severn we survived the Severn and ducked into the smaller more sheltered River Avon at Tewkesbury.

I knew before arrival what I wanted to paint in Tewkesbury after attending my friend's wedding in the Abbey earlier in the year, on the day of the wedding I had spotted the magnificent Copper Beech in the grounds of the Abbey, the biggest Copper Beech I can remember, it has grown unhindered and perfectly balanced for 424 years and its leaves release the most spectacular combination of colours. Apparently it is not as old as its neighbour, a mulberry tree, tiny in comparison, that was planted by Charles I (before losing his head). Nevertheless it is the Copper Beech that is the most visually spectacular competing with the Abbey for the skyline.

In the painting I wanted to communicate the mass of the coloured leaves but also show the external / internal relationship of this tree. The leaves form like a tent skin to the very outer edge but you could glimpse through to the magnificent skeletal internal space the tree has. Almost like a Cathedral or Abbey itself.

Another element I was keen to represent was the dappled light surrounding the base. This interest in the ground around the tree plus wanting the Abbey to be a secondary element in the composition to this tree meant I adopted a slanted composition for Oil Painting 45.

The strong slant is the most striking feature, and something I thought I would embrace, although it perhaps too strong an element and could take away from the subject matter. As I touched upon in the blog entry for Oil Painting 44, I am very aware of the passing general public's reaction and try to quickly get the paintings to a state where the average passer-by can relate to. I have to say, this didnt really happen with this piece, even late on!

'Why is the Abbey on a strange angle and look like it is falling over?' seemed to be a common question.

I could have chose a more orbital perspective and got a result very similar to the previous painting, 'Crowleasow Farm', curving the horizon and keeping all the verticals coming off the horizon at 90 degrees -

However I have experimented with a very photographic distortion on the space, manipulating the Abbey's vertical perspective like a wide angle photograph would.

To help explain I have overlaid one of Karen's wide angle shots over the top of the painting and erased areas so you can see where I was coming from with the angles of the verticals of the Abbey and the windows on the far right.

I was testing my ability to paint this distorted space convincingly, and push my luck further by having so much of the composition dominated by a mass of leaves that do not give much help in describing space unlike for example bricks on a building or obviously vertical pillars. That seems to be a running thread this year, describing space/depth/distance with organic nondescript masses like leaves, a rapeseed field or of course, water.

Probably a failed test though, judging from the amount of explaining I had to do whilst producing and the fact that I feel the need to do a photo mock-up to explain where I am coming from. Still, you have go to try these things!

Oil Painting 38 - Gas Street Basin

'The Heart of the Canal Network' , the last painting from our stay in Birmingham.

A found a good pulpit to view the mixed landscape from, stood up at the top of the old ramp leading to the cast iron footbridge. The vista was complicated and of interest right the way round, so I have attempted to condense a 270 degree view into a rectangular canvas, enjoyed skewing and manipulating the space. The scene contained a lot of themes I have been enjoying exploring with water reflection, dramatic near and far, obvious passages and routes for the eye on several levels above and below our vantage point. Also of interest Was the contrast of architecture, and some colourful elements with the glimpse of cafe culture and the bright boats in the marina, all coming off a central pontoon like a fern leaf.

I was greeted after only 15 minutes of setting up with a cup of tea from a resident boater in the basin, a Mr David who is a columnist for a few canal publications including Canals Rivers and Boats. There cannot be many city centre locations where you can stand and a stranger will bring you a cup of tea. Mr David wasn't the only resident to come and chat, there seems to be a photographer in every other boat in the Basin and a genuinely creative vibe amongst the boaters.

Meeting the canal community in Gas St was a enjoyable and fitting end to our time in Birmingham. Stopping for water on the way out I came the closest I have to falling in the canal, overlooked by hundreds of windows of the new cube building alongside the Mailbox. I leapt to the boat gunwale from the side and slipped, luckily I had managed the grip with both hands on the rail on the top of the boat and pulled myself out, but for a while I was dangling off the side with the water coming up to both knees. Apparently you are not a proper boater until you have fallen in. I see this as a sign that I have now done more than dip my toes in the world of boating!

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Oil Painting 36 - Brindley Place

I was pleased with how Oil Painting 35 'Birmingham watching the Olympics' was going but felt one thing it didn't do was reflect Birmingham's love affair with the canals; "more canals than Venice" being the infamous boast. The redevelopment of the central canal passage has been startling, not that I was familiar with the area previously but it is obvious that the transformations around Brindley Place, leading on to Gas Street and the Mailbox have enabled the city to enjoy its canal association, to the point of now being one of the top tourist attractions in the city centre with boat trips, boat buses, boat hotels, boat restaurants, boat scout excursions, boat cafes and boat stag and hen doos!


My favourite cities worldwide seem to have a central structure to connected to water, e.g. London's Thames, Budapest's Danube, even the coastal separation of Hong Kong and Kowloon, and be celebrating that association. The rivers, canals or coast give recognisable geography and identity to our cities as well as offering a place of relaxation in the hustle and bustle. Birmingham has reinvented its own water structure which has in turn made the city centre easier to navigate and much more enjoyable as a whole.

It is quite obvious why I picked this view, human activity between 3 different levels linked by staircases with a central passage of water can hold the viewers eye with routes in and around the painting. The bright scarlet red of the cafe boat providing a bold diagonal device. This boat was manned by lovely chatty brummie ladies serving up sandwiches from the side hatch.

The experience of painting this piece is marred slightly by my eventual removal by security staff at Brindley Place meaning the painting was left in quite a loose state. Even though I wasn't selling, just painting I found out I needed to show evidence of my setup and work, and personal liability insurance, plus a method statement and risk assessment form that would take 3 days to be reviewed by the operations manager and presented before a team. I didn't do this (or knew i needed to) I just wandered up with easel, and tried my luck, which on this occasion ran out on the second day and there wasn't the time to jump through all the hoops before we left Birmingham.

I want to state that every person I had dealings with at Brindley Place seemed genuine, friendly and interested in what I was doing, I had been happily chatting with the security on the first day and throughout the first part of the second before the guard asked me if I had permission. When I had then found out from the office the protocol the security staff were deeply apologetic and assumed it wouldn't have been a problem, and we're sad to see the painting go.

I know it gets complained about a lot, but this red tape culture and the fear of law suits stops so many productive things from happening. I ask a lot of questions of public space ownerships by setting up with a canvas in all sorts of locations, and am glad that it is a by-product to my work, but it is often hard, and will detract many artists from the process of claiming their streets and in turn their own experiences. It is a shame that one of the most commonly asked questions of me whilst painting is 'did you get permission to do that?'

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Oil Painting 35 - Birmingham watches the Olympics

One of the downsides of trying to live without a television on board a narrowboat is when a once in a lifetime event comes along, like the Olympics in your home country, everyone begins talking about it, and you do not have the means to participate.

Imagine our delight then, when we moored up in central Birmingham to find within strolling distance, an epic television bigger than those in even our richest friend's lounges, seating, and even a ready made atmospheric crowd of spectators. Couple that with relaxed 14 day moorings in a secure marina with good facilities and you have an unforgettable few weeks in Britain's second city.

This painting started out life as a quick watercolour sketch from the other side of the floozy in the gacuzzi.

I quickly realised this square had enormous potential in subject matter - iconically Birmingham, colourful flags, beautiful buildings, sweeping curves of the cascading steps and fountain, crowds that were going to be there day in day out for over a fortnight, a pretty complicated multi-leveled space to depict and a ready made plinth to stand upon and be admired producing a painting.

My 'plinth' was the base to the sphnix statue - the statue is a great compositinal device itself relaxedly watching the BBC Big Screen 

Cue purchasing as big a canvas as I could fit through the hatch of the boat, and spending days watching the London 2012 Olympics unfold, whilst chatting with hundreds of people and building up as fine a painting as I have produced.

I like how the 'Year of the Boat' has stumbled across the Olympics, after the nightmare of getting to the capital to paint the flotilla I had written off the Olympics but was over the moon when this project naturally crossed paths. I was able to relax into the Olympics, watch event after event and still be able to do my work.

What is interesting with these crowd paintings is picking out the colour differences between them, my V Festival paintings have a quite a orangey fake tan feel to them, with lots of legs, hot-pants and pink wellies on show, the Stoke football paintings I have done have the iconic red and white striped shirts and the flotilla had the raincoats, umbrellas and union jacks.

Crowd painting at the flotilla - rain macs, brollies and union jacks

This crowd was different once again and actually changed halfway through; it began with a summery coloured crowd sitting amongst the bright colours of the 2012 Olympic branding but then took on another dimension when the event 'Jamaica in the Square' was set up and took place during the course of me producing the painting.

The star of the painting - this lad takes centre stage looking at us from the bottom of the painting

At its peak, there was the Jamaica flag raised in the square in front of thousands of people dressed in or waving the green yellow and black flags. The event was celebrating the 50 years of Jamaican Independence and was another fascinating experience to add to the trip. You can imagine the crowds reaction when Usain Bolt and Blake thanked Birmingham for being such good hosts to their athletic team after Jamaica blew away any competition in the 200m final! Birmingham was Buzzing. We were really lucky to arrive when we did.

As well as the flashes of green, yellow and black the Jamaican Independence Event also changed the scene in another way- the blue smoke from the food stalls cooking up Jerk Chicken and Curried Goat added real atmosphere and distance to the City Hall building at the back. Aerial perspective I think is the technical term.

Our friend Gemma pointing to her little self watching the Olympics

Oil Painting 34 - Spaghetti Junction

This, if I am honest, was the main reason for leaving the Birmingham Main Line and taking the Tame Valley canal detour into the centre of Birmingham. My interest in representing complex spaces with multiple levels of activity and movement meant that this was a must see.

Motorways, railways and bypasses cross over and over, one on top of the other, sometimes getting to such a height that they take on the appearance of giant roller coasters supported by a forest of enormous concrete cylindrical pillars.

The canal was here first and so drifts through at the very bottom of all these stacks of modes of transport. It is a strange world down here at base level, spending time, largely unseen, underneath what you know to be thousands of people hurtling along at speed. On the boat you slowly and silently glide through this alien cathedral of artificial noise and vibration. The experience is much like being on the sewers of mankind, or in movie terms like being in the lower levels of futuristic cities in science fiction films like Blade Runner or The Fifth Element.

There is a buzz to finding a subject like this and a space like this in which to work. You feel like you are not supposed to stop here. This bizarre experience, for me, on a similar level to the Pontcylytte Aqueduct, is not talked about as a waterways highlight. It is a very intimidating space, the bottom rung, and you feel like you are breaking the rules being here, and you should be scrambling to get out, yet if you allow those feelings to wash over you and you embrace the space, it's fascinating to study the underbelly.

I am not alone in enjoying producing artwork down here, there is a real gallery of graffiti art down here, one wall in particular must have at least 50 large tags in a line. Hours and hours of work have gone into them and I found myself looking and appreciating the work more than I have previously. The abstraction, distortion and embellishment of type takes the medium into its own.

I enjoy any comparison with my 'en plein air' practice and street art. The words 'en plein air' ( in open air) are probably enough to make most street artists throw up, I am not working with type at all, and am observation rather than imagination led although I equally enjoying thrashing out an artwork in public spaces and in doing so trying to claim some kind of ownership over them.

So here is my attempt at ownership of Spaghetti Junction - Oil Painting 34 - enjoy!

Oil Painting 33 - Fisherman on the Tame Valley Canal

We had left the Birmingham Main Line to explore the Tame Valley canal as we had friends in Perry Barr and wanted to experience travelling underneath Spaghetti Junction and travelling over the M5/M6 interchange. Big motorways contrasting with slow canals has a lot of appeal for me, the different heights, speeds and aesthetics, the fact that I only ever see these motorways from a cars view, usually annoyed, means I was keen to experience them from a completely different vantage point, gliding past them like some kind of existential being with a glass of wine.

I am well aware this is not everybody's cup of tea, which is probably why the canal was so empty, except for high numbers of fishermen. I guess less boats means more peace for the fish and the men trying to escape their families. One such bloke got featured in this study on a blazing hot day. I don't know much about him because we only exchanged a sentence in the 2 hours I was staring at him and he was staring at the water.

Again it was the human element that was the appeal, but visually the scene was striking with the blazing sun gleaming off his light clothing and cap spotlighting him against the dark background.

Oil Painting 31 - President at the Black Country Museum

The Black Country Museum has good secure moorings and facilities right alongside. I'm sure this means absolutely nothing to the majority of readers but that alone makes it a favoured destination for boaters. You can only gain access to the moorings by foot with use of a magic golden BW key. Every boat owner has one, and it unlocks almost every door, water point, shower room, launderette and elsan on the waterways network. What's an elsan then? Such a graceful name for what is essentially a direct line ... Change of mind, I am going to leave talk of this side of boating on this blog... Google 'elsan' if you feel you have to.

I introduced myself to the staff of the  Black Country 'Living' Museum, asking permission to paint and they showed me around the dry dock and wharf they have contained within the museum grounds. Moored at the wharf is the oldest working steam powered narrow boat called 'President' and it's butty Kildare. President is quite a celebrity (as far as narrow boats go) having his own fan club - The Friends of President.

It turns out I have already seen him once before in 2012, from afar, cruising down the Thames as part of the Queens Diamond Jubilee River Pageant when I was painting Oil Painting. A famous boat, that took part in the flotilla, moored in the marvellous setting of the Black Country Museum, is enough temptation to make me get the paints out and so you get Oil Painting 31. 

It took 3 separate sessions to complete, the last being glorious sunshine changing quite a dull gritty industrial scene into a high contrast sun blasted painting. You come away from the BCLiving Museum smelling of smoke as all the volunteers and costumed staff are stoking up coal fires, even in blazing sunshine to illustrate our dependence on them before electricity.

Oil Painting 29 - Stretton Aqueduct

I had been looking forward to painting this piece since driving to Weston Park last year and realising the canal ran quite close. The road to Weston, the busy A5, dips under this Thomas Telford iron crossing and the contrast between the rushing cars and the slow boats floating above is something I wanted to capture. When I  got to paint the piece though, with the boat moored just alongside the aqueduct, this contrast wasn't shouting out as the main subject and in fact the painting doesnt really contain any boats or traffic but instead has become the study of a startling and enjoyable sunset which I couldn't have predicted after over a dismal month of rain in what was supposed to be a glorious summer of boating!

If you are interested in the history of the aqueduct it has a wikipedia page - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stretton_Aqueduct

Oil Painting 29 in progress

Apart from the sunset it was the poplar trees behind the aqueduct that were unexpectedly enjoyable subject matter from being on the spot. I love, of course, Van Gogh and Monet's poplar and cyprus tree paintings. Tall iconic shapes can make a composition very easily.

Monet - Poplars on the River Epte

Van Gogh - Wheatfield with Cypress