Oil Painting 62 - Above Deansgate Locks

The breach on the Trent and Mersey by Middlewich meant our return to Manchester was via the Macclesfield, Peak Forest and Ashton canals.

After a winter of animations and harsh weather I was eager to get the paints flying again in Manchester, and on the home stretch into Castlefield, I was already spying possible subject matter and left the boat dropping in a lock to run up these stairs to check the view from this metro station.

The shear drop down to the bar terraces and the canal even further below, in contrast to straining your neck to catch the full height of the Beetham Tower was an interesting spacial challenge. I also wanted to depict the dog-legging staircase up to where I was standing as a device to describe the different levels and the banister railings to help reiterate the vertical. It got to the interesting stage where I was having to look through myself to describe the platform.

Edgmond House Commission

A private commission produced this winter as a surprise 50th birthday present for the owner of this wonderful property near Newport, Shropshire. He had previously seen and expressed interest in the Weston Park interior paintings, so his wife knew it would be something of interest.

I wanted a composition that would combine a view out to the garden, in particular capturing the height of the tall tree, with an unusual depiction of the lounge. The enormous windows flood this room with natural light and give an enjoyable comparison to the artificial wall lights and chandelier which is sending out shafts of colour across the white ceiling.

I enjoyed depicting the mass of the material of the large curtains in the foreground, trying to really reflect their weight. This reminded me of one of Lucian Freud's earlier paintings which is primarily a study of gravity with a dense coat hanging alongside a gravity defying plant delicately meandering upwards.

Large Interior, Paddington, Lucian Freud

Source: wikipaintings.org via Rob Pointon on Pinterest

The painting was presented on the birthday with the room still empty on the understanding I could return to paint in family figures if required.

After some deliberation this was agreed and I painted in three of the family's children. We were all keen to keep the depiction of the family informal and almost incidental. I am pleased with the results.

Altogether this piece was 6 days work spread over a few weeks.

Oil Painting 57 - Narrowboat Interior

Living inside a narrow floating tube and being interested in dramatic perspectives I had to try and sum up this unusual space that has occupied so much of my time and thought. I say 'thought' because of the year we spent designing and fitting out this interior after buying it as a shell and being so limited on space every decision needs thought and has consequences.

This space of our design has now moved with us around the country, and now coming to the end of the project it will soon be time to put it on the market for the next owner to enjoy, a difficult decision and all the more reason to get it recorded in paint.

As a painting this piece was really enjoyable to produce, the natural light in abundance coming in from all angles and reflecting of all the varnished wood was releasing all sorts of unusual colour combinations, and cast and reflected light patches. Karen is featured working on the laptop. Hopefully the angle I have given the composition isn't too much to be distracting, especially in a floating subject you would wish to be level. I seem to be introducing an angle into a large percentage of my works which seems a natural process and true to how I see or experience the spaces as I am painting.

Somebody on social media likened this piece to Pierre Bonnard's work who is an influence, I shall attach an example -

The Dining Room in the Country, Pierre Bonnard, 1913

Source: wikipaintings.org via Rob Pointon on Pinterest

Oil Painting 44 - Worcester Cathedral Interior

I am especially grateful to the management at Worcester Cathedral for allowing the benefits of my work to overrule the hazards and to grant me access to paint inside the Cathedral.

This interior space is beyond breathtaking, the height, space and unquestionable beauty surround you. Whereas I was struggling to find an angle that satisfied with Oil Painting 43 of the exterior, there was absolutely no problem in locating a vantage point inside the building. This for me, sits alongside some of the best Cathedral Interiors in the North of France. I can now, for the next four days at least, walk to this incredible subject from where I wake, and spend full days responding. The colours change fabulously throughout the day as the sun comes and goes throughout the different stained glass, highlighting the green and golds of the naked cotswold stone. 

I knew instantly this subject would lend itself to my approach and I could produce an individual take with challenging perspectives, gestural brushstrokes whipping the eye around to reflect the enormity and strength of the pillars, and draw out and exaggerate some of the colour subtleties within the stonework in the changing light.

Because there was just so much to go at visually I ended up attempting to contain as much as possible by standing in the central cross of the building in a position where by swinging around I could view down the Nave, both transepts and down towards the Lady Chapel, basically a panorama just short of 360 degrees catching the north, east, south and western stained glass windows in one image. Panning round so far enables you to convincingly wave the horizon and bring in a sense of height. 

This was the main struggle with this painting, wanting to spin right the way round but also knowing the overriding sensation of being in this space, and therefore the main subject, is the gravity defying height. Spinning too much and creating a thin panorama that loses that feeling of looking up would be a failure. The easiest way for me to communicate the height would be flip the panorama on its side, so you simply pan from the floor to the ceiling, which is exactly what I did Oil Painting 42 - Pugin's Gem. This piece is the straight forward symmetrical depiction of the interior of a gothic space and I wasn't surprised to find a photo with nearly the same composition in The Pugin Centre in Cheadle after starting the piece. No, I had got the appeal of the symmetry out of my system with that painting and now wanted to play games with recording right the way around me, looking up and down, even skewing and distorting some aspects to sneak the transept organ in on the right.

It was a compositional struggle that stretched me to the point of not knowing, even after a full days work, if it would read clearly as a representation of space or not. There was a eureka moment when i painted the pattern of the tiles in the central space that helped describe the entire space. All of a sudden the piece then seemed to click with the average viewer, and I gained the approval of the general public which until then had obviously been unsure! This happens a lot with the painting process in public and I often rush to get to the stage where people can read where I am going with the painting, as the activity becomes more enjoyable after that and you do not feel the end to constantly explain yourself. Believe me, a full day of rushed work and doubt, with confused glances from passers by, is a long time!

Gradually though the piece developed and the community of the Cathedral became warmer and warmer to having a painter in with them. I thoroughly enjoyed my time in the Cathedral, met some wonderful people, and would love the opportunity to spend more time there. A residency either with the Cathedral or the local school would be ideal where I could have more time  to explore spacial representations in this the most breathtaking of interiors. This is something I shall certainly be pursuing once I have finished dragging this 16 tonne tub around the country.

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!

Posted with Blogsy

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 30 - Wolverhampton Viaduct

We reached the end of the peaceful Shroppie and began entry in to the great urban unknown of Birmingham, beginning with Wolverhampton, and a day's slog up 21 locks on the Main Line into the city centre. Our joy at reaching the top of this lock flight was short lived when we realised we were moored in a police investigation scene after a tragic incident at a nightclub alongside the canal. This setting highlighted our anxieties about now bringing our boat and home into an urban area, which seem exaggerated anyhow having spent quite some time off the beaten track. It is a noticeable feature of this year how our feelings are effected by having the ability to engage and disengage with mainstream society. You see very little advertising on the canals living without television, in an era when we are bombarded normally, but then reentering a built up area, especially such a warren of disorientating canals as Birmingham, makes you doubly apprehensive about mooring up all our possessions in an unknown area. The constant complicated logistics of this trip we're taking their toll at this point.  A new map book helped in us visualising what we had ahead of us on the BCN (Birmingham Canal Navigation) that has more canals than Venice and also the act of getting the paints out to paint this Oil Painting 30 - Wolverhampton Viaduct really helped in taking some form of ownership over the landscape we now find ourselves in.

This is a real positive of the painting process I have not really mentioned before but spending long periods of time observing an area gets rid of all anxieties about that location. Because a painter with an easel is such an unusual sight I talk to a lot of passers by, and low and behold the people of Wolverhampton turn out to be some of the friendliest I have met on the canal network.

I had noticed this scene on the way up the lock flight and was fascinated with the angled spiralled brickwork underneath the railway viaduct as it compensates for the old canal passing through at an angle other than 90 degrees. It reminded me of the spinning ghost train tunnel at Alton Towers and got me thinking about how this angled approach is a much more effective way of representing the planes of a tunnel. I am talking about quite abstract values here so I will try and help illustrate with some doodles -
I do a lot of work with perspective and drawing viewers eyes into a painting by taking them down 'tunnels' of interest towards a vanishing point. I create these tunnels, a lot of the time, by using obvious directional brushstrokes to manipulate the viewers eye. These are not literally tunnels but can be looking through a passage of trees or down a street etc.

To date I have been mainly painting the brush strokes pulling straight towards the vanishing point like an orthogonal on a perspective drawing

or alternatively creating hoops with the brush strokes.

The Breakfast Painting, 2009 -  You can see a lot of 'hoops' in the brushwork in this piece creating a tunnel for the eye

The brickwork in this viaduct, and the thoughts of the ghost ride spinning tunnel got me thinking that I should utilise this method more as it a dynamic combination of the two. So try and emulate this more complex recording of space when next painting a passage of trees or an underground tube station or even put the pattern in the sky with brush strokes above a subject I want viewers to be drawn to.

Have another look at the full painting at the top, I have altered the graffiti that was on the bridge to be my signature for this piece.