While traveling in London for a couple of weeks, I took with me my watercolors and some small sketch pads. Everyday, when at home at my daughters residence, I sat at the end of the table to paint.
I painted the scene outside her place as it is a courtyard inside a gated area that dates a long way back. Her residence was the former stable. Other residences are part of a community complex with characteristics of what might think of as a castle.
Her area was rural all the way up to the 19th century. Then the Georgians made way.
There is an old dairy down the street that is now a pub. There are ancient churches.
Anyway, we took a lot of walks and it didn’t matter that it was raining. Pay no mind to that. They treat rain as if it were sunshine. Being a bit soggy is just the environment. I didn’t feel the cold inside as I could bundle up. I didn’t catch a cold until I returned to the sunshine. What’s up with that?
I painted scenes of our foursome doing things with my focus on the threesome.
We visited the Freud Museum and that inspired some Freud-theme work. They say that they intend to use some of my pictures on their website.
Now, back at home studio, I returned to my trees.
Lately, I have been working in 3” X 3” squares. Why? For one thing it is challenging because the eye is more normally seeing things in 35mm and not squares. Constraining such as this makes one focus on subjects more selectively.
Second, working small, one refines techniques and I admit that I have a long way to practice and to learn.
Lately, I have been using the pencil and paint combination more than ever to create the perception of more detail. As I work to a larger size, I intend to migrate those techniques and scale upward.
Sometimes, I frame the 3” x 3” panels individually. Other times, I keep them together in a matrix such as shown here as people can experience what I see in the woods on a single visit.
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