Well after an extremely productive two weeks, I can at last show you what I have been up to. It seems that the routine of the Autumn and all my travelliing and commuting of late has got me back into a working rythym. And I think that at last I am making some progress. I have been concentrating on creating numerous compostions through drawing, watercolours an even one or two monoprints. You can see some of this work here.
It seems that ater all my walking and commuting, that the one place I had forgotten to look at for source material was here in the house where I am staying in Hastings. A few days ago, as I was waiting for David (my sister’s partner) to cook the dinner, I decided to do a drawing out of the window from my bedroom. This is the sort of thing I am always tellingstudents to do when they cant think about what to draw.
Milward Crescent Gardens
Not a great drawing by anyone’s estimation, but it gave me a few ideas of how to develop it. Hastingis is full of of steep terrace gardens going up or down one of the many hills. I had spent a lot of this summer helping build a wooden wall embankment in this garden and had been aware of all the conversations, discussions and (non) neighbourly comments.
I proceeded to make three further studies from this sketch in the studio:
Garden Divide 1
Garden Divide 2
Garden Divide 3
There was something about these images that I thought it could go further, so today I risked starting a large oil painting based on the the essence of these studies. I decided it should be portrait format and and that it should cover up over the hill and a view over to the East Hill and English Channel:
Battle of Hastings 1
The above images show the first paint I put down with not much real definition. I was just trying to reflect the muted colours which were in the watercolours. I loved the feeling of the composition already without any description. So, I started to paint in some definition for the composition:
Battle of Hastings 2