Towards Sunset

My latest, the first painting I've done for a long time that I completed in just one session. This is an acrylic on a canvas covered board: I've found these not very sympathetic to paint on up to now, but for this one I laid down a base coat of cadmium red plus a little white, allowed that to dry, then painted on top: it seemed to respond much better to the rather thicker base paint than previous pictures have to my usual coloured stain on the board. 30 x 30cm, and because I rather like it the asking price is £100 - Christmas is coming, don't forget! Goose getting fat! But I'm not .....

Re-sprayed

Well for better or for worse - here's the repainted picture. It's less bland; it's also less immediately attractive: the first version had the virtue and simultaneous vice of being relatively inoffensive, except to me - whom it offended because it was as exciting as a dish of cold porridge. You could take my mind off it entirely by buying it, of course ..... A snip at £150: acrylic on canvas.... I don't, to be honest, quite know what I think of it yet, but - well, here it is.

Fallow period!

I've been doing bits and pieces for the last couple of months, interspersed with a good many meetings on the NHS, and a fair amount of dithering. I'm good at dithering. However, I have been doing some work as well, and am currently engaged on illustrating a book - the details of which are under wraps for the moment. Not the first book I've done - but the last one (like this one, unfortunately) is a bit of a speculative effort: and it hasn't yet been published. I hope it will be, but the recession is unfortunately still very much with us, and just to really cheer myself up, I fear it's going to get worse.

Anyway: one of the things I've been up to is what I call a re-spray job; taking a painting I really didn't like very much, and working over it to (with any luck) rejuvenate it. This is a bit of a risk with oil paintings - you run the risk of cracking the paint film - but it's possible to overpaint almost anything, even watercolour. Acrylics are "easier", technically if in no other sense, and the one I'm painting again is a beach scene near Fort Victoria, at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. I'll show it here, as it was, and in a day or two I'll post the new (and improved?) version. The trouble with the first one was really that it was taken from a photograph, and someone else's at that: worked fairly well as a photo, but its lack of focal point and the blandness of the colour, which I unwisely tried to copy, made a very boring painting.

I've also updated my profile photograph: this one is courtesy of Barry Fitzgerald, a professional photographer from Tralee in Ireland, who has been a friend of mine for more years than he cares to remember. Not only did the old photograph make me look as though I were munching on a wasp, but honesty compels me to admit that I've aged a bit since it was taken. Well, don't we all....?