Rob Adams a Painter's Blog painter's progress

Some more work from the last week or so. I am trying to complete a couple of paintings a week. Which is for me fast enough, actually the painting of the canvas is a smaller part of making a picture than people might believe. To sit down and start I must have a feeling that it will produce something worth having. I quite often go out to paint and end up only taking photographs because nothing caught my eye enough to make me sit down and start. Photographs that are “paintable” are quite few and far between alas and I see little point in sitting down and painting just for the sake of doing it. Many would feel differently and post a “painting a day” but I don’t think I am built of stern enough stuff to attempt such a thing.

Painting also is much about failure, sometimes the process just goes astray, the original subject was badly chosen or you just could not give it life, who knows, but many of my canvasses are 4 or 5 paintings deep with failures buried beneath fresh paint. We all love those paintings that fly off the brush and seem to take no effort, but my favourites are the ones that came close to calamity but were rescued by an unexpected turn only discovered in the making.

Here is a painting done from a photo. The original image was almost black but after I adjusted it in Photoshop it had a mood that was more true to the actual scene than the better exposed photos. When working from a photograph I don’t bother with drawing I just print out a black and white laser print the right size and trace it through. In this case compositional adjustments were made by dragging bits around in Photoshop, I paint directly from the screen image which some might think is odd but I find nearer to painting from the actual scene than using print outs. I think this may be because a printed image already has the tones and values brought into the possible range of your paints, but a with a backlit screen image as in real life there are brightnesses and so forth that paint can’t reproduce. This painting still has bits to do, but is in need of a couple of days drying –  something I’m not used to with acrylics!

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Here’s a painting made in a slightly different way. The original image was a photo trawled off the web. The Greenwich Phantom deserves a big credit here as the original photo was from that site, and was shot while I was still in bed no doubt… It had much of the feel of the end of the day paintings I had done a few weeks before so it took my eye. The tug was inspired by a visit to Mudchute on the opposite bank to the Greenwich Hospital when an old tug passed upstream it looked so down to earth and no nonsense compared to Wren’s fantasy on the opposite bank that it stuck in my mind. I was going to work this up more but somehow it suddenly looked finished so I’ve stopped for now.

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To lighten the gloom a plein air painted in early evening light of the allotments near New Cross. The allotments are very rich visually with all sorts of workaday clutter and some gems of the art of shed building. I have recently got a share of a plot here so I dare say it will be the subject of a fair few daubs.

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In the same spirit another “on the spot” job in a friends garden in Childe Oakford in Dorset. I liked the blue shed and the path running through.

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This is the same view later the same day. It was an evening soirée at the cottage, and after the sun was down the whites of the garden had just hit that moment when they seem to glow and become luminous. I grabbed my camera but was to many drinks into the evening to either get the exposure right or hold the camera steady… so, apparently, I took several completely black photos. But on lightening them in Photoshop later at home there was the ghost of that evening and in the shadow a feline observer who I had not seen at all at the time… the whole lot was very blurred so a lot of imagination here. The result is a bit twee but what the heck tweeness never killed anybody to my knowledge. It would make a quite a good illustration for a kids book… cats, gardens and mystery… I can almost feel the royalties pouring in!

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