My current series of paintings are all based on sketches done from train windows on London train journeys. I've been using the timed sketch idea for some years but decided to restrict the journeys to London as it's my main inspiration place for current and future writing ideas. As well as journeys the sketches can be from a static place - café windows a favourite, or a brief standing/crouching sketch if I have been captivated on a walk by a particular cluster of buildings, trees, etc.
As I mentioned before on this blog, I stopped painting for some time as I felt disturbed at having to purchase plastic (acrylic) paint in plastic tubes, and buying wood specifically to then cover it in paint. Having now decided to only buy 'second hand' paint from online sites such as gumtree/Vinted et al, and only using found wood or old pictures bought in recycling emporiums, I feel this to be ok, or as near as ok as possible until I perhaps make a sortie into using earth pigments and fallen trees.
The picture below is an extraordinary example of 50s/60s factory paintings (I assume); where someone has been trained to dab and smear, creating a homogenised version of a landscape, in this case one I find extremely eerie. It cost four euro in the many-times-on-this-blog-mentioned Emmaus, so someone rid themselves of something rather worrying, Emmaus made a bit, and I get a large and cheap canvas to work on - with some unready interesting textures which will work well with my next sketch - that of Greenwich and the dome structure, the two minute's limitation making some interesting swoops and lines.
I hope the previous painter - or their ghost won't mind be borrowing the surface; I find it interesting to absorb someone's forgotten brushstrokes into a new image. Would they have had a cooling mug of tea on their work station as I will no doubt have? and similar worries, fantasies, music or blankness running through their mind as they had worked.
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