Category Archives: Cycle tour

New painting

Sol and the crescent Moon – 400 times larger, 400 times further away. Oil on canvas 30×60 inches

 

Sol and the crescent Moon – 400 times larger, 400 times further away. Oil on canvas 30×60 inches £2500

24th March 2020

Lockdown-ish day 1…..the morning has almost gone, and I have been as always painting, just outside the front door is a sheltered veranda with a glass roof where I set up two tables for all the stuff I use. No one about. Usually there is always some background noise….some thing… some annoying engine, ship engines, aircraft engines, tractor engines….lot’s of aircraft…cars always bloody cars….and on an Island I can cycle round in 20 minutes…..it is ridiculous.
But today is different, I remember when air traffic was shut down during Iceland’s volcanic eruptions….at first it took a while to notice that there were for a short time no aircraft vapor trails scaring the sky, once I had noticed I just could not stop looking at that sky…..it was quite wonderful…..actually it was sublime.
…And today in beautiful sunshine spending the whole morning painting not a cloud in the sky….and the only sounds I hear are the sounds of nature. The bird song is utterly sublime…it echoes from place to place….it is wonderful. I cannot describe how wonderful it is to simply only hear nature……without that constant and incessant background noise……I hate that noise…..we cannot…must not go back to how things were, it is simply wrong…..

Indoor swimming pool commission

Indoor swimming pool commission. Five 38×90 inches and two 70×82 inch paintings……

The  38×90 inch paintings all need to be carefully taken off the wall and cleaned. I do this from time to time throughout the year to prevent the build up of salts that condense out of the atmosphere of the swimming pool. It is not just that they condense, but with all the activity in the pool the paintings are often splashed and so as the water runs of a build up of salts is deposited leaving vertical streaks on the surface of the paintings…..

This year was more complicated as some people had been playng ball games in the pool and had used the two larger 70×84 inch paintings for target practice. One had suffered 19 impacts and the other 29 impacts. The damage was so serious that the paintings were ruined. Each impact had generated multiple concentric ring cracks around each of the impacts. Think of them like ripples from dropping a stone in a pond the ring cracks correspond to the peaks of the waves…..well anyway they were beyond repair……So after giving the gallery the bad news and a working plan and after some meetings with Tresco Estate, we came to the conclusion that the best thing to do would be to replace them……it took four months.

This time however rather than allowing it to happen again and assuming that there would be some idiots capable of doing the same thing again  l lined the back of the canvas with hardboard…which had to be sealed to prevent warping in the humid atmosphere……scary stuff because it more than doubled the weight of the artworks. Once installed I was checking on them 2-3 times a day to make sure the wall fixings were adequate to the task of holding the paintings securely in place……six months down the line all is still well…..

An example….this is an image of just one of the 48 impacts on the two 70 x 84 inch paintings

…..and this cleaning in progress….you can easily make out the difference between the cleaned are and the area with the build up of salts…..

The salts do not affect the paint at all. When I first received the commission to do these paintings. I understood the necessity of protecting the paintings from the humid environment of the swimming pool. For the most part I always use Michael Harding and Old Holland oil paints. They are superb. but as  a precaution I contacted Michael Harding and actually got to speak with him about the problem I had in protecting the artworks from the swimming pool environment and he recommended  another one of his products….a  doubled rectified wax based matte varrnish…..odd stuff to use but it is spot on and has never deteriorated or reacted badly to the atmsphere of the swimming pool……Gret stuff