New paintings and regular art updates.
Clouds and rooves by the sea.
Quick sketches can be useful to remind you of a view. You can think about weather and how rain falls from the clouds over the sea. The jumble of buildings with slanting rooves, hunkered down for an impending storm.
Sketching fast gives you the chance to record something that may be fast moving, capture motion, in fleeting minutes the whole thing has changed!
Painted a few years ago while we were on holiday in Pembrokeshire, South West Wales 🏴.
I ppainted this while we were staying in a caravan in Pembrokeshire, I’d decided to take paints and a canvas for a change (I usually just take a sketch book or watercolours). I did some sketches of the castle but used a guide book for the castle to find an image to work from.
Manorbier is still in private ownership (a lot of places are now owned by the National Trust and other charities). Its really close to the coast, you can walk down a valley to the sea and if you look back you can see the castle up on a hill on the left and the church tower of the village on a hill on the right.
If you ever go to South West Wales it’s worth a visit……
Surreal image of sea and sky. I choose things that will make a good picture when they are duplicated and put together in a pattern. The waves were breaking in the distance and the sand was thinly covered with a film of water. The groynes are wearing out but still stop the sand drifting. I like the triangles on poles at either end of them (only one in the original photo) I think this makes a plesant composition…
Driving through Wales last Year. My sister took us out into Snowdonia, past lakes and mountains. Along streams. Through wooded valleys, over mountain passes. Seeing the scree tumbling down. Sheep climbing jumbled piles of broken slate. Then down steep hills back to the coast, along tunnels bored through the mountains, back to the flatter lands of North Wales (flatter not flat, its not Cheshire!)
The beauty of the country of Wales is amazing. I’ve only really explored the North of the principality, I would love to visit Cardiff for instance, which is in the very South of the country.
You know when you find old paintings? You wonder where you were when you painted them, what you were doing! These bring back memories of a holiday at Challaborough in Devon in 2002.
The rocks were dark and solid, with red brown sandy beaches. Across the bay you could see Burgh Island, a small island across a stretch of sand. To visit it you had to drive up from Challaborough and follow the coast road round to a little hamlet opposite the island.
The stretch of sand is really a sand bar that reaches out from the coast to the island, sometimes it is under water and can only be reached on a sea tractor that has a seated platform high above the waves. The island is worth a visit because there is a 1930’s hotel on it that Agatha Christie, the famous crime fiction writer, stopped at. There was also a pub near the shore of the island, called the Pilchard. Im not sure whether they are still open as it was over 16 years ago that we were there!
I remember taking little canvases with me and sitting painting the view from the caravan site we stayed at at Challaborough, I also remember having to stay there longer as I twisted my ankle because the caravan steps were rusted through with the sea air and collapsed when I climbed up them.
Anyway these are two small canvases that bring back memories…..
