The paintings, sketches, artworks, daubs or
whatever you want to call them, of Canterbury in this post have all been done
by me, not from photos, but by going to Canterbury, finding some sort of view
of Canterbury, preferably with a comfortable seat, near a toilet and with a
supply of food and drink.
This type of painting may be called en plein air although a
strict translation is “"in the open air" so as some of them were
painted from inside café windows I suppose they should be called peinture sur
le motif "painting of the objects or what the eye actually sees"
One of the first things I consider when I look
at a painting of a place, is where did the artist paint it from and often I go
to the place and take a photo from the artist's point of view. Often this turns
out to be somewhere you couldn’t easily paint from like the middle of the road,
suggesting the painting or drawing was done from a photo, possibly even traced
from a photo, though usually I assume the photo was squared off to make it
easier to copy. Of course there are paintings drawn from the imagination and lots of practice drawing from photos may help with this, particularly if your imagination looks like a photo or you square it off. Frankly most of the paintings of Canterbury aren’t
much help to me when I comes to choosing somewhere I can paint from.
There are two main snags with this type of
thing, one being that perspective through a lens looks different to perspective
viewed with the eye and the other is that some of the colours are different in
photos, particularly the blue of the sky.
Anyway I am working up to doing some oil paintings of places
and as far as I can see the options are:
1 I buy a cheap campervan and park it where I get a decent
view.
2 I take a photo and paint from that.
3 I do a watercolour sketch and copy that.
4 I take all the oil painting paraphernalia and put up
an easel somewhere and give it a go.
I would say the fact that there are lots of oil
paintings of Canterbury and yet you don’t often see artists there painting them
is an indicator that this may be a difficult one.
One think I do assume is that there are going to
be lots of watercolour paintings and drawings that were used to paint oil
paintings of Canterbury, so far the galleries I have visited in Canterbury just
don’t seem to have any on display.
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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.