Some landscape sketching inspiration from Paris #painting #landscape

Here are some great landscapes that I saw on my break in Paris last week.

If you go, get a Museum Pass as you can skip some hilariously massive queues as well as saving money.

Plenty of inspiration for the final few landscapes I need to complete for the North Som Arts Week open studio the first two weekends in May!

Excuse the laughably bad photos, you get the gist and life’s too short for all that cropping and skewing.

Here are some landscape sketches from the Louvre. Here’s Daubigny who’s death caused VanGogh to grieve.
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Corot, amazingly loose and modern looking, if you ignore the windmill.
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And some great sketches by someone I’d never heard of that obviously painted plein air well before the writers of art history claim the impressionists invented it, Pierre Henri de Valenciennes, d.1819!
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Here’s a more well known Caiballote from the Musee D’Orsay.
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And finally some more Toits from the Nicolas de Stael in the Pompidou Centre.
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Portrait drawing with Laurence Kell

I spent last weekend at the RWA doing portrait drawings at the Laurence Kell course.

It started off fairly conventionally, although I think it was the first time I’ve drawn someone sat in front of me with a pencil since I was fourteen when I dropped art and took physics at school.

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We moved onto cartoons to draw out the unique features of people. I think this was the most fun I’ve had while pretending to take art seriously. I think I may have taken the exercise too far?!

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Then some tonal drawings, altogether more LaurenceKell-like. Would have loved more time to get them to that Florence art school finish.

An unexpected bonus was that the selection for the RWA Drawn exhibition was the same day so could peep at some of it. It was a pretty brutal and rapid process, the final selection looked great in the gallery though so it’ll be worth a visit. It made me feel better about not getting into the RP exhibition this week!

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Some rapid life class oil paintings

I’ve had a stab at doing some real full(ish) palette oil paintings in the life classes recently here are the results with varying degrees of looseness and accompanying turps dribbles.

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This one was a 1 hour study on Arches Huile paper at the Bristol Grammar Life (Ashley Down locn), size about 14 by 12 inch.

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This is a two hour study on a little 8 by 6 inch board, it was at an RWA long pose day a few weekends ago. I thought I’d do a little board to warm up and ended up fiddling about painting tighter and tighter but I kept at it as I quite liked the composition. I was also using Cremnitz Lead white painting the sheets so was really having a go at being a Freud clone.

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This is the one I’m most pleased with I think. I like the turps dribbles so much I briefly considered switching back to watercolours! It’s on a sized piece of cardboard, 10 inch by 10 inch. Also 1 hour.

Watch this space, more turps dribbles coming in the future I think…

P.S. not an oil painting I know, but I enjoyed the following Quink ink study too. I was pleased with the initial outline drawing in fountain pen but took a deep breath and dived in with the watered down inky brush.

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More Portishead Seascapes ready for arts week #art #painting #landscape

Been painting a few more plein-air landscapes on the beach in Portishead. I went down a few weeks ago wondering what to paint and thought I’d base a picture around the two fishermen I could see.

I decided to pack in when I couldn’t feel my fingers any more, which only took about 45 minutes, luckily this was the same time the fisherman left. They’d spotted me painting and were enthusiastic about taking a look leaving the beach and were keen enough to take take the site details from me. So, as promised, here it is following a small about of remedial work to make the sea horizontal!

Two fishermen, Black Nore

Two fishermen, Black Nore

Here are a couple more painted a few weeks earlier during the snow.

Snow on Black Nore

 

Snow over channel

Snow over channel

Anybody know the name of the factory featured?