Connaught Water

A large acrylic painting on canvas, based loosely on a photograph taken by Eve Stanger.
A  swiftly executed painting, accomplished with thin washes, in one session, without re-touching or re-painting.
The original is slightly larger: this photograph is cropped on the left-hand side.

Ireland with Mick, 1977 ( 2nd holiday)

Ireland with Mick, 1977 (2nd holiday)

Ireland with Mick, 1977 (2nd holiday)

Ruin in Ireland with Mick Talbert,1977 (2nd holiday)

The author in Ireland in 1972

Opening day at E17 Art House Picture Framers

I went to the opening day at E17 Art House yesterday.
Google E17 Art House to see my listing, and another of my paintings.
Click the Artists link at Michael Stanger
Better still, pay the gallery a visit.
The Fauve Red Forest painting ( see below) is directly in front of you when you go through the purple front door.

My biggest painting on show.

Party at E17 Art House on Saturday 17th Novenber 2012 at 2.30pm onwards

E17 Art House

The seven paintings below, which are all acrylic paint on canvas can be viewed and bought at E17 Art House, 6-10 Church Hill Road, Stainforth Road entrance,
Walthamstow,
 E17 3RY.
Telephone: (020) 8509 8211.

Connaught Water with yellow foreground.

Japanese mountain and lake with yellow foreground

Copper Green sky and white-flash lighting-bolt .

Blood Red sky, raging blue river and violet tree in letter-box format.

Yellow trees in Epping Forest with violet foreground

Fauve Red forest with Ice Blue path

Connaught Water: Orange foreshore and Ultramarine sky

The Red Bird

Connaught Water Chingford

Connaught Water Chingford

Turner: the burning of the Houses of Parliament 1834

Coventry Cathedral:cropped version ( See the Hove Town Hall fire image below)

Bombed-out Coventry Cathedral 1940 by John Piper

Arctic Landscape 1995

After fire and hot orange from Peter, ice from my years at John Cass

Last orders, last trains 1994 by Peter Saunders

Palace Theatre London 1987 by Peter Saunders

A later painting than the Hove Town Hall painting below: less illustrative, more gestural, and close to the work that I remember from my time at John Cass Art School.

HoveTown Hall on fire 1966 by Peter Saunders

This painting was probably produced in a studio  from on-the-spot-sketches, and brings Turner's paintings of the burning of the Houses of Parliament to mind. Turner famously worked from rapid watercolour sketches, milling with the crowds watching Parliament burn, and  later worked up ambitious oil-paintings, using his powerful imagination and visual memory.( See above)

Also, it also reminds me of  the well-known architectural image by John Piper of Coventry Cathedral after the bombing raid of 1940. (See above.)

Obituary of Peter Saunders

I was depressed today to stumble across Peter's obituary in the Guardian, while browsing on-line.
Peter taught me, if that is not overstating the case, at the John Cass Art School in Whitechapel in the 1990s.
 He was a wonderful painter, albeit overlooked by the mass media, latterly working in the style of Auerbach, but with a  better colour -sense.
 He died at the end of 2011, but I have not seen him for over ten years.
Any chance reader of this blog is urged to Google Peter Saunders, painter.

2012 E17 Art-Trail

Today is day one of the 2012  E17 Art -Trail and a celebration of five years of Inky-Cuttlefish.

Art Trail blunder

This is the year I missed the E17 Art Trail. Too preoccupied, I missed the deadline.

Chris 19 May

Colour adjustment towards warm

Colour adjustment towards cool

A new 5x4 foot Painting

This work is currently hanging in the Inky-Cuttlefish Studio
The original is a 5x4 foot acrylic painting on canvas
The original colours have been much altered and made darker in the scanning process.

Asking advice from an old friend of my parents

The image below is an inaccurate reproduction of a painting from 1952 by William Townsend (1909-1973), a friend of William Coldstream ( Head of the Slade ), and a staff  lecturer at the Slade School of Art. The original is more Cobalt Blue than Electric Blue, more Yellow Ochre than Lemon Yellow,  but I digress.
The point is that I went to see him in !971, only two years before his death. At the time I was two years into an architecture course.  I was unhappy as an architecture student and dreamed of a career in art. William looked at a couple of paintings of mine, and advised me to stick with the architecture.
Good advice, as events turned out, since I have never made much money from my paintings.

William Townsend Hop Gardens in Kent

MIchael Andrews 1980

A beautiful painting by a superb artist who does not get the attention he deserves.
This is another  illustration, like the Ravilious and the George, from David Dimbleby's ' A Picture of Britain'.
I have a clear memory of his paintings at an exhibition in London in the late 1980s. This included some of his distinctive paintings of balloons floating above a desert landscape, with their ghostly shadows cast onto the sand below.
Clean, crisp, paintings, with a still, other-world power to fascinate.
He typically spray-painted acrylic, and worked with photographs, but the results far surpass photography.
Sadly, he died in 1995.

Patrick George in Suffolk In the 1960s

Ravilious : The Vale of the White Horse

Eric Ravilious 1903-1942 : an under-rated English landscape artist.

The finished Haywain , as seen on TV.

My contribution is somewhere to the top right in the darker blue area.
I impressed the  organisers enough to be allowed back at the day's end
so that my panel was not obliterated by someone coming after me.

Painting A Bigger Haywain.

Back in 2004, years before Hockney started banging on about A Bigger Picture,  Rolf Harris put out a Television show in which 150 painters contributed a canvas panel each to produce a huge version of the Constable painting. I turned up early at Trafalgar Square to find an area of interlocked square umbrellas, shading an expanse of brand new red carpet, on which were laid out new and expensive radial easels, each with a layout table. Each table had its own new tubes of paint and new brushes. There was not a speck of paint to be seen anywhere. These were the workstations for the celebrity artists, including Rolf Harris. Literally red carpet treatment.
Around the perimeter of the square were various covered stalls. At one of these the general public could paint a panel, using a black and white photograph of the relevant part of The Haywain as a guide. This is what I did: it was what I had come for. There was a catch, however. The public were only permitted to paint the sky. The tricky bits, i.e. everything else, were left to the celebrity painters. Rolf painted the central figure and the front wheel of the haywain, naturally.
I forget who the other celebrity painters were, apart from Bill Oddie.

Hockney at the Royal Academy, London

A shocker of a much-hyped show. Huge paintings made up of separate canvases. Vivid, clean colours  in oil, many straight from the tube, with a sparing amount of white. Expensive , full pigments, with a heavy gloss varnish. Some very harsh, garish colours: Emerald green, or Viridian green, screaming Chrome Yellow, and violet. Some wonderful small charcoal drawings of logs in a clearing, or trees. Why not more, bigger charcoal drawings?
 Hockney is thrilled by new technology, but I walked through the iPad gallery, and the multiple film gallery, with hardly a pause, or a backward glance. I also ignored the Claude gallery, with due deference to the original source painting.
 Above all, marvel at the brilliant, fluent drawing of  inter-lacing branches, the lines stroked with amazing fluidity and bravura.
 But by contrast an individual painting, seen as a whole, sometimes displays a jarring ugliness, which can be put down to too many strident colours, and too few softer tones, or a lack of aerial perspective.
 Of course, he is a draughtsman of genius, as good as anyone, ever. I long to see him produce large-scale work in black and white.
 Hockney makes much of looking and seeing, but how much is really plein-air painting from life, and how much is studio artifice? Plenty of repetitive pattern-making . Many of the paintings are really huge stage back-drops, or , as Brian Sewell put it on a daytme TV show, scenery for a production of  Bambi.

painting fau(x)ve Hockney red trees.

Going large, having fun, painting red trees, but not from life. I will get into Epping Forest, come the summer, I promise.
Next Monday is the last chance to get to The Academy to see DH. Will I make it ?

Waltham Forest Art Club

I am now exhibiting with the local art club in The Arcade Indoor Market off Wood Street in Walthamstow. The exhibition is inside a free-standing all-glazed kiosk. There are 11 exhibitions in all in 12 weeks.The series as a whole is entitled ' Turnaround.' The USP of the show is that you can see both the back and the front of the exhibits, either from the corridor of the arcade, or by venturing into the kiosk.  I am part of Exhibition 3/11, entitled ' Helen Porter and guests.' The guests include Anna Alcock.The colour brochure which is given out to visitors promises Printmaking and Installation, but Installation is nowhere to be seen.
I have 3 paintings for sale @ £40 each.