Dry - Please Dry!!

Fingers crossed as the last of the paintings for my big London consignment dry.

Thanks to my liberal use of impasto, some areas are refusing to cure.  Obviously, I don't frame them until they are touch-dry (otherwise they'd stick to the insides of the frame), and the temperature in the studio has been a bit chilly.

So I've brought the last magnificent seven back home so they can spend the weekend relaxing in the heat, and, hopefully, drying.

Here's a couple of the reprobates...

Troublemaker....Low Tide, St Ives Bay (Oil on linen, 24 x 26)

 Damp - Chalk Figure near Weymouth (Oil on linen, 24 x 26)

Now, the Chalk Figure near Weymouth painting is rather interesting.  

Driving past in Dorset this summer, my attention was caught by the rather lovely chalk figure on the hillside.  I love chalk figures - the Long Man at Wilmington in Sussex is one of my favourite, and one that I'm familiar with, but I hadn't seen this one.  So I stopped the car and took a whole series of photos from various points at the edge of the fields.

Later on during my trip round the south coast of England, I was at the Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne.  There I was lucky enough to see Eric Ravilious's painting of exactly the same scene.  

Eric Ravilious, Chalk Figure near Weymouth

It was interesting to see how he had exaggerated the line of the hill, enlarged the figure to make it more dramatic and prominent, and had interpreted the lines of the hedges and field patterns, making them more sinuous.  

I love his chalky-looking work, as it very much reflects the quality of the landscape which he lived in and recorded.  It was really exciting to see the picture, and to think that I'd been to the same spot that he'd painted from.   

You can read more in my blog here.

 

Chalk Figures

I find chalk figures really intriguing, and I came across this figure in the hillside near Weymouth, and took photos of it from a couple of places.  Chalk figures are giant drawings in the surface of the landscape, often made hundreds of years ago, which cut away the turf to reveal the white chalky soil underneath.

Apparently this one is of King George III, and is officially called the Osmington White Horse.  It reminded of the figures in the chalk in Sussex, such as the Long Man of Wilmington, the mysterious guardian of the South Downs.

Co-incidentaly, whilst in the Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne later in the trip, I was delighted to come across this print  by local boy Eric Ravilious, painter par excellence of the Downs. 

Eric Ravilious, Chalk Figure near Weymouth, 1939

You can see he's exaggerated the shape of the hill-ridge, and the line of the hedge, which gives a more sensual sweep and rhythm to the landscape.  It's still pretty exciting to see the same lines of the fields as Ravilious was drawing, over seventy years later.

This is the Long Man of Wilmington, which you can see from the train near Polegate.  When you see it out of the train window on the right hand side, you know you're almost back in Eastbourne.

Ravilious also painted this scene in 1939, on his whistle-stop tour of chalk figures, before he went off to be official war artist (sadly he was killed in 1942).

 

Eric Ravilious, Long Man of Wilmington (1939) V&A