Liverpool painting No.119. West Derby Road.

21cm x 14cm acrylic on canvas board £90

Liverpool painting No.112. Strand Street

SOLD

21cm x 14cm acrylic on canvas board, £90

I see this docked most days on my walks around the studio, but some days the spring sunshine turns the Formby Channel Lightship redder than red

Liverpool painting No. 110. Boundary Lane

21cm x 14cm acrylic on canvas board, £90

Memories of Ogden's.

The factory is still there! I'm not sure but I think it may be a listed building. It certainly is a nice piece of architecture! Up to a few years ago there was an advertisement hording just outside which showed a large briar pipe, the bowl of which glowed red embers at night! Always impressed me that did! Also driving past, sometimes you'd get the smell of one of the more aromatic pipe tobaccos...Something like Clan


The baccy came in large bales straight from the docks, and it was blended as whole leaves by guys with pitchforks. Lots of flies around and it really stank.
Think how much a small can of rum flavored tobacco smells, and then imagine that smell multiplied enough to fill a whole room - yuck.


For more snippets from the past visit

http://www.yoliverpool.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-10472.html

Liverpool painting No. 106. St. James' Road.

20cm x 14cm acrylic on canvas board, £90

I've really begun to notice how many smoke plumes rise from the city during these cold crisp spells of clean light. It was just turning dusk and the Mersey in the distance reminded me of a time past, when smoke filled chimneys filled the air and snow covered the roofs.

Liverpool painting No. 103. Earle Road.

Acrylic on canvas board 20cm x 14cm, £90

Not long after being here a fat man in a Santa suit crossed Smithdown Road giving traffic the finger...tis the season to be jolly. Came across another site in London that I regularly drop in on. Olha Pryymak (London, UK) paints her city in much the same way as I have been out and about in Liverpool. You can see more of her good work on http://olechko.org/

Liverpool painting No 100. Oxford Street East.

21cm x 14cm acrylic on canvas board, £90.

I pass this building most days to and from the studio and have always thought just how thin it looks. 100 hundred paintings done already, where has the time gone? I'll have a look through them all today and upload what I think is my top 5.

Liverpool painting No.95. Rathbone Road.

Acrylic on canvas board 21cm x 14cm, £90

Liverpool painting No. 92. Navigation Wharf.

Acrylic on canvas board, 21cm x 14cm, £90.

Liverpool painting No. 88. Mersey shore

I went in search of Oglet and followed Brunswick Street to the footpath that led to the Mersey shore. Talk about follow the path less travelled, the place was empty except for a few startled rabbits and the curlews that lifted from the bank in panic at my approach. Here on a small hill was the graveyard of boats, propellers and engines. I would love to have found this place when I was a kid, hours of fun. No doubt it will soon come to the attention of someone in a suit who will order it to be cleared up or fenced off as dangerous.

Liverpool painting No75. Coleridge Street.

The last days of summer. Distant mowers make their final cut and the ice cream vans wind down for the winter. What ever happened to Vincent's ice cream and Mr Whippy?

By the 1950s, ice cream vans were enjoying their hay day. Many chains of operators sprang up and the chime of an ice cream van was a daily part of life around the streets and on the many new housing estates.

Most homes did not have any facility for storing frozen food so the ices had to be eaten when they were purchased. On Sundays it was a regular treat for a family to have a bowl filled with ice cream and enjoy it with canned fruit - these days over 90% of homes have freezers and we can eat ice cream at any time. Although this also means that we don't have to wait for the ice cream man when we want to enjoy a lolly or basic ice cream.

http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/cgi/news/release?id=106564

Liverpool painting No 69. May I Start, May I Finish. Water Street

Water Street 21cm x 14cm. Acrylic on card.

Liverpool painting. May I Start, May I Finish. Wapping Dock

Last day of the month and 15 Liverpool paintings completed. I'll probably get time to draw breath and search for new paintings outside the city centre. I was given an interesting book called, 'Village Liverpool' by Kay Parrot. In it is a collection of Liverpool scenes from various artist from a generation or more past. It may be interesting to visit some of the paintings as they are now and redo them for comparison. Writing about one of the artists, Alfred Harry Jones, it says,

'Mr Jones has taken up the brush and palette laid down by Hardman and is in the same way, preserving memories of the city's landmarks and quiet places for the historical interest of future generations.' p11

Just about sums up what the project is about really, coincidentally, he died in 1958, the year I was born.

Liverpool Painting. May I Start, May I Finish. Back Percy Street

21cm x 21cm oil on board. I think this one's cooked now so I'll call it a day. This was worked up from an acrylic image done some time ago. I received an email today from artist Richard Mckinley talking about finding beauty in the mundane.

It put me in mind of the current Liverpool project in that our time is filled with the ordinary; it is up to us to find the extraordinary in that. Letting events tell their own story as much as possible. It is perhaps up to the artist to find a sense of the sublime in the most inauspicious of subjects.

As Philip Larkin noted, “Nothing, like something, happens anywhere "

http://pastelpointersblog.artistsnetwork.com/2010/06/14/BeautyInTheMundane.aspx

May I Start, May I Finish. Pochade painting of Picton Road

May I Start, May I Finish. Pochade painting of Princes Road.

This is a sort of continuation of the last painting in that if you walk to the end and turn right, this is the view of Princes Road heading into town, apparently heading the other way on this dual carriageway it's called Princes Avenue,(what I always thought the whole place was called).

The building on the right is part of the first grade 1 listed Synagogue outside London, in the distance sit the Anglican cathedral and two of the four domes of the Greek Orthodox church of Saint Nicholas. I find it refreshing that these buildings all sit in the shadow of each other.

I spent two days at the Georges Hall this week showing work with the different communities that make up the spirit of Liverpool. After talking to a woman who was looking at the painting project I'm doing, she showed me a copy of some work by Alan P Tankard. Alan was doing something similar in the 50's and this is the only snippet I have come up with, so if you have any more info or can point me in the direction of his book I'd be most grateful.

A more recent artist, who you may have heard of, Alan Tankard was born in Manchester in 1897 but was involved with Liverpool all his life.

His family moved to the city in 1916 and he transferred from Manchester College of Art to Liverpool College of Art where he remained all his working life. His topographical watercolours and drawings of the city probably first date from the 1940s when he took his students to sketch bomb-damaged buildings.

This led him to being commissioned to provide a major series for the Recording Merseyside project with watercolours and drawings.

His views of Liverpool and elsewhere were painted mainly from observation. He completed his pictures quickly, preferably when the sun was shining which he said made the buildings “sparkle”. He retired in 1961 and died in 1964. His paintings are highly saleable.

http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/liverpool-life/liverpool-lifestyle/2010/06/05/paintings-by-famous-liverpool-artists-are-highly-saleable-says-mike-litherland-100252-26589535/2/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princes_Road_Synagogue

http://www.visitliverpool.com/site/what-to-do/greek-orthodox-church-of-st-nicholas-p56479

May I Start, May I Finish. Pochade painting of Parkway.

There are some lovely old buildings in Liverpool 8, churches, synagogues, mosques and former embassies. I think you could spend a year around here alone and never run out of things to paint. Found another painter who has painted the urban landscape in the past, George Shaw.

George Shaw paints the Tile Hill estate in Coventry where he was raised in the 1970s. He painted its houses, paths and garages, all with Humbrol enamel model paints – the same he used as a boy on his Airfix models.

'Shaw's previous work has seen him looking back over the scenes of his childhood and adolescence. In this new show we see him looking again at those familiar places as they pass into unfamiliarity. He suspects things are being taken from him and the work is gloomily shadowed by the anxiety of himself being taken; a pub vanishes overnight, a library is boarded up, garages are flattened.

His images a lot more detailed than I normally like but they are strangely familiar. I was raised in the seventies in Huyton so maybe I recognise in his work the disappearance of a mundane past.

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/blogon/art_news/george_shaw_at_wilkinson_gallery_london/5415

May I Start, May I Finish. Pochade painting of Hope Street

11th painting of the month for the Liverpool project. I have quiet enjoyed using the Zorn palette and then adding the small amounts of blue for the sky and the green of the trees. With mixes of yellow ochre, cadmium red, black and white, the subdued colours they create work really well in the shadows yet yield bright earth colours for the brick and concrete in the highlights.

May I Start, May I Finish. Pochade painting of Old Swan

I managed to get a few photographs to work from late last night. This is the first painting of the Old Swan area as suggested online, along with a quick sketch of the old Barclay's bank roof. If you go to http://oldswan.piczo.com/?cr=5 you'll find an excellent site on the Swan and surrounding areas with heaps of old photos.

Talking about photos, if I work from pictures they are always my own, but even then you must remember there are few pro's and cons with a camera.

I always use my own pictures as this means you were actually there and experienced the time of day, sounds and light etc.
The camera records good references for what was there and where.
You can take pictures from a vantage point you could not ordinarily paint from, i.e too crowded, no room to paint, the last part of the day.
Things can move too fast to be painted, cars or children, unless they are parked and remain there for some time, the cars not the children.
The camera is like your drawings or colour swatches, a visual aid. it will not give detail in the shadows and it will lose colour in the highlights, your drawings and colour swatches wont.

'They are recording devices not experience devices', Richard Schmidt. p181 Alla Prima; Everything I Know About Painting