Santo Antônio de Lisboa, Monet

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Santo Antônio de Lisboa, end of the day SOLD

 oil on card, 29.7 x 27.5 cm

 

 

 

 

 Santo Antônio de Lisboa, end of the day -  detail

 

 

 The proceeds from the sale of this painting have gone to UNICEF to help in Ukraine. To help Ukraine, and recieve a painting, please contact me.

 

 What happens when you are painting sunsets is that you work away steadily for ages then suddenly become aware that the scene has changed entirely.

 So you wipe off the painting and start again...and again...

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There's no getting away from Monet with pictures like this, is there? The subject and and plein air approach are utterly dominated by him.

 It would be like playing reggae and trying to deny the influence of Bob Marley. 

 

Well, if one is going to have an influence, at least Monet is a good one to have...

 

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Beiramar Avenue, sea

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Beiramar Avenue, sea, oil on card, 10 x 14 cm  SOLD

This was painted as part of a series back in 2013, but for some reason not posted. It's rather romantic, reminiscent of Boudin or Monet. 

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A quiet street

A quiet street, oil on card, 10.2 x 14.2 cm  - available

I had originally intended to title the picture "a boring street". I'd walked past it and thought, how spectacularly dull, I must try to paint it!, but of course as soon as I came here with my easel and started looking the more I found of interest. The little road leads to various research institutes each featuring rather anonymous buildings and, as with many academic institutions, there is a very particular atmosphere of "hush". The road curves round, undulating slightly.

This is one of the oddities of boring things: that is, when you start studying boring things they very quickly stop being boring. Martin Parr's collections of "Boring Photographs" illustrate this very plainly.

There is a tense stillness in paintings by Alfred Sisely, especially apparant in his paintings of floods at Port-Marly. This is one of the most Sisely-ish pictures I've done for a while.

Of the Impressionists, I feel the greatest connexion with Sisely: he isn't syrupy, like Renoir, or heavy like Pissarro, and he doesn't have Monet's inclination towards epiphany (which I don't give two hoots about, not having any mystical instincts whatsoever). His sensibility seems sensibly British: phlegmatic and free from melodrama and I love the sense of harmony in his works, which usually are constructed using a simple grid system.

The theme of silence, of boredom is very late nineteenth century: I suppose it relates to the often idle leisure class of the time and its evasion of social responisbilities.