Railway lines in Pindamonhangaba

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Railway lines in Pindamonhangaba, oil on card, 11 x 9 cm  SOLD

A little Sisley-ish picture of this pleasant little town- part of my Vale de Paraiba trip.

It has good baroque-style church, but the name of the town itself alone is sufficient reason to visit- though after a week of practicing I am still unable to say it.

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Wall enclosing a school; Sisley

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Wall enclosing a school, oil on card, 11 x 10.5 cm  - available

Painted on a brown base: I am experimenting more with the colour of the priming.

I feel this picture to be in my more Sisley-an mode: this is partly because of the texture, and partly because of the scale of the motive: Sisley often stood a certain distance from his motives when painting. This lends a sence of emotional reserve to his paintings, a quality I find most sympathetic.

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It is so hot that it is quite oppressive and I hope it rains. I miss the absence of seasonal variety here: I remember autumn in Italy last year with great fondness, especially the smell of damp leaves.

I hope I can save money to go to Europe in September or October. I wish to revisit Naples.

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.