Assignment five: A series of paintings on a theme

A series of paintings on a theme

For this last piece  I wanted to draw from my landscape work from previous parts of the course, and in particular a cityscape of my home town, Birmingham.

I had attempted previously in ‘looking out’ a rather unsuccessful the view from a local beauty spot Barr Beacon, however the view of a landscape from a distance is one I wanted to take forward –  particularly a view of Birmingham, and  I had an idea that I wanted to include a an a-z map into one of the final pieces.

However, views of the Birmingham skyline are actually more difficult to define than I had originally anticipated. Apart from finding an ideal vantage point – I also needed a clear day, and also having identifiable features of a city in the view. I found the best feature to show as a focus would be the tall Post Office tower.

A further problem was that I do not own a long range lens for my camera, so any kind of photo was turning out to be a indecipherable blur on the horizon:

 

However, spurred on by the concept of how I was going to take a skyline and use it for a series of techniques I stared off with a more realistic view; my first paining in the series worked on a more photo realistic interpretation.

Using prussian blue, yellow ochre, cad yellow, and greys mixing paynes grey I identified the layers of the painting and worked from the sky downwards, bringing the foreground warmer. Although, not shown the photograph, I wanted to show a hint of the oilseed rape that is surrounding Birmingham glowing an almost surreal lemon yellow.

The next painting I wanted to make a more abstract view, using the textured and scraping techniques I had used in the previous exercises.

I started off the ground using prussian blue and painted an approximate version of the previous painting using the same colours as in the first, using a palette knife (apologies for the poor photo quality but this was taken by electric light).

The next stage I applied more gesso to ass texture and worked in paynes grey and yellow ochre to describle the buildings. I sed the end of the palette knife to scrape lines to describe the different layers of the landscape.

Final stage of painting two:

The third painting in the series I wanted to include other materials than paint.

After using strips of paper in the exercises in this section of the course I decided to use an A-Z map of Birminham the foreground using green spaces like sutton park, and the buildings on the horizon using built up areas of the map.