I do like Atkinson Grimshaw!

Last year I did a blogpost - Little things that are making me happy- One of those things was an artwork-a-day desk calendar, I loved it so much I got another one this year, and this was the artwork for the day a week ago.

I love the little surprise each day when the new artwork is revealed, and this one made me say 'oh gorgeous'. When I looked more closely I found it was painted by John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-1893), an artist I'd dismissed as a teenager. Grimshaw was from Leeds (like me), and there are several of his paintings in the Leeds Art Gallery. When I used to visit I'd walk quickly through that room in search of something more 'modern', wishing there was a Matisse or a Gauguin in the collection!!

Grimshaw was a Victorian realist, mostly painting urban scenes often at night or evening, big canvasses in oils of gas lit streets and misty waterfronts, they seemed very old fashioned to me.

This painting is watercolour and gouache on paper, which is different for a start, and it's a country scene not the city. But what grabs me is that wonderful sky and the bare winter tree on the right. It doesn't feel old fashioned to me, if anything it feels timeless, and it makes me want to go out with my paints and capture the sky at dusk and the shape of trees against the sky.

Apparently this painting is in the Leeds Art Gallery collection, I don't know whether it's on display, but hopefully next time I'm in England I'll get to see it in the flesh.

Sketching wet season skies

Hello blog friends..... Wow, it's a long time since I posted. I never meant that to happen, it makes it hard to jump back in. Why now? There's nothing special to write about, but I'll just write something and hopefully get back in the habit.

One of the good things that happened last wet season was sketching regularly at the beach... For years and years I've said I want to paint the wet season clouds, skies can be so dramatic at that time of year. About 10 years ago I bought myself a beautiful moleskine A4 sketchbook for this exact purpose. Needless to say it was too beautiful to use, and is still on my shelf it's plastic wrapper unopened!!

So what made it happen this year? One thing was the terrible weather - it was relentlessly hot and humid with little rain to cool things down. Usually I go to the beach to walk, but I realised I was getting home so drained I was worn out for the rest of the day. I thought I don't have to punish myself like this! But I still wanted to go to the beach so I took my sketchbook and a chair instead!

The other thing that helped was sorting out a small sketching kit that worked for me - an aquabrush (no need for a waterpot and extra brushes) a couple of watercolour pencils and a dried up watercolour palette - I squeezed out tube watercolours onto a small palette rather than taking a big watercolour set.

I went sketching a couple of times a week from Xmas to the end of March,  and made around 30 sketches. They are tiny 10x15cm in a little cheap sketchbook. Some are good and some are not so good, and that's ok because it was really about the process; about spending time looking, about playing with watercolours a medium I rarely use, about going back again and again for another try, and in the end achieving something I'd wanted to do for a long time.