All Roads Lead To Lady Churchill’s Rose Garden

This post was written on 30 July 2019 but is only being released now that the program has aired.

Now, this is more like it.  Not that I was ever asked to make a choice but this was my entry for the wildcard competition.  It’s obviously the same view as my other painting and still includes the leafy canopy and the shadow on the ground.

It’s also still in the key of triadic left, so the main three colours are again Prussian blue, Indian yellow and quinacridone magenta.  There’s also some cadmium red, cadmium yellow and cerulean blue, though, stippled in in the tree on the left, the leafy canopy and the plants against the wall.  I needed to use some bright opaques to make the colours stand out in what was looking quite a dark, muddy painting.

Anyway, first things first.  You’ll see that I painted this on a map of the area.  I glued it down onto cardboard and put on two or three coats of watercolour ground in advance of the recording, hoping that I might impress the judges with my unorthodoxy.  I found it quite tricky to paint on this surface, needing a lot of pigment to make colours show but then finding that the painting was quite dark.  The sky, background trees and walls are all darker than the should be.  It meant that I had to outline the wall in white gel pen at the end to make it stand out against the trees, but this white line got some good feedback from other wildcards.

The leafy canopy and shadow on the floor look better here but are still not perfect.  In particular, it’s hard to distinguish the canopy on the left from the tree behind it.

It was only on the day that I decided to try to incorporate the roads on the map into the painting.  I first spotted that the M25 would make quite a good background tree line.  Then, later on, I painted the tree on the left with a trunk along one of those blue lines that indicate there’s a bit of country that’s covered both on this page of the road atlas and the page before.  And then there’s a shadow that fills up the M23 bypass around Crawley and I made some of the foreground shadows cover the North to South roads in Sussex.  These are things that you have to look closely to spot, but they’re there.

And then there’s the star of the show.  All those Sussex roads that seem to be guiding the viewer upwards towards the gate.  And the A264 which runs East to West along the bottom of the wall on the right and between Crawley and the gate escalates it to another level, still pointing at the gate but contrasting the East/West road against the North/Souths, which is something that textbooks tell us to do.  And it was a good move to leave the inside of the gate white rather than painting what’s behind it.  Everything points to the white space.  If any of this was deliberate I’d be a genius.  In reality it’s a lucky accident.  The road grid on this page of the road atlas turned out to be the perfect backdrop to the painting – I couldn’t have done this with a map of Milton Keynes, all grids and roundabouts.

Other wildcards commented that they liked the colours in this one.  It’s another positive reinforcement for my 2020 three colour paintings, even if these aren’t the greatest colours that I’ve ever drawn out of a triadic left key.

I’m looking at the painting again now.  There are also roads in there that look like twigs on branches or cracks in the wall.  And the bends in the roads in the foreground make the hillside look bumpy and three-dimensional.  A student of general relativity would call those roads geodesics – on a bumpy surface the shortest distance between two routes will twist and turn a bit.  It’s interesting.  It was up for sale for a while but has been taken down after one of my shop window purges.