I wasn’t very good at painting and not that committed to improving. I would have…
Blackpool Pleasure Beach
My second episode as a wildcard at Landscape Artist Of The Year was screened in February 2023 but here’s what I had to say after filming in June 2022.
I had to travel up to Blackpool for this one, the alternatives of flying to Northern Ireland or having to comply with a strict dress code for artists at Royal Ascot not really appealing to me. I found out a couple of days before that we’d be filming near the pleasure beach, which was good news to me as I’d booked a hotel room close by.
I came up with a plan for the painting at home. The idea is that I’d paint what Blackpool looks like to someone plummeting downwards on the rollercoaster: I’d rotate the view so that the roller coaster train was on a horizontal bit of track. I explained to everyone that dropped by (artists, their seconds, judges, the general public) that this work represented two paintings. One (at the top of this post) shows everything from the my point of view; for the other, you just hang the painting straight and get the view that the passengers would have seen.
Anyway, on to the painting itself. The main three colours were rose dore, French ultramarine and Indian yellow. The first two were easy choices, based on the colours of the roller coaster beams. For the yellow, I was planning in using transparent yellow but ended up going for Indian yellow instead, meaning this painting is in the key of orange warm. I think it was motivated by me wanting any greens to be dulled right down but this was a mistake. It meant I had warm versions of all three primaries, making for a very warm looking painting. Transparent yellow would have put me in the key of triadic right which (my notes on) my experience tell me would give the atmosphere of a cold day but with the heating on indoors, which would have suited the day better. As usual, some opaque colours made supporting appearances later on.
I started by putting down some masking fluid to protect the tops of the buildings from my sky colours, which feels overly prudent in retrospect. But I also spattered over some masking fluid, which always gives a bit of a pop. Then I painted on the sky using my three primaries and sprinkled on some salt. The sky came out amazingly well and the salt decided to work today, giving the impression of papers blowing all over the place, which meant I’d captured the weather conditions perfectly. If the competition had been ended at this point by an act of God, less than 30 minutes into the competition and with three quarters of my painting covered, I’m convinced I would have been crowned the winner.
After the sky had dried and I’d removed the masking fluid from the rooftops, I painted the roller coaster and the foreground in parallel, flipping backwards and forwards between them. Let’s talk about the roller coaster first. I started with all the thickest red and blue lines that you can see. I loosely added a train on the horizontal bit of track, with some people with raised arms. And for the thinner blue girders, I tried stamping in dry paint with a piece of credit card. But the paint came out too thick in places and got even worse when I tried to lift it off. As a last resort in an attempt to rescue a painting that was close to being written off, I stamped in some white highlights with the credit card. And it worked! People were telling me how good the white looked. I’m a very lucky man.
For the foreground, I started with a multicoloured wash, then tried to add darker washes over the top to create a bit more detail. I found this really difficult as the wind was making it impossible to be delicate with the brushes. It didn’t come out great. While I couldn’t do much about the looseness and lack of detail, there were two problems that I did manage to correct. First, the foreground buildings didn’t really work well together, so I laid a thin orange glaze over the top, which seemed to work. And second, after the orange glaze, the foreground and roller coaster didn’t seem to work well together; I solved this problem by adding lots more of the blue to the foreground in all the windows and shadows. I ended up with something marginally acceptable.
As final touches, I added the figures and birds. The figures were painted on using cotton buds, with cadmium red, cadmium yellow, French ultramarine, titanium white and sepia. The birds were painted on using titanium white and sepia after spending some time actually observing birds. And the final step was to remove the masking fluid spatters.
As a painting, I think there’s a great underlying idea but I’m not entirely happy with the execution, especially of the foreground buildings. Maybe they’d not have looked so orange if I’d used transparent yellow rather than Indian but it’s too late to change that now. This one will be going up for sale. But Landscape Artist Of The Year is about more than the painting. It’s about the craic and the adventure. How did that go?
Let’s start with the weather. It was generally a nightmare. The day started off very windy but I found a spot by a bench and managed to tie my easel securely to it using a linen bag and the lace from my brush roll. A couple of other artists got into trouble when their easels blew over. Later on it started raining and I had to protect my painting under a towel. I did go back to the hotel to get an umbrella but it turned inside out too many times to be of any use.
The presenters and judges? Well, there was no sign all day of Joan Bakewell but Stephen Mangan did wander round talking to people. He spotted straight away that I wasn’t a local, so I told him that the dress code at Royal Ascot had put me off applying for a place in the Southern heats. And just for good measure, I pointed out that he wouldn’t be able to get away with the clothes he was wearing in Blackpool in the Ascot heats. Comedians never like being in the receiving end of banter like that, do they? And it was good to see all three judges take a tour around all the wildcards. All three commented on the wonkiness of my painting, and all three got the point about there being two versions of the paintings in two different reference frames. One of the judges described a group of four of us as “colourful corner”. Another asked whether the four of us in the corner already knew each other before today: she was amazed at how well we were getting on together. Which brings me on to…
The other painters. Words just can’t describe the positive vibes and genuine camaraderie that you get among a group of wildcards. Things always start off a bit reserved in the morning as people concentrate on their own paintings and don’t want to disturb anyone else but after a couple of hours, things loosen up and people start circulating and talking to each other. Some of these people deserve a special mention, so here goes.
First, here’s a long shot of colourful corner. I’m second from the left, so there’s one artist to my left and two to the right.
Here’s the artist on my left, Lisa Ainslie. She’d travelled down from the Scottish borders with her young family. Her painting had a great blue and pink in it that vibrated against each other on the paper while also matching what she was wearing. She didn’t seem happy with the quality of her final painting but I thought it looked great. Having said that, I’ve since seen some of her other work and it’s even better than this, so maybe she did have an off day after all. * Photo credit: Lisa *
Immediately to my right was a guy called Daniel Moore, originally from Northern Ireland but now based in Manchester. He provided that little bit of extraversion that we needed in our corner to get the party started. Here’s his painting. Again some great blues and pinks. He sounded as if he wanted to add more detail to the buildings when he got home but I’d have been happy to stop at this point. Daniel was really popular with the production team from early morning all through the day and got a bit of on screen time. * Photo credit: Daniel *
To Daniel’s right was Fiona Matheson. She started by masking out the roller coaster, then sprayed on loads of paint from aerosol cans. After removing the masking she used masks and stencils to add the buildings along the bottom, this time using a brush. Once the production team became aware of what was being created, they became more interested and I think thought we’d be seeing Fiona in action when the program comes out. This was my favourite out of all the wildcard paintings. A favourite with lots of other people too. That rollercoaster has a real swoosh to it. It’s a shame this one didn’t feature in the program.
My second favourite painting was by Mark Harris, an unorthodox potter and someone described on the program as a contrarian. Being more interested in the sea than the pleasure beach, Mark was on the opposite side of the wildcard area to the colour corner team. He’s one of those guys that will happily talk about painting with anyone. He was looking around at the views while queueing for registration and telling me that nobody would be using green today, so I did give him some stick when he put all that green down for the sea. And it was Mark that brought the production team’s attention to Fiona’s masterpiece, which was such a classy thing to do.
And finally I should mention the artists’ seconds and the public passing by. They would look at everyone’s paintings and find positive stuff to comment on in all of them. In my one previous wildcard adventure, we were fenced off from the public. But I prefer it when random people wander around and talk to us. I like hearing feedback from non-artists as well as from artists.
Needless to say, I wasn’t the winning wildcard. More surprisingly nor were any of those artists featured above. I didn’t get a great view of the winning wildcard painting but it must have been good to beat Fiona’s.
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