Eastfields

It’s a week today to the 80th anniversary VE Day and our village will be having a celebratory party this Sunday. A local guy, Kevin, will be letting us all gather in his front garden to drink until well into the evening. A noble gesture and not for the first time: t( Village celebrated the 80th anniversary of D Day in his garden in June last year. I think it’s only fair that I turn up on the day with a gift, so I’ve been painting his house today. I only had a small window available to paint as if I’d done this any earlier, I’d have felt compelled to include it in my monthly post in the village WhatsApp group and Facebook Page. And that would have spoiled the surprise.

This is a posterised painting using the trippy colour scheme and follows my usual process for such paintings. This is actually my first landscape in the trippy scheme, so a bit of an experiment. Because my source photo had a lot of sky in it, I made a couple of early compositional decisions to make it interesting:

• In masking out the sky, I left a few holes for the paint to sneak through. I quite like the effect that I’ve ended up with. Despite the marks not being bird shaped, they give the impression of a flock of birds in the sky. If the marks hadn’t looked as good as this, I was prepared to put in some multicoloured semitines clouds, but this turned out not to be necessary.
• I left a big thick band unmasked on the right to be filled with a red to violet rainbow of colours. The band isn’t meant to be anything: it’s just a random abstract shape helping frame the sky and not letting the viewer’s eye escape the painting.

It’s not too bad this one, and I won’t feel embarrassed handing it over to Kev on Sunday. The huge white sky actually works, thanks to the bird marks and the vertical framing shapes on both sides. It makes the house look as if it’s been cut out and pasted on to the paper. The white on the front of the house gives the impression of a sunny, albeit cool, day. The gate in the bottom right is a bit of a jumble but looks like a gate when viewed from a distance. And the lack of discernible detail means it doesn’t compete with the house.

Should be a good do on Sunday. I just hope the painting goes down well.