He Made A Home In The Wilderness

It’s back to landscapes and to soft pastels today. This is neither WW2 pillbox, this time on the Wales Coast Path in Pembrey, Carmarthenshire. So it’s my first ever Welsh landscape.

It’s always the same with these soft pastel landscapes. An initial blocking out, then working from the back to the front with whatever colours feel right in layers as thin as the paper can take and smoothed out with whatever tool feels right.

Looking at all those colours in the concrete and the foreground, I must have been in a particularly colourful mood today. And the more this one went on, the more I felt I was injecting life back into dead ruins. It’s why I ended up adding birds and picking a title (from a line in Telegraph Road) that suggested this pillbox was still doing something to sustain life while leaving it unclear about whether it’s a haven for birds or a roof for a homeless person.

It’s not bad, this one, but not perfect. I had trouble with the left facing wall and never got to something I was happy with. After getting all those warm pastel colours and going to town with them, my pastel paintings might have plateaued. That normally means a step change is on the way, maybe in a couple of years, maybe tomorrow. Who knows? Anyway, this one’s up for sale, with the price to be found here.