Lady Churchill’s Rose Garden, Chartwell

I’ve had an amazing day today as a wildcard at Landscape Artist of The Year 2020 at Chartwell, Sir Winston Churchill’s former home, new Westerham in Kent.  The first couple of hours painting were quite quiet and focused but after that, when some people had finished or fancied a break, they started “walking the room” and that’s when the day became something special.  Every single one of those wild cards was positive and encouraging to all the others.  It was an amazing experience.  Everybody must have come away at the end having both learned something and had their confidence boosted.

Anyway, we were shown an area in which we all had to set up shop (appropriately socially distanced).  It was an interesting choice because this area had two separate views: one looking out across a very green valley with loads of trees and one looking towards the wall of Lady Churchill’s rose garden.  I chose to paint the latter and the best location for me to paint the view from turned out to be under a tree, which was a big bonus on a hot, sweltering day.

With four hours in theory to paint (in reality six if you didn’t take a break) I thought I’d run off two paintings.  If after the first couple of hours I was looking up against it, I’d have abandoned one of them and concentrated in the other.  But this didn’t turn out to be a problem: I got both done in three hours.

This is the worst of my two paintings, and the one that I hid away when the judges started circulating.  It’s in the key of triadic left (Prussian blue, Indian yellow, quinacridone magenta) with no other colours used.  The idea was to make it as much about the leafy canopy and the shadows on the floor as about the wall.  But the canopy and shadow don’t work, the wall looks like it’s in a distorted wraparound perspective like How The West Was Won, the triangular shadow on the wall is too lonely and the plants against the wall in the right are two-dimensional.  Maybe the perspective problem is to do with the bottom of the wall on the far right, which should slope upwards towards a vanishing point, but which I’ve made slope downwards because that’s the way the ground sloped.  Schoolboy error.

There’s nothing good about this one.  I won’t even put it up for sale.  Let’s move on.