People Driving Home From The Factories

Today was a good day for a long painting after getting out really early to go for my walk before the temperature got too high. And when things did get hot the paint was drying really quickly, so everything was all done by 2pm when I’d been expecting to be busy all afternoon. Oh well.

Today’s subject is one that’s been in my head for a few weeks and I finally decided on my walk today exactly how I was going to paint it. It’s the famous Tahoma Narrows Bridge, opened on 1st July 1940. It remained open for 129 days before things took a turn. If you don’t know what happened, or even if you do, I’d recommend checking out this video.

With the bridge only existing in old photos and video footage, it was a no brainer to paint it using the desert watercolours, to get that old photo look. It’s a posterised painting, based around my usual process, but with a few extra twists, so I thought I’d better set it all down here. What I did was to:

• find two photos of the bridge, with it twisting in two different directions
• convert these to four value plans using the Notanizer app
• mark out four overlapping rectangles on the paper, tipping to the left and right alternately
• mask out the borders with masking tape, starting with the photo on top and finishing at the bottom (this was important)
• mark out the value shapes in pencil, using a grid and alternating the two photos so that one was always tilting to the left and one always to the right
• mask out any highlights in the four subpaintings and highlights in some (but not all) screws
• apply the first layer of paint to the four subpaintings, desert yellow and desert orange applied randomly and covering all the light, mid and dark tones
• cover the whole background in a random mix of all five desert colours, allowing them to blend. I even sprinkled on a tiny bit of salt
• paint over all the dark and mid tones in the subpaintings with desert brown
• returning to the background, add in the screws and the vertical and horizontal marks with desert green and desert grey. I put in the holes with missing screws using one of those plastic tubes that new paintbrushes come in. And to get straight edges along the lines I used scrap paper as a mask
• paint over all the dark tones in the paintings in desert grey
• add the shadows of what are looking like four photos. I started from the photo at the back and worked my way to the front. Before adding shadows, I any maki g fluid or masking tape that were masking out ares that shadows would fall on: this was why it was important to put down the masking tape in the right order at the start
• remove any remaining masking fluid or tape
• and that was me done.

I like this one. There’s a lot of story going on. The tipping of the photo and of the bridge are matching each other, which makes the viewer wonder whether the bridge is making the photo move or whether someone’s moving the photos and that’s making the bridge move. The missing screws in the background are a worry too. Compositionally, we have big contrasts between verticals/horizontals and oblique lines and between straight lines and bendy curves. And within the first subpaintings there’s a spiral aspect to the composition, starting in the bottom left, moving anticlockwise and ending up at the car. I’m taking the opportunity with this one to tick off another line in Telegraph Road, but it’s a line that also adds to the story. Is there still someone in the car, driving home from the factory? Is the background to this painting part of the bridge or something the driver has been building at work? Or both? Did the driver build part of the bridge? Who knows? This one’s up for sale, with the price to be found here.