The Old Post Office, Hartlip

My neighbour from number 2 came up to me a few days and said hey Mr Artistic Actuary, I found an interesting old photo of Hartlip Post Office online and if you ever painted it, I think the owners the Rose & Crown would be interested as they’ve just moved in there. Here’s the link. I think you could turn this into a really colourful painting. Now, as you all probably know, I have a load of paintings on display and up for sale at the Rose & Crown and whenever one is bought by a customer all the proceeds come to me with neither the pub nor its owners taking any commission. I’ve told them that if they ever see a painting they like they can have it for free but they’ve not taken me up on this. So a while ago I came up with a kind of portrait of the owners that they could keep for themselves. And I thought I’d have a go at painting the Old Post Office today and let them keep that too.

As I’d been given a strong hint about colour, I thought I’d go for a posterised painting in the trippy scheme. I followed my usual process in creating this, starting from a three value plan and putting down two layers of colour. In my first layer, I put down a red band through the middle to try to distinguish the foliage in front of the house from the hedge at the bottom. And because there was so much foliage, I threw on some salt after the first layer in an attempt to create some texture. I was planning at the end to add some rainbow colours in the top left, like those in my painting of Eastfields but decided that the edge along the top of the trees and all the skyholes looked too interesting, so I kept them and binned the rainbow colours idea. Instead, to make the sky interesting, I spattered over most of the colours from my second layer. And that was me done.

I’ll say this straight away. This isn’t my favourite painting ever: it’s a bit too messy for my personal taste. Others (including hopefully the recipients) will like it though. There’s an interesting distribution of lights across the painting, all drawing the eye towards the woman in the bottom left and then to the man next to her. The colours are good in places too, some greens in the roof, all the reds in the foliage. The whole thing looks better from a distance where an interesting thing happens. The painting starts to look like a black and white photo that someone has tried to convert to colour. Which it is, I guess.

I’ll get this one framed and probably drop it off next Friday when most of the village will be in the Rose & Crown celebrating the anniversary of the pub’s last change in ownership.