Weissenhof Estate, Stuttgart

The subject of today’s painting is a building in the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart, a set of supermodern homes built for an exhibition on 1927. Not much of the estate was left standing after World War II. I was drawn to this building by all the crazy shoes on view and by the bright light in my source photo, emphasised by the dark shadows.

This being a white building, it had to be painted in the key of purple cool, using French ultramarine, quinacridone magenta and transparent yellow. No other other colours were used in this one.

I started by putting down a rough pencil outline using the NeoLucida XL. There re some draftsmanship errors in there but the cycle of change means that things will always get worse before they get better when making a big change like this. I also masked out some handrails. And then I just filled in the colour from the back to the front. I used kitchen paper a lot today, mainly within the sky (where I put down three washes of paint) and on the sunlit white walls. There’s not much more to say about the painting except for some compositional points. I died in some greenery where it was missing from t( source photo and where I thought the painting could benefit from it (good) but I stuck too closely to the source photo in places, including stuff that I could have left out like the meter box in front of the wall (bad). Once I was happy with all the paint, I added in some looser than normal birds and removed the masking fluid and that was me done.

It’s not too bad, this one, and worth putting up for sale. I’ve managed to capture the bright light, which was my main objective. The little bits of greenery and the red bits in the building shattered all around in a balanced manner add a bit of energy too. It’s my best painting so far this month but I can do better.