Painting journeys: Leaving the North

Good morning! I've just posted Leaving the North – off to its forever home. How exciting! Thought this event marked a good time to share the evolution of this painting with you.

^ Leaving the North (acrylic on cotton canvas) 

In pre-pandemic days, I hurriedly snapped a few photos of The Angel of the North out the blurry train window on my way home from a conference in Newcastle. My intention – besides proving to Richard that you can see this iconic Anthony Gormley sculpture from the train – was to attempt a Fauve-inspired rendition of the Angel presiding over multicoloured, late summer fields. 

At home, I started the painting with gusto: marking out a composition on the plastic of the wrapped canvas – something I often do to help me decide on the size of canvas or test out composition and proportions. And then the deep-edge canvas, with its hopeful sketch, lurked around the corners of my studio-cum-living room for months. Every now and then I’d test out a different composition by re-cropping the reference photos on my phone but some of my painting have a long incubation, and this was one of them.

^ Leaving the North – preliminary sketch 1

Three years later, while watching a Find your joy Q&A (Find your joy is one of Louise Fletcher’s art courses that I took this year), I spied the canvas awaiting me and inspiration kicked in again. I grabbed the closest materials I had to hand to sketch my Fauvist rendition. Medium: chunky marker pens in a satisfyingly garish array of colours. Surface: my art journal (which as you can see in the pic is a mix of quotes from the course and my own reflections, brainstorming and doodles).

^ Leaving the North – preliminary sketch 2

Determined to finally put brush to canvas, I sat outside in my summer garden and experimented with using a large brush on a small canvas to help me develop bolder strokes than I usually make. 

^ Leaving the North – work-in-progress

I added some finer details towards the end. I particularly like the clouds and how these contrast with the repetition of the yellow lines.

^ Leaving the North – work-in-progress

I continued to explore the scene on paper in some of our Find your joy contrast assignments. I wanted to see if changing the volume of sky VS land made a difference. The assignments were also about contrast and mark-making. I contrasted marks made with different sized brushes or with my dominant and non-dominant hands. Unexpectedly, something about the A3 paper format and the somewhat muted colours reminded me of a landscape I painted in my school days that my mother insisted on hanging below the kitchen clock (I didn’t think it merited the position). 

^ Cross country service – incomplete (acrylic on paper)

^ Leaving the North II (acrylic on paper)

Until I packed it for shipping this morning, the one on canvas has been proudly displayed where I have been able to see and enjoy it. Absolutely delighted that someone else has fallen in love with it too.

I like to return to subjects and explore the potential in them, so I’m sure there’s still another Gateshead landscape to come from me. I suspect I’ll probably try to combine the loose chunky brushwork with the colourful and somewhat geometric composition I’d first imagined. And I’m thinking a splash of purple too … watch this space.

P.S. After posting this, I came across a couple watercolour and ink studies I did for this in 2019. Here's one: