... It Is Now.

Horizon, slightly less wonky. People, a bit smaller an to the right. Line of sea-coal, moved down.

Finished...Probably.

...but possibly... not finished.

Hm.

Bamburgh Beach, Winter

Oil on canvas, 16" x 12"

Wonky horizon, for one thing.

Code Blue

I was reading earlier today about American hyrdogen bomb tests in the 1950s. They weren't always sure that the bomb wouldn't consume all the oxygen in the atmosphere, but went ahead anyway in that happy-go-lucky fashion that the military have. So you would think that the stuff inside the hydrogen bomb was the most powerful substance available to mankind.

I am here to tell you that it is not.

The most powerful, tenacious and insidious substance in the physical world is phthalo blue. It can turn an entire painting a shade of strong greenish blue simply by being present in the same room. It cannot be diluted with any other known pigment. Not only that but it transmits itself via your face and forehead to the soles of your shoes, your elbows (it can flow uphill), your laptop keyboard, objects outside that never come into the house, neighbours' pets and migrating animals.

Be careful, is all I'm saying.

Rust Never Sleeps 2

Dredger, oil on canvas, 16"x20"

I feel like I've had something of a breakthrough with this, and it's a style and subject I want to do more of. It's simultaneously tight but loose (heard that somewhere before) and satisfies both of my apparently contradictory feelings in painting. I like very much this idea of pursuing the 'natural abstract,' and the exploration of layers that time and decay reveals. Anyway, here it is, and there's more to follow. I'm quite excited. I think this may be my best painting yet.

Resurgam

Dawes Warwick, completely cleaned and restored and repainted, minus only the rear carrier, which I'm about to put on. This afternoon I fitted new brake levers, assembled the brakes, attached the computer, and pootled off up to the road end and back, and came back grinning like a goon. It's marvellous!

Sunrise/set

In progress.

I posted this as a work in progress a while back, and I think I'm finished now. An evening view of the sea at Tywyn, Wales. Oil on board. In real life it's not quite as luridly green as I've managed to make it look in the photograph.

Tywyn, Evening.

My One Two Three Legged Fiend

What with moving house and Bostin' Heroes and what have you, the War of the Worlds illustrations I was footling with rather slid out of view. I did three in the end:

In order: first sighting of the tripods in a storm at night; the destruction of Shepperton by the heat ray; the aftermath of the engagement of the tripods by HMS Thunderchild. I picked this incident, when an object appears in the sky and cascades the deadly black smoke over the land, rather than the actual battle because a) it's something of a curtain-down moment on a section of the book, and I tried to reflect that sense of conquest and doom in the image of the black cloud falling, b) I had a feeling it would be the same as the Shepperton image only with more sea and bigger boats, and c) it's on the cover of Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds album and whatever you think of that it's an iconic sort of image.

I'm ambivalent about the results. The book was inspiring, as it creates very vivid visual images to pursue. Doing it did throw up a couple of issues. Firstly, depicting something very tall and three-legged brings about compositional issues; as you can see, two of these are very similar, although I tried to vary them as much as I could. Secondly - dear me, look at the difference between the two tripods. It's as if the Martians had time to redesign and bring out a Tripod Mk. II, leaner, sleeker and more in tune with invading today's world. That's just carelessness. It's why - which I did, luckily, with the Bostin' Heroes - you need to spend a lot of time on preparatory sketches, so you don't make accidental 'improvements' as you go. Lesson learned.

I also learned a lot about indian and acrylic inks, the different finishes they give, and how well they blend in washes and in layers. I had to work hard to get that smoke/steam effect in the Shepperton drawing as I was using acrylic white ink; the indian ink (Windsor and Newton) blended much more smoothly and with softer edges in the black smoke image. I also liked using latex masking fluid to show the heat ray, which is invisible in light but is shown up in the steam.

Even so, I don't think I quite captured that mechanical, crustacean look that I got in the sketches:

I tried to be fathful to Wells' descriptions, which are both mechanically precise and nicely suggestive. (The notes on the sketch say "no plain pivots / like spiders / like crabs / ball joints / alive / lifelike and striding / scuttling / parody of human gait.") Even so, I think that my tripods are more stiff-legged than Wells' intended - his have a series of round plates that seem to be far more flexible than my crab-creature. It wouldn't be the first time someone's got it wrong, though, so I'm in good company: Warwick Goble drew some rather splendid illustrations to accompany the first appearance of War of the Worlds in Pearson's Magazine in 1897. Splendid to my mind, anyhow - Herbert George did not like them, and even added an extra passage to later editions of the book which is a swipe at Goble's work:

"I recall particularly the illustration of one of the first pamphlets to give a consecutive account of the war. The artist had evidently made a hasty study of one of the fighting-machines, and it was there that his knowledge ended. He presented them as tilted, stiff tripods without either flexibility or subtlety, and with an altogether misleading monotony of effect. The pamphlet containing these renderings had a considerable vogue, and I mention them here to warn the reader against the impression they may have created. They were no more like the Martians I saw in action than a Dutch doll is like a human being. To my mind, the pamphlet would have been much better without them."