Arctic Corsair

The Arctic Corsair is the last of Kingston-Upon-Hull's side-winder trawlers, efectively the last remnant of the city's fishing fleet. She currently lies on the mud in the river Hull by the museum quarter and is a museum ship herself. She has been there since 1999 (after the time I lived in Hull) but there is talk of moving her to a dry dock in the near future.

The painting is based on a couple of sketches that I made in January 2016. There is a little artistic licence in a few places - the riverfront warehouse on the right, for example, is a complete fabrication! The jagged red brick edifice in the background, in front of the cream-coloured Shotwell building, on the other hand, was there and was in approximately that shape when I drew the Corsair and her surroundings. It was partially demolished and looked rather like a post-industrial castle.

Arctic Corsair

Oil on canvas, 55 x 46 cm

£200

Pickfords

This - worked up from a photograph that I took just over a year ago - has been a long time in the painting. I started it before Easter, and - because it is such a complex subject - didn't manage to finish it before the school holidays started. I rarely get the chance to paint in the studio during the school holidays. As soon as the children went back to school, I was busy preparing for the Reading Contemporary Art Fair.

The paint was surface-dry when I went back to it today. This isn't really a problem, unless there is a lot of texture that I'm trying to paint over (it's a bit like an acylic knife painting in that respect), and I had been aware that a long interval was a strong possibility, so I had deliberately minimised the impasto.

As it happened, a dry surface was quite useful. I discovered that a colour shaper (effectively a solid silicon paintbrush) would lay down paint very effectively onto a reasonably smooth layer of dry oil; this is how I managed to write the word, "Pickfords" on the roof of the foremost building.

This building and its roof inscription give the painting its name. As far as I can make out, Pickfords no longer occupy this building, which is in Nottingham (the elevated view is from Nottingham Castle). In fact, it appears - from Google's Street View images (dating from September 2014) - to be under development.

Pickfords
Oil on canvas, 55 x 46 cm

Fisher and Warrior - SOLD

This is a painting based on a sketch (and supporting photographs). It's of a charmingly scruffy fishing boat in Portsmouth Harbour, with a Historic Ship (HMS Warrior) in the background.