"I was asked to paint a
view of the country fair and I set up under a gazebo for the day. The
challenge for me, as you will appreciate very well, was making the painting
last for six hours. My usual approach would be to paint for a two hour stretch,
fairly instinctively and quickly establishing essentials of light, tone,
movement and form, possibly without much embellishment. Because the light
is completely different beyond this it is really dangerous to keep working on a
plain-air painting in case you are tempted to re-state everything on top of
your original impression. I hit a compromise whereby I started very
slowly, only establishing pockets of shadow and detail that wouldn't really
change much. I also did a small but useful quick impression on a separate sheet
of paper so that I could refer to this later on.
The final painting was
OK but might have been a little livelier if I had not had to stretch it out for
so many sweltering hours. But the result was quite respectable and I may be
able to produce a more spirited interpretation in the studio.
The filming started in a
very encouraging way. Matt Baker spent some minutes asking questions and I was
able to give my name and to answer that my concern was with capturing the light
and other qualities. I was filmed for five or ten minutes getting
started. Initially it seemed that Matt would return to do a conclusion with me
but as the day went on it became clear that the crew had a great deal of other
work to do. Camera-men visited every so often, filming the gradual progress of
the painting. At the end I gave Matt Hill a copy of my book and DVD and I know
that he was very pleased about this.
It's absolutely
impossible to know how much or how little of all this they will use but I did
receive an e-mail thanking me for my efforts and encouraging me to watch the
relevant episode, which is due for broadcast on 28th July. "
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