On a sunny afternoon I headed to Ham Lands, ostensibly to paint watercolours but when I got there I decided to paint the sixth plein air oil. Wasn’t completely a good decision if I wanted to do anything else *ahem* as covered in oil paint I’m not exactly friendly but hardly anyone was there, not even the usual sunbathers.
Unusually I did this in one ‘take’ which means I’m getting better at wet-on-wet oils, I think – learned to do the white/sky first to try and avoid that getting muddied with other colours. It’s very Van Gogh, unsurprisingly, with added sgraffito, working with Liquin Impasto medium. Not sure I totally got the colour of the shadows but the sky and the plants I’m really happy with.
Ham Lands is common land ‘sculpted’ and filled in after WW2 by dumped bomb damage from central London, brought down in barges. You can still see bricks and rubble on the surface.
This part of Ham Lands is also an unofficial nude sunbathing and gay cruising area – this piece inspired me to plan to go and paint other areas like this in oils and watercolour, which extends the Hidden Histories series into a new area. I like the idea of doing ‘pretty’ traditional pieces of places linked by subject that some would find distasteful or antisocial, or they have no idea these places exist.
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