TIM BAKER

Kingston Market is an ancient market – it’s existed as a meeting place since 1170 and the first recorded market was 1242, so nearly a thousand years! It’s amazing how old some things are in the UK, we take them for granted, but many countries have only existed for a fraction of that time the market has been running in Kingston. This is called the many times of Kingston Market because of not only the many eras on display, but also these pieces had to be revisited several times – four times in the case of the biggest work!

First is a view from one of the benches in front of the Market House in my then new Indigo Panorama sketchbook. This had to be done in two parts – because of the short days, I ran out of time and had to come back another day to do the watercolour. When I came back one of the traders was using part of the bench to store their stuff…and the Market House was suddenly being used as a COVID-19 Testing Centre! This wouldn’t be the first time that changing events

The idea was to show the new and the old – the cranes behind the ancient timber-framed building that proudly proclaimed 1422-1922 – the latter when it was redeveloped, and gave the piece it’s named. The 1930’s? building next to it, and the Georgian or Victorian brick buildings to the right – in the classic golden/orange London stock brick that is a such a feature of this area. The commercial waste truck was long gone by the time I did the watercolour, so I had to remember what it looked like.

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Just off the Market to the North is All Saints Church – dating from 1120, and like many churches ruined by Victorian fussing…to the west of where I painted this was the Chapel of St Mary’s where many medieval kings were coronated – Kingston’s claim to fame, Ethelred the Unready being one of the Saxon kings coronated here who you might have heard of.

Sadly St Mary’s with it’s famous medieval royal effigies fell down in 1730, killing the sexton who was digging a grave and almost killing the sexton’s daughter, who then became the new sexton. There’s a novel there….a stone, the Coronation stone from the site which was something to do with the coronations is now in front of the Guildhall.

Anyway, the reason for the title, and the flag at half mast is I drew and painted this the day that Prince Philip died, the church had this odd sign that they had candles burning for Philip and they kept ringing the bells…Operation Forth Bridge is the code-word for the protocol to put in place when he died (Liz’s is called Operation Unicorn). Not sure how I feel about this painting – I was documenting what was going on but I didn’t post it then because it felt like I might be supporting all this guff.

I am not a royalist, but I do feel artists have to document things around us but I also think they should make clear how they feel about those things. Not sure I did with this piece.

And now to the piece I spent far too much time on – this view of Kingston Market showing the 1840 Market House (formerly the town hall) and the aforementioned 1930’s Guildhall (now the town hall) in the distance was revisited on side four times, well actually five times but one time had to be aborted as I’ll explain.

Sudden rain showers, cold, boredom, market traders cars reversing right by me and even the bench being roped off one time because they had been varnished….I quickly decided ‘never again’.

This is the most detailed work I’ve done, probably ever – and was inspired by the Clock Tower piece I did. A very detailed drawing as you can see from the in-progress photograph above, that alone took three attempts. First time I ran out of light – second time the rain storms came and I had to run and shelter under the market awnings. Third time I finished it but I got really cold (no soup) and went home before I started the watercolour. Fourth time I arrived to find the bench roped off, so no watercolour today! Fifth time lucky and I got the watercolour finished and good riddance to this piece. I was totally fed up with it by the time I had finished it, really glad to see the back of it.

It’s really not my style nor one I want to progress further, the hyper-detailed local watercolour. I didn’t plan it, so stupidly did this on A3 standard Daler Rowney paper, nothing special…that didn’t help when I was doing the watercolour, I couldn’t scrub off stuff I didn’t like because the wood pulp paper will just disintegrate…wish I had done it on the Fabriano, but it was meant to be a quick piece, not the Sisyphean task it became.

Still it’s nice to prove to myself I can do this, I just vehemently choose not to.

EDIT – I forgot to add this drawing of the Grade II listed Market House to this post, rather proud of it, and the 3D effect caused by the differences in the white ink and the paper. This is not far from just rotating 90 degrees from where I was sitting for the watercolour. As I said before, buildings aren’t my strong point, so proud of this one.