TIM BAKER

It’s been a while since I spent the night drawing or painting on the river – in fact there is a whole gallery of Night Work from a year or more ago doing exactly that. Because of winter and quite often starting late, I’ve been catching a lot of sunsets and nocturnal views, working from the lights along the road. It’s quite hard to work out the colour in the dark, it’s literally feel and also trying to adjust for the yellow light that you can see – not always successfully, hence what looked amazing in yellow light looks far too blue.

This is very true of the watercolour below. There’s also a sunset done very quickly using Derwent Graphitint (yes I still use it) and Graphitone pencil of the ‘Tupperware’ as my dad calls them – the plastic motorboats floating opposite Raven’s Ait. Gloaming is the most recent here, and was started in almost total darkness, bar the distant streetlight of the road. I was trying to capture the gloaming of a big light behind Raven’s Ait, not sure where it’s coming from – Hampton Court area?

Some of these like ‘Barge House’ are on the edge of night, dusk, but I certainly was still there when it was completely dark. The house I’ve drawn and painted before, as has that barge.

These two watercolour and bodycolour pieces are very dark and created again at night rather than dusk, and remind me of the ink night pieces I used to do way back. I found ink and watercolour was NOT a good mix, this is better I feel (bodycolour being a fancy name for adding opaque paint, usually gouache to watercolour).

The craziest being the Two Blue Boats, there is hardly any light at that part of the river, the usually dark building of the Minima? Yacht Club has no lights, so I was working off 100% gloaming. Surprised any of the drawing worked, I could not see what I was doing. Painting is easier in darkness. Still this has gotten very abstract out of necessity – one of the reasons I like working in darkness.

Some of them don’t look like they were done at night, partly because depending on which fountain pen I am using it is hard to get a real ‘black’ wash from it, they don’t put down enough ink. So they are like a reverse of the old Day for Night trick – Night for Day? The two images abouve of the barges I know were in an area of the river that has a lot of lighting, so I can see, but all three of these were created when it was totally dark outside.

Really not sure why I want to do it on Hard Mode like that, but that’s my art, I guess. Why make it easy when I can self-sabotage myself into doing it the tricky way?

‘Boat Trips’ is my fave – I think I added black Jackson’s ink via brush to get it ‘black’ enough for night, and the white highlights of the Rotring white ink DIY pump marker. Not sure what that crane is for – water? Offloading? All three of these are at the end of Turk’s Pier, part of Turk’s Boatyard, they do boat trips hence the sign – but not usually at this time, not at night in winter anyway! ‘Boat Trips’ almost sounds like the start of a pun…but who will catch it?

It also reminds me of this piece from a few years ago.