TIM BAKER

Last time we visited the Queen’s Promenade it was night time – this time we have Prom dance in the daylight, mostly at sunset with new materials and new techniques such as the tempera paint sticks and the Inktense paints. Working at sunset speed is the order of the day – and unlike slow old-fashioned media like watercolours or oils, you can work quickly with these, and use sgraffito and build up layers.

First up is an Inktense paint piece – again a fairly early painting using those, of one of the newer boats on the river. The moorings here have been a bone of contention – originally some boats illegally moored on Queen’s Promenade, then there was planning approval, and heard just before the local election it’s been removed again?

Anyway having boats moored up here for the last few years has been unusual – and one of these is The Frozty Zwan, with it’s plastic green ivy garlands, very pagan! It might be called The Frosty Swan given the stylised swans in it’s name, painted on. I like the water in this painting – hard to do that in watercolour.

The Sentinels as I call them, the orange/red life buoy holders which seem to watch the river have made another appearance in their 4th version. This incidentally was the subject of my first watercolour of recent times, back in the mists of August 2018, and like benches or birds they appear a lot in my work on the river, usually as distant blobs. This is a very new piece, created a few days ago using the thin paint sticks – I’ve been doing a fair amount of paint stick work on Queen’s Promenade.

I do feel a lot of these paint stick pieces are a sort of attempt at painting without painting, scratching that oil/acrylic itch without getting really messy. I do miss oil plein air but I don’t miss the turps and white spirit making me ill, lugging the heavy paints around, waiting it to dry or indeed the mess. I might return to it, via this someday soon.

An older paint stick piece from April using the larger sticks is the one of ‘The Unknown Tree’ – I am calling it that because everyone I ask including John and Julian from the Friends of Queen’s Promenade who I met painting the Tulips has no idea what this tree is. It could be a hornbeam? It feels very Japanese, so hence the second ink piece because I want to show the hanging branches. Two different approaches – one very abstract with broad strokes and bigger detail (St Raphaels church had to be larger just to be able to draw it with those chonky sticks), and another more detailed ink version.

It’s not the first time I’ve drawn this tree, I first did so in 2020 on a stormy Tuesday but it’s actually quite hard to get to draw this view. I pass this area quite often and there is always someone sitting on the benches I want to draw from, especially on a nice day. You might notice that the previous one was from the other side of the tree – yes, even on a dark stormy day there were several people sitting there! Only taken me four years and two rather moody/cold days to get to draw it as I wanted to.

And this is the latest piece of sunset on Queen’s Promenade – created last night, and gave this post it’s name as a bunch of students turned up noisily celebrating something (like a Prom? End of exams/year?) sending off chinese flying lanterns. It’s probably fortunate that it’s been raining, because they didn’t float off over the river, they floated over the buildings over the road. Needless to say, chinese flying lanterns are a fire hazard and a danger to wildlife and lifestock.

Along with ‘The Canoeists’ this is a very recent development to my style – but also harking back to my Posca work and my origins as a kid using oil pastels, so both forward and backward looking. Clouds and skies are really a struggle with those paint sticks – they don’t do ‘subtle’ easily, you can layer them but not mix them, so gradations without hatching or smudging are nigh-on impossible.

And as well as being very painterly – the Van Gogh influence is very evident. Starry Starry Night!

The rise of sgraffito in my work spilling out into other media is evident by ‘Sunset Cypresses’ – a watercolour work, but I’ve etched into the thick watercolour paint. I like the sky on this, less fond of the rest…also I don’t know if these trees either. I think the trees I’ve been calling poplar all along are actually cypress? ‘Small Craft’ is a quick sketch showing my newer approaches to composition and framing, as seen in ‘Sentinel 4’ ‘The Conversation’ and ‘Two Green Bottles’. It’s all about the edges.

My composition and scaling can frankly be a bit cack, so I’m trying to push the law of thirds/subject at the centre into more modern styles. There’s a danger with this though, I can miss the very thing I wanted to draw in the first place! That has happened a few times.

And finally ‘The Canoeists’ – which is a piece trying to be desperately a woodcut or ink work if I ever saw one! I like layering and scraping, necessary in part cos of the big chunky sticks (even the ‘thin’ sticks are like 0.8-1cm wide?) and the restrictions with the fast drying and unlike oil pastels lack of intermixability. There is something really nice about layering down the neon/bright colours and overlaying a darker or contrasting colour and scraping that back. I usually work dark to light, laying down a darker colour to get a reference point for the rest but these sunset pieces I worked the opposite way.

As I found the extreme day-glo nature and the shiny metallic nature of some of these sticks with the fast drying is perfect for sunsets which tend to be OTT bright colours anyway. The clouds and light is fast moving so need a really fast approach, and you don’t have time to wait for a layer to dry, so ink and watercolour are out (I have tried many times, and failed as many times as well).

The harder thing is building the dark greens and blues, but that can be done in slow time when the lightshow has gone and it’s in the dusk gloaming. Also remembering how the clouds were, which affected ‘Sunset Prom Dance’ because I didn’t get the clouds down fast enough. Also you are missing the shiny nature of these – like the gold and silver Posca, impossible to photograph the metallic paint sticks.