The Big Painting Challenge

A view of the studio last week...

Out of the blue less than three weeks ago on Monday afternoon I was called up by a man called Graham who had seen my paintings on the internet. He wondered if I would be interested in painting a large painting of the interior of a factory for his small start-up local energy company who wanted the painting for display at some forthcoming trade events. A bit random, you may think…I did too, but by Friday, after seeing some photos of the type of image he wanted, I had agreed to do it.

It was to be a giant 2m high x 4m wide canvas, one of the biggest paintings I have ever made, which I decided to do over 8 canvasses of 1m square fixed together, a bit like David Hockney’s large Yorkshire landscapes. This seemed a good idea, but by the following Wednesday, after spending 2 days in my studio hanging these canvasses together in my studio, staining the canvasses with a phthalo blue ground, and gridding and then painstakingly enlarging the preliminary drawing I had made, I found myself looking dumbly at this vast canvas surface which took up the whole of my studio wall,  very daunted and a little overwhelmed, wondering what I had let myself in for…it had seemed like it would be a nice change to do something like this, now it seemed like a completely mad idea, especially as they needed it by May 12th…

After a few days of staring at it and thinking about the technicalities of how to create this painting, last Saturday I dived in and spent a whole day working on it. After a few hours of very enjoyable but physically and mentally taxing work, I knew I was ‘in’, and that it would be ok. I could do it. I worked on it again on Monday evening and by the end of Tuesday I had finished it. I think it looks good. It looks very modernist in feel, like a David Bomberg, but also carried elements in its abstraction, of contemporary painters such as Stanley Whitney and Thomas Shiebitz, whose abstract, colourful paintings I like a lot. Graham and Pauline at Osmium Energy were also really pleased too. Phew. 

So that’s been a bit crazy. I now need to leave it to dry, which hopefully it will before the first trade event on May 12th, and get it transported out of my studio. As I write this though, and the dust settles a bit, I think what a risk it has been to create this in my humble garden studio in just a couple of weeks.  

So that’s been a bit crazy. I now need to leave it to dry, which hopefully it will before the first trade event on May 12th, and get it transported out of my studio. As I write this though, and the dust settles a bit, I think what a risk it has been to create this in my humble garden studio in just a couple of weeks.  I think I'm a bit mad sometimes....