Royal Flotilla enters the City of London, Pastel 100cm x 70cm (Sold to a corporate buyer in the City for £9000 including 25 giclée prints in 2013)
“I was doing a little online research for an article and found your painting – a splendid representation of the culmination of three years work for me and the Thames Alive team”.
Malcolm Knight, Director of the Thames Alive team and events manager of the Thames Royal Pageant
This painting was technically very challenging and time consuming, not least because it was impossible to get close enough to take good reference photographs. The painted scene is from an imaginary point near Southbank. (On the day of the event I was actually positioned at Blackfriars north of the Thames.) For a full description of this painting, see here.
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Greenwich Hospital from the North Bank of the Thames, Oil on board, 45cm x 30cm
I created this fairly small oil painting as a wedding gift for a couple whose wedding I attended at the Trafalgar Tavern, which is the pale yellow building just to the left of the painting. I made some slight modifications to bring in the masts of the museum ship Cutty Sark on the right.
Contact me if you would like to discuss an idea for a unique wedding gift that will last for centuries! I could produce an artwork of this size and complexity for around £650, not including the framing.
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City of London from 41 Lothbury (Commissioned by Silicon Valley Bank UK)
Pastel on board (100cm x 45cm). Giclée Prints available.
I was commissioned to paint this scene from 41 Lothbury. I visited the office of Silicon Valley Bank several weeks before I began the painting to take reference photos and sketches from the balcony of the 7th (top) floor of the office building. The American bank had tried photography of the view, but the results were not satisfying, hence they commissioned me to attempt to paint it, allowing me to make small changes to the London topography.
Luckily, it was a fine day, with a milky-bright February light. The bank’s balcony certainly offered a stunning view on seeing it for the first time, but to the left of the balcony was a concrete wall, obscuring the Tivoli Corner of the Bank of England, with its golden statue of Ariel. In order to get my reference photos, I had to peer over the wall, and point my camera down. This meant I that at the drawing stage I had to transpose the perspective to bring the Tivoli Corner into the painting.
I titled the painting, “Hello World”. It has a communications narrative, fitting in with Silicon Valley Bank’s client base of high-technology companies. I centred the painting precisely on the distant London Communications Tower near the West End. Completed in 1964, the Comms Tower was the highest building in London until the 1980s. You might have noticed that the tops of the buildings around Saint Paul’s Cathedral are nearly all the same height, creating a flattish horizon. This is due to a building regulation known as “Saint Paul’s Heights”, designed to conserve the views to and from the dome of the cathedral.
The buildings in the scene were generally grey. In order to keep the greys lively I used a technique known as “optical mixing”. Rather than apply grey pastels, I laid down a fine hatching of the complementary colours of blue and orange, and then gently (but not completely) blended them to create the optical illusion of vibrant greys. I decided that the crane in the picture (which was red in real life) would be good for compositional purposes, and I agreed with the client that it be included in the painting. However, I changed the colour from red to orange, in keeping with the orange/blue harmony of my greys.
I personally delivered the framed painting to the bank, along with giclée prints with the bank’s logo destined as corporate gifts which were given to clients throughout the world.
My wife and I have a print of “Hello World” hanging in our home. It has a peaceful, harmonious – almost meditative – quality, perhaps partly due to the optical mixing for the greys, and because the whole image points to a distant central point, almost as in a mandala image. The big sky too draws the eye in (I slightly exaggerated the ariel perspective). And of course, the painting is helped by the harmoniously designed Christopher Wren cathedral and churches of the City. I have some full-size giclée prints in stock on fine-art archival paper, signed and numbered, that I have recently reduced in price to £150 (plus postage and packaging). Contact me to enquire.
