Urban Buildings

Assignment 3 – Landscape

Urban Landscape – Buildings

The working method I chose for this painting was dictated by he fact that I wanted to use backstreets from the small town in Spain where I had holidayed in August.  My recollection was of the shaded street in strong sunlight and I had taken a couple of photographs which I wanted to use as reference.  Each photo had figures but I wanted to construct a tension between them by incorporating them both in the same picture.

Sorting out the combined perspective was a bit misleading at first.  I really wanted the eye-line of both characters to be horizontal, but it couldn’t work that way because of the slope of the hill.

I decided to paint in a representational style using oil over acrylic sketch.  I was again influence by John Piper and incorporated a similar rebate edge echoing the style in his painting Cheltenham, Composite of Houses in Priory Parade and elsewhere.

Check and Log

·        How did your chosen work method influence your finished work?

Because I chose to use memory and photographs, plus some influence of John Piper the painting was an amalgam of things.  I also wanted to set up a kind of tension between the two figures.  For this reason the work ended up as a representational piece because I felt that worked best.

·        How did you apply the techniques and skills you have developed in relation to the natural landscape to the urban landscape?

Because I was working naturalistically things such as aerial perspective, linear perspective, and the capture of light were all elements which I used in this painting.  Colour contrasts between the yellow building and mauve/blue shadow complimented by the related colour of reddish pink, as well as viridian green were also relevant, as they are in most paintings.