The Wonder of Woolworths (West Ealing)

I’m back from Spain. I enjoyed the best part of a fortnight in the Spanish sunshine, and I made about 20 sketches and a couple of paintings. But now I was ready to make another Ealing painting. This one was going to feature the West Ealing Woolworths building. I have sketched it before in ink. Today's painting is going to be based on a different reference photograph.

West Ealing Woolworth in the fifties/sixties - sketched in 2021

So, first process photo shows me assembling all the equipment. Well, most of it. You can also see the reference photo that I was using, which I printed out beforehand. A lot of the time I will work off a photo on the screen, but I enjoyed using the hardcopy today.

I began by making the two diagonal lines marking out the edge of the roadway and the edge of the pavement by the buildings. I wanted to draw the two cars as well, but this was going to cause me some issues, which I’ll explain shortly.

When you look at the next process photo you can maybe see what I mean with regards to the cars. The car on the left is actually rather nicely drawn. . . but. . . if you look at the diagonals and verticals I’ve already drawn in behind it you’ll maybe be struck by the same thing I was. The left hand car is too big in proportion to the buildings. Especially when you look at the little figure I’ve put in. So I was aware of the problem by this time, but I did make the decision to leave it for the time being while I was sketching in some of the details of the buildings behind, and then think about my options.

Having said all of that, as I built up the details on the shops, it became harder and harder to ignore the car. So I’m quite pleased with my self discipline. Leaving the car for now was not so much a case of me burying my head in the sand, so much as thinking that the more details I’ve sketched on the shops, the easier it will be to work out the right proportions for the car when the time comes to do it. Come to think of it, I was surprisingly well disciplined making the whole picture.

So I lowered the roof of the car, and extended the shop doorways to meet it. I also shortened the length of the cabin , and showed more of the bonnet. None of this was drastic surgery, but at least it gave the car the kind of proportions where the eye is going to accept that the car is that much nearer to the viewer, rather than being a car for a giant. I mentioned about being disciplined, and you can see this in the way that ‘ve pretty much completed the left hand side of the drawing before sketching hardly any details on the right.

So to the large building on the right. This is – or rather was – the Woolworths store in West Ealing. It was something of a landmark right through from when it was built in 1926.Incidentally, originally Woolworths had their store in the building which is BHS in this picture. As with many Woolworth stores throughout the UK, Woolworths pretty much fell out of fashion, and the store closed as Woolworths when the UK company collapsed in the late noughties. Incidentally, when I visited Berlin 2017 I was delighted to see that Woolworths survived in Europe, and in many ways the Berlin store I used was pretty typical of what I remember.

So all that really remained to sketch were the storefronts and the apartment blocks on the extreme right. Simple as that. Except for the fact that to make this drawing, which is far less detailed than I would have made as an ink sketch, still took the best part of a couple of hours to make!

I do enjoy painting cars, but I did have the discipline to paint the sky first, and then the road surface. If you look at the bottom right you can maybe just see that I did paint the zigzag band, albeit a lighter colour, which is preparation for later. I did the first layer of paint on both cars, but wasn’t going to do anything more with the car on the right for a while. My plan was to try to work left to right as much as possible without diving off to do something else. You can see that I have begun to paint the BHS sign as well.

Now, even though the BHS sign extends all the way to the middle of the page, there was a good reason for finishing it before going back to do more on the left hand side. Doing it all in one go gave me more of a chance of keeping it smooth and even.

Before I took the next photograph I did the top windows on the far left and the shop front below. Then a layer of light yellow underneath the top floor of the BHS store, before the brown/orange brickwork on top. Shadows, then window panes and the top floor was looking decent. I broke to make lunch for my grandson and me. When I came back to the painting I have to say that it wasn’t looking at all bad. The BHS shopfront shows a wee bit of subtlety which pleases me a lot because it’s not my real strong suit, subtlety.

Considering the size and seeming complexity of it the Woolworths building was relatively simple to carry out. Once I’d made the decision not to try to show the joins between the tiles it really was just a matter of getting in the light shadows, and putting in the window panes. It’s painstaking work, but if you have a little bit of patience it’s not too difficult to do. Likewise, making sure that the sign says Woolworths is just a matter for patience and a steady enough hand with a small brush.

So I wanted the shop front of the Woolworths to be darker and contrasting with the BHS and New Look shop fronts, and then the Wilkinson shops on he far right to be different again, and I’m happy that I’ve done that. The tree didn’t take long and I’m glad that it was there in the original reference picture because the green stands out in contrast to the reds, yellows and browns of the shops. Seaking of green as well I applied a very thin layer of green to the band of the road containing the zig zag lines on the bottom right. All that really remained after this was to sign and date it then remove the tape.

Here it is. At the moment I’m really rather pleased with this. It’s West Ealing pretty much as I remember it – although by the time the photo was taken it must have been a good 20 years since I moved away! I won’t lie, I’m pleased with the result, but I’m also pleased with the way I went about this. I’m pleased with the decision I  made with regards to the car on the left, and with the self discipline I showed. A nice addition to my growing Ealing collection.