Ealing Watercolours *11) The former Himalaya Palace CInema

 This is one of Ealing's Grade II* listed buildings - the former Himalaya Palace Cinema. It's stunning. The original cinema on this site, the Paragon Palace, was built in 1912, but when it was acquired by the United Picture Theatres Ltd. Company they pulled it down in about 1928, ad erected this building, which opened in November 1929. It closed in 1982, and became an indoor market, then reopened as a cinema in 2001. Sadly it closed in 2010 and became a market again. It was grade II listed in 1980 and upgraded to Grade II* in 1998. Quite right too, since it is the only cinema ever built in this particular oriental style ever in the UK.

I will admit that while I have looked at the building many times - often from the top deck of a 207 bus, I never actually watched a film there. The Odeon in Northfields Avenue was much closer - and that too is an equally stylish building, albeit in a completely different style. My father was in the habit of being given money by my mum to take us to the cinema. He'd present us with a choice - I can take you to the cinema now, but that's it, or I can take you to Rossi's now, buy you an ice cream and then I'll take you to see the film in Southall next week when it's there.- The point being that if he did this he'd save enough money to buy himself a bottle of cider. Of course, he wouldn't keep up his end of the bargain to take us to the film the next week. Choosing to take the cinema today rather than the ice cream didn't work. His reaction to a refusal was often ' Right, you're being greedy, so I'm not taking you at all now.' While it would be nice to say this was just one little foible and that he was good most of the time, it would be an utter lie. He was a bit pants as a dad. In fact if I'm honest, he was a lot pants. In fact without wanting to overstress the matter, he was the whole underwear drawer. Enough about him. So - I tried to produce something on a par with my last painting of the Hanwell Clock Tower. 

I did make an ink sketch of the Himalaya Palace last year : - 

I hope you can see what I like about the building just from the ink sketch. Here's the sketch I made today: -

I didn't use the same reference photo. Today's reference photo was taken sometime between the reopening in 2001 ad the reclosing in 2010. I'll be honest, I did not take process photos other than this. My feeling was that it was going to be a more complicated painting than he clock tower. It bloomin' was too. The irony of doing a much larger building like this one means that you're painting every thing in a smaller scale. Now, until recently I'd have made a sketch like this completely freehand. I will come clean. For several of my Ealing pictures I've used a ruler when I've been making the original sketch. It takes a bit longer - making just this sketch took me 2 hours this morning. 

So - you remember the two lessons I tried to apply when I made the previous painting? 1) Be creative with the sky. Again I've gone for yellow, but added a light blue streak at both top and bottom. Since the yellow was wet they kind of coalesced so that while it's more yellow further down, it's almost greeny further up. 2) Try hard not to overwork it. If anything I was even more likely to overwork this one than the previous one since it has so much going on in it, and there's so much detail. I hope that I haven't. 

So here it is:-

I like it and I'm pleased with it. Not as much as with the Hanwell Clock, but then that one turned out pretty much exactly the way that I wanted it to. This one, well, I don't really know how I wanted it to turn out. 

Learning two simple lessons: Hanwell Clock Tower watercolour

I haven’t taken as many process photos for this latest painting. Bteween painting the Woolworths painting at the end of last week, and painting his one, I’ve been looking at watercolours of similar subjects by artists I really like, and trying to figure out why I think their’s are SO much better than mine, and I picked up just a couple of ideas that I tried to apply while I was making this painting.

The subject is the Clock tower in Hanwell, which is the part of Ealing where I grew up. It was erected in 1937 to commemorate the Coronation of King George VI. There was a campaign to have it removed during the 1970s. Thankfully this didn’t come to anything.

I've sketched the clock tower in ink from a different angle: -

I’ve developed the habit of filling the page with my original outline sketch, which does mean that I have to rub out the pencil lines which have been covered over by the tapes.

Right, the two things I picked up from looking at watercolours by artists I like showing similar views were these:- 1) You don’t have to go for a traditional blue sky every time. Some of the pictures I looked at achieve great things using colours like yellow, crimson or even purple for the sky. So I went for a mostly yellow sky with just a hint of blue bleeding into it from the very top. – 2) Do not overwork the painting.As you can see, I had finished the clock itself at a very early stage of the painting. I would always be tempted to do more work on it, to darken the shadows more, and try to add more texture. Here I forced myself to say – it’s good now, be satisfied.

I’d started the painting on the Sunday afternoon, but my daughter and my youngest grandson called round, so I didn’t return to it until the evening. Taking this photo was the last thing I did before packing up for the night. The natural light had gone and the artificial light was not really helping me much.

 

I woke too early this morning, but was eager to crack on with the painting. I made up my mind to be disciplined and work from left to right. So the first job was to complete the red brick building. I’d already painted he cream base yesterday. Today I applied the individual brush strokes to replicate the pattern of the bricks. Once these had dried I watered down the brown, and applied a very thin layer over the op of the brickwork, just to push the pattern back a little.

I shouldn’t say it, but I was getting quite excited by this time at just how it might turn out. I was deliberately using colours that were somewhat more muted than I would normally, and it was giving the painting the quality I wanted.

The next thing was to work on the shopfronts. I had to have a serious think about how I was going to execute what I wanted and in the end decided to paint in the more brightly coloured chairs on the pavement in front of the café before finishing the shopfront and windows.

By this time I was so far into the picture that I really only had one main concern which was – don’t cock it up now by making a pig’s ear of the last few bits on the far right. I was happy with the front of the café and the chairs. Although I still need to add the shadows on the pavement in front of it.

Before I took this penultimate picture It struck me that the blue on the timbered building and on the building on the far right was a little weak. The buildings in real life are actually white but the blue contrasts strongly with the colours of the clock tower, and fools the eye into thinking that the white buildings are in shadow. So the Ladbrokes shopfront and the windows above it were finished, and this was the stage just before the signing, and the ceremonial removal of the tape. I still had to add the kerb, and one shadow running up the steps of the clock.

And this is the finished painting. No doubt it’s not a masterpiece. However, it does show some of the qualities I think make watercolour special. I like this one a lot.

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.

Parkers Bakery Northfields Avenue: The Flavour of Nostalgia

I’m off to Spain tomorrow, but there was still time for one last Ealing painting before I go. Not enough time to take many process photos,  mind you, but you can’t have everything.

Easter 2021 saw me making this sketch. Parkers was a local bakery in Ealing West London. At one time they had several shops in the Borough and neighbouring boroughs. Sadly this one, the last one in Northfields Avenue Ealing closed in 2019.

Parkers were something of an Ealing institution. Maybe nostalgia makes me say this, but I’m lucky enough to have eaten produce from bakeries in many countries and cities throughout Europe, but I don’t think that any of them gave me as much pleasure as a freshly baked warm crusty roll from Parkers.

This looks like a very detailed sketch. It’s really only the one part of the sketch that is at all complicated, and that’s the queue of people outside the shop This isn’t exaggeration or artistic license, it was par for the course for Parkers. It took a long time to produce the sketch, however balancing this was the fact that there’s only a small amount of brickwork on the extreme left of the picture, and it’s brickwork that took such a long time to make in a few of the Ealing pictures that I’ve made.

This is the last process photo that I took. You can see that I followed my susual practice of painting in the sky, then the ground – in this case the road surface, pavement and kerbs. There was an awful lot of black on the shopfront. Parkers had a very distinctive black shopfront with silver (chrome?) lettering. It was stylish and timeless and never changed as long as I can remember. I took care of the brickwork on the building just round the corner in Mayfield Avenue as well. Moving from left to right, I left the blank paper to represent the white first floor of the building, although I did in places paint a very light shade of blue in a couple of places on it just to give it a little definition.

A lot of delicate layering work went on in the shop window, working from light to dark. You can see I’ve painted a very light grey above the loaves. This would be followed by light creamy yellow on the loaves, then a darker browny yellow for definition, and almost a terracotta colour in places. Then a darker grey for some areas, and then a last grey, almost black, for areas of extreme shadow.

Next I moved on to the figures in the queue. More shading and definition were given to the figures closest to the viewer. Shopfronts followed fairly quickly once I’d finished the figures, and just the hints of windows made the first floor of the buildings very easy to complete. Once the foliage of the tree had been painted, then there wasn’t a huge amount more to do other than the lady in the pink top on the far right, and the cars to her right. Finishing off details were the lamppost, some shadows on the pavement, and a little definition to the pavement outside the shop. This is the finished picture. I have to say, I’m pleased with this again. 

Living in the past in West Ealing

Well, since I posted my last post I’ve sold another couple of prints I made for the craft fair. So it’s been a good day. By way of celebration I’ve made another painting of the West Ealing I remember. Again, I only took a few process photos. Stupidly, I got something on the lens of my phone camera, and so they are all rather fuzzy, apart from the finished photo. Apologies.

So, the subject of today’s painting is the West Ealing Branch Library. It’s not there now. In the early 80s Sainsbury’s was redeveloped on the site, with the proviso that they provide a new branch library which they did. This was the library I grew up with. I’ve already made an ink sketch of it –

So here is the first photo I took, after I'd made the sketch and just begun painting:-

What’s this, a grey sky? Yes, because although it’s hard to believe we did have some grey days when I was growing up in Ealing. I also painted in the roadway, and laid down the first layer of paint on some of the cars. However this was just delaying what was going to take the most time – the brickwork. The library was built in 1903, just a few years before my great great grandfather moved to Ealing, and it was made from London yellow bricks. I’ve worked out a three stage process for doing brickwork. First stage is to paint the whole building in the first layer I’ve chosen. This will be the lightest visible colour, which will show as the pointing work between the bricks. The second layer, and the one that takes all of the time makes up the bricks themselves. I paint these in with a very thing flat edged brush. It takes a very steady hand to keep the perspective right. Then I use a very thin watery layer of the same shade I’ve used for the bricks themselves, which is applied to the whole building. It just pushes the brickwork back a little. It takes a long time to paint a building like this, but it is worth it usually,

Here I’d finished the brickwork on the library building itself. On the right you can see the buildings have had the first layer of paint applied, but not the brickwork yet. I was very pleased at this stage because this is how I remember the library. The obvious thing to do was to tackle the house on the left, but first I rewarded myself with a little more work on the green car. You can see that I’ve used a very light red brown as the base layer for the house. It’s going to be much darker than the library and in this case I applied another layer, a much darker brown, before I put in the brickwork. I was actually very pleased with the way that the house turned out once I’d painted in gables, windows, the corrugated iron on the doorway, and various shading.

The left hand side of the painting was looking pretty good by the time I took this photo. As well as the work on the house I painted in the hedge beside the library and the wall in front of the house. This is a very 1970s affair, with those ornamental cement blocks. I added definition and shading to the maroon car on the far left. The time was approaching when I was going to have to tackle the brickwork of the buildings on the right, though. Apart from anything else I couldn’t paint in the black railings I remember outside the library until I’d painted in the details behind them.  I also wanted to do something on the light blue car roof foregrounded on the left. See if you can spot it in the next photo.

On my reference photo you can see a distorted reflection of the library in the car roof, which I tried to reproduce here. So all the brickwork was done. It didn’t taken a massive amount of time to paint in the windows and doorway, and do some work on the car in the right foreground. I was a little heavy handed with it I’m afraid, and it’s the bit of this painting I like least. Still, the painting was pretty much finished, and this painting was at the stage where I do a little ritual before signing it and removing the tape. Namely, the checking for the bits you’ve missed. Can you see what it is in this picture?

Ah, the mist has cleared! Now we can see the picture clearly. If you said – roof and chimney top left had corner, well done. Spot on! So this is the finished picture. It looks really familiar to me, to I must have done something right.

Some you win

 So let's recap. A fortnight ago I did the Craft Fair in the school where I teach. It was a disappointing turnout but in the end I covered all my costs and made a small profit. Whilst there one of the other stallholders approached me, and asked if I wanted to participate in a craft fair last Saturday in the neighbouring town of Neath. Yes indeed. I produced half a dozen sketches of Neath's more notable buildings, made the prints, sorted out my Public Liability Insurance, and bought a table. Costs definitely mounted as I prepared, but never mind - I told myself - insurance, the table and unsold stock were all things I would be able to reuse. If I could clear costs then I'd be happy.

Well, as you know if you read my post about the craft fair I didn't sell anything at all, and I wasn't happy. A combination of probably wrong time of year, and definitely horrible weather meant that turnout was terrible. 

So I got on my metaphorical bike. I posted the Neath sketches on the town's Facebook page, and managed to sell some of the stock I'd made for the fair. The same day, a chap who'd bought one of my old Port Talbot pictures at the school Craft Fair had also taken one of my business cards. He rang up and enquired about buying one of my back catalogue, and we sorted this out on Monday. Also on Monday I made my surprisingly quick painting of the Grand Union Canal. Following an enquiry on Facebook I sold a print of it, and then the original. So over the last 7 days I'm in profit again, and I have stock to sell, and I'm in a much better position for next time that I do a Craft Fair. 

Don't get me wrong, if there was no money involved in it at all I would still be sketching and painting. But I really don't want to lose money on it, so it makes me really pleased with myself to recoup all of my losses - and a little bit more - in just a few days. 

Back to West Ealing - Back to the Past

Later in the day after I made the canal picture I started on another Ealing painting. The canal picture had been so quick and easy to make that I guess I had a lot more painting energy left. I’m making the most of having the time to do it. When I’m back at work in just over a month I won’t be able to apart from at the weekends.

This one is a return to the Ealing street genre of the previous  before the canal picture. I used a postcard from a series produced in the 70s by Ealing Libraries. This was a then and now comparison, with two photos from pretty much the same vantage point, one taken in the first decade of the 20^th century, and one taken in the 70s. The irony is that the postcard presents it as a ‘then and now’ comparison, whereas now it’s a comparison between then, and even further back then.

Very few process photos taken this time. In fact I didn’t even make up my mind to take any until I’d started painting, so no ‘naked’ photos showing just the sketch I’m afraid. I began with sky and road surface, and then leapt straight in with the two cars. One is clearly a Morris Marina, but the sports car has been the subject of some conjecture. I originally thought it must be a Triump, possibly a Stag or a TR6, but when I posted the finished painting on Facebook it was identified by people who know a lot more than I do as a Jenson.Jumping around as I tend to do, I switched to do some of the detail of the routemaster bus on the left and the buildings just above it. Before starting on the main building I stopped for the evening, and so all of the photos were taken while I was working on the picture today.

So much for self discipline. Common sense would have suggested that I work from left to right. No chance. I love the Edwardian buildings of West Ealing and Ealing Broadway, and it’s nice that so many of them survive today. But blimey, they had a thing about ornamentation around their windows – and so many of them at that.

The brickwork is one of the reasons why a painting like this takes so much longer to paint than the canal painting of yesterday. It is worth taking the time and trouble to do it though. I don’t claim that I’ll have got all of the colours right, but the buildings at least look right, and feel right. This is how I remember West Ealing.

After I’d initially painted in the shop fronts, as you can see in this photograph, I did feel that there was still too much white showing. So one of my priorities at this point was pushing the shop fronts back a little bit, before trying to complete the left hand side of the painting.

So by the time that this photo was taken it was pretty clear what the finished picture was going to look like. This is not to say that it was going to be simple to finish things off. For one thing the photo reference is pretty unclear about exactly what is going on in the far left. There’s also the trees to consider. But as we saw with last week’s tram painting, in the distance like this if you can just do enough to suggest things, then the viewer’s eye is going to do a lot of the work for you.

So here we are with pretty much everything painted in. I like it because this is how I remember West Ealing where I grew up. All that really remained now was to sign and date the picture and remove the tape. So here it is.

Start all over again

 Alright, so much for feeling sorry for myself. Yesterday I got off my butt, stopped feeling sorry for myself about the Craft Fair on Saturday and sold some of the Neath prints that I'd made for the Craft Fair, to cut my losses a bit. I also sold an original sketch to a chap I met at the school craft fair a couple of weeks ago. Some you lose. . . but some you win.

So I made another watercolour this morning, and it's another London Borough of Ealing Watercolour as well. This one is a complete change of pace - not a bus or tram or trolleybus. I went to school in Elhorne High School in Hanwell. At the back of the school there was a very large field, and that led down to the Grand Union Canal. It's still a very picturesque place.

I didn't make may process photos at all today. This is partly because I was working so quickly. It's not as detailed or complex a view as either of the watercolours I made last week, and I really didn't need to do much more than outline the treelines, ad where the land meets the water, and the basic shaped of the canal boat, the lock and the lockkeeper's house. 

Once I started painting It went incredibly quickly. I felt most trepidation about painting in the water and the reflections so I did the sky first, and the started on the grass, then the trees. then the house, the lock and the wall on the right. I liked what I'd done by this stage, but I also knew that the bottom half of the picture was going to make or break it. 

Here's the finished picture. I won't lie, considering some of the rubbish I've produced in watercolour in the past I am really rather pleased with this one.The surface of the water is better done than I've managed before, and having the reflected foliage that little but darker than the trees works well.