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.