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.