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.