Another tube painting - and Postcards

This has been the first full week that I haven't spent in another country - last week England, week before that Denmark. So I did think that I might get a bit of painting done this week. Well, if you define a bit as a small amount, then yes, I have. There was the previous painting in the last post, and then yesterday I did this direct watercolour.

It's the Bakerloo Line at Piccadilly Circus Station, based on a photo from, I'm guessing, the 1940's or 50's. A4 sized.

I've spent a lot of time over the last week producing some A6 size postcard prints of some of my prints. I've now got the production sorted, the packaging materials - everything, in fact, except the buyers! So just in case anyone out there reading this (well, you never know, somebody might) here's the link to oe of the train prints, and you'll see the others underneath:-

DaveClark Port Talbot Shop

So here's the postcards I've made so far:-

Basically I'm aiming at two potential markets. The first is obviously fans of public transport in London, and the second is the good people of Port Talbot. With the four PT cards I've shifted a fair few copies of A4 prints of each sketch, so fingers crossed. With the London Transport - well, coin is in the air.

Tube Direct Watercolour 3

This is Euston again. It wasn't one of the original stations on the City and South London Railway, which opened in 1890. The line reached Euston in 1907. The C and SLR was the world's first deep level Underground railway line, and so it really was the first 'Tube'. Previous lines like the Metropolitan and the District railways were 'cut and cover' lines - trenches were dug, and the roofed over. The C and SLR was also the world's first major railway to use electric traction. You can see one of the original cars in the painting. They were underpowered - the first terminus in the City of London was King William Street station. The trains had to negotiate a slight incline up into the station, and often had great difficulty doing so. The station was closed in 1900 when the line was extended to Moorgate.

The City and South London deep level tube lines were Ingenious the way that it was done. Basically it used a machine called a Greathead shield. It protected men hacking away at the tunnels until they could install the circular ring sections which made the tunnel walls. James Greathead built on the earlier work of Marc Isambard Brunel, (Isambard's dad) who invented the first tunneling shield after being fascinated by the way that the shipworm - teredo navalis - lines its tunnels with its own excreta. Mind you, it still took him the best part of 20 years to build the first Thames tunnel - not the least because it kept flooding and the money ran out, dumping him in debtor's prison. Coming back to the deep level tunnels of the London Underground, of course, the thing that really helped was London's clay soil.

So this is another direct watercolour. I'd like to think that these pictures I've bee painting since the 2023 challenge ended wouldn't have been any better if I had sketched them in pencil first. I do really enjoy the challenge of direct watercolour very much. 

No, it isn't all about the money. . . but . . .

 . . . the money from selling pictures and prints is always welcome. I sell a lot more prints than I sell original pictures. The last original that I sold was the 30x30 direct watercolour of the London Underground train at Southgate Station. 

I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but my day job is an English teacher in a local comprehensive school. So the painting and drawing has never been more than a sideline. But when I started my Etsy shop there was some money to be made and so I stared putting all the money I made from the pictures to one side. Since before lockdown I've used this money to provide spending money whenever I go abroad on a sketching trip. I booked my last trip, to Copenhagen, back in the tail end of last year and while my daughter contributed to the flight, everything else - accommodation, spending money and the remainder of he cost of the flight came out of the picture money. And I possibly enjoy these trips all the more because something that I enjoy doing so much has paid for it. 

The next trip scheduled is Lisbon at the end of October. That's all paid for already and I've even got my spending money already - left over Euros from previous trips have accrued quite nicely. Still, the painting pot has dwindled and so it occurred to me that it might well be time to do something that has a chance of selling. Hence yesterday's painting. Here it is:-

Unlike my previous tube picture this doesn't show on old fashioned train visiting a modern platform. No, his is based on a b and w photo from about 90 years ago. It's actually Euston station. Very few underground stations have island platforms like this - an island platform stands between up and down tracks. As for the painting ittself, well, it's another direct watercolour and to be honest I used more or less the same techniques that I used in the photo below. 

The appeal, apart from the fact that I love the tube anyway and I love painting it, is that you can get a far more substantial whack of cash for it in one go than with a print. Now, whether this latest will provide that. . . we'll see.

Victorian School

 

Yes, another based on a B&W photo from the time. I have to be honest, I did look for a male teacher teaching boys, or both sexes, but I didn't find any that I liked half as much as the original this is based on.

The reason why I would have preferred a male teacher is this. I always thought that I was the first bloke in my family to become a teacher. My aunt was a teacher, but apart from her, that's it. Or so I thought. Quite a few years ago I researched my family history, and found that a 2x great grandfather on my mother's side was the headmaster of the village school in Fernhurst in Sussex for a few years in the 1880s. I don't think teaching was anything like as regulated then as it is now, and basically if you could read and write you could se yourself up as a teacher. It was only at the end of the Victorian era hat school became compulsory at all. 

Coming back to my great great grandfather George, he was the son of he village blacksmith in Chilton Foliat near Hungerford in Berkshire. How he was never apprenticed to his father John I don't know. Possibly he did well at a local ragged school - ragged schools were basically charitable organisations which provided rudimentary education for children of the poor. Whatever the case, George was married and working as a clerk in Paddington by 1871, and then started teaching within he next ten years. Not that he seems to have stuck at it for very long, as he was back clerking in Bromley by Bow by the 1890s. 

I look at the writing on the board behind the teacher and I think two things. The first is that I thank God that I began my career just a month or so after the UK banned corporal punishment in schools. Spare the rod and spoil the child indeed. However badly behaved they are I did not sign on the dotted line to hit kids. The other thing I think is that I remember that for my first few years all I had to work on was a blackboard like this one. 'Chalk and Talk' as it was known in the trade.

Crabalocker Fishwife

What is a crabalocker fishwife? Gawd knows, but I mention it because probably the most well known occurrence of the phrase fish wife in popular culture is in the Beatles’ song ‘I am the Walrus’. I’ve read various interpretations of what crabalocker actually means, none of which has entirely convinced me. I believe that the song was mostly written by John Lennon, and he loved playing with words, and making them up. He was a fan of Lewis Carroll, who was similarly inventive with made up words in ‘Jabberwocky’ for example.

A fish wife, however, I do know about. Nowadays it’s a perjorative term, meaning a woman who is loud, coarse and crass. It’s very sexist. Trust me, women by no means have the monopoly on these qualities. Go back over 100 years, though, and it meant a woman who sold fish, usually those caught by her father or husband. ‘Wife’ actually derives from the old English word ‘wif’ which originally meant woman. Here’s the latest painting.

It's another direct watercolour. It’s based on a black and white photo from the late Victorian/Edwardian era taken in Whitby in Yorkshire. Whiby is known for many things, not the least of which is that it was where the fictional character of Dracula first arrived in England. At the time the photograph was taken though it was a busy fishing port. I don’t have any personal connection with Whitby, but some of my ancestors were from a coastal village outside Dundee which had a fishing community. My 3x great grandfather, James Clark, was a fisherman who drowned, leaving Margaret, my 3x great grandmother, who presumably sold fish like the woman in the picture, to bring up their 3 children. It can’t have been an easy life.

Victorian Monkey Business

I continued with the Victorian theme yesterday. The painting I made, another direct watercolour, was based on a monochrome sepia toned photograph.

In the original photograph I really didn’t like the background, which was boring and very indistinct. So I put the accordionist against a background I found in another Victorian photo of a street performer. The tatty billboard on the right is for Crowders Music Hall in Greenwich. This became Greenwich Theatre. When I was at Uni in the mid 80s I used to spend some Sunday lunchtimes in the bar of the latest incarnation of Greenwich Theatre, doing the Sunday Telegraph Crossword and listening to a live jazz band. Street entertainers in Victorian times were pretty common, especially in big cities - and London at the time was the biggest in the world. Like chimney sweeps, itinerant musicians had been around for several centuries, but by the middle of the 19th centuries not only musicians, but many other kinds of street performers had proliferated, a huge variety. If you read contemporary novels by London based writers like Dickens or Thackeray you can see that all levels of Victorian Society had a great thirst for live entertaiment. 

As you can also say about a huge number of Victorian professions and occupations, if you were managing to support yourself through street performances you were doing a lot better than some. What became known as busking during the next century was made more precarious by the rather fuzzy legal status street performers enjoyed. A street performer would often be ordered by police to move on from a favourable location, and if they didn't comply they could find themselves in court or even in a lock up. Street performers were also a target for petty criminals, who would steal the performer's takings or equipment or both, often with violence. As if that wasn't enough in the middle of the century the Times started regularly publishing snotty letters about the rising level of street noise in London, for which street musicians were allocated a disproportionate amount of the blame. In 1864 the Westminster Parliament passed a law enabling residents to complain to the police about street musicians, although it was still fuzzy as to what police should do about such complaints. Street performers suffered from an extremely low social status. Complainants against them often did so in the kind of terms we'd use today for an infestation of vermin.

Okay, let’s get to the elephant, er, monkey in the room. The accordionist has a monkey attached to him with a chain. I don’t excuse this or condone it because it was a long time ago. I think it was – and is – wrong to exploit animals. I reckon it’s a pretty foregone conclusion that animals used this way were subjected to great cruelty – after all, think of the ways that master sweeps treated children at the same time. There are countries in the world where this still goes on, and it should be stopped. Monkeys were still being exploited like this in England in the 1980s. I remember in about 1982 I went to Wembley market on a Sunday Morning and a young bloke approached me, with a monkey sitting on his shoulder attached to a leash. He offered to take my photo with said monkey for a fiver. Being a gentleman I merely told him to fuck off go away. This wasn’t just  because I’m a cheapskate. I mean, I AM a cheapskate, but this turned my stomach.

Okay, let's get back to the picture. I say it as shouldn't, but I'm pretty pleased with what I've achieved with it. My decision to keep going with Direct Watercolour has paid off in as much as I don't think that this would have been any better if I'd sketched the outlines in graphite pencil before picking up a paintbrush. When you use monochrome photos for reference then you have to use your best guess for the colours. With the background it wasn't difficult, for many brick built buildings of London of the time and the first half of the 20th century were built with distinctive yellow London bricks. With the billboard, well I felt that a blue ground would contrast well with yellow letters, and the whole thing would contrast well with the predominantly brown and grey palette used for the figures and the rest of the background.