This painting of Venice has been lurking for four years.

Our town, Lodeve, is known as the town of the Artists. That’s not all that special as about ten other towns in this part of The Midi are known as the same but there are quite a few painters here; good, bad and abstract (so they don’t really count… I may get letters after that comment). Anyway, we met a painter shortly after we arrived in the area, his name is Shelley and he has been a painter for a long, long time. He paints the most beautiful landscapes in pastel on brown wrapping paper and uses acrylic to produce some rather unpleasant nudes. Shelley is the only person, apart from my brother, who I’ve ever allowed to paint on my pictures; they are both exceptionally good teachers.

Shelley is 83, or there abouts, even though he acts like an 18 year old, especially when there’s a pretty girl nearby, and he totters up to my studio every-now-and-again. He might stay for five minutes or thirty, he looks at whatever I’m working  on and sometimes makes a comment, a suggestion or just nods, grunts and wanders off like a white haired, bearded Yoda. There are a thousand stories to tell about Shelley and I’ll tell them one day.

The other part of this story is that there are two galleries in town. One is enormous and exhibits the work of ancient and modern Masters, this summer we have Gaugin, and it attracts about 70,000 people to each exhibition. The other is a converted Methodist Church and its reputation is growing fast. The lighting is well positioned and its great attraction is that the owners are also wine merchants, so the opening nights are always rather good!

Shelley was offered an exhibition at the smaller of the two galleries, he did want the other one, but you really need to be dead before they hang your work. So he started to move paintings about his studio which wasn’t a good idea as some of them are very heavy and he is rather small and very independent. Of course the real problem isn’t the weight of the paintings, it’s the weight of years.

He has cancelled the exhibition and some days he doesn’t remember. The gallery has offered his space to me and I feel… guilty, elated but guilty. So I’m frantically getting all kinds of work ready.

I’ve mentioned, I think, that I work on quite a few paintings at the same time. They hang all around me on the walls of my studio waiting for their turn under the brush. There are many reasons for this, sometimes they’re waiting to dry, waiting their turn because I’ve been given a commission which takes precedent or…. because I don’t know how to force the paint to do what I want it to do. So some big canvases have been in the studio, in a state of suspended animation for a long, long, long time.  Perhaps they needed a little something to force me to GET ON WITH IT so….

The painting of Venice has been lurking for four years and every now and again I’d put it up onto my easel and I’d whack on a glaze or two but I was afraid of it, perhaps I was really afraid of finishing the damned thing and discovering that the paint didn’t do what I’d wanted it to. One problem is that its huge and the detail that looks OK here is magnified hundreds of times, so mistakes tend to scream out from the canvas. It was time to “Fish or cut bait.” So a week’s work, a few brushes and one hell of a lot of concentration and the ripples were done. It was boring at times… well it was hugely boring, but it had to be done and I painted what was there not what I thought was there!

"Dancers in Mannon" by David McEwen

I’ve made two paintings of world reknowned dancers in Mannon. The first one was based on reds and was sensual, soft and blended colour, this one is blue and green and in some way rough. I’m a realist, but not a photo-realist so this painting shows brush marks and globs of colour. I held the brushes at the tip at arms length which forced me to avoid all sorts of detail.

"Michael Whitaker on his horse Portofino" by David McEwen

Now, sometimes a painting, a big painting, can take weeks but occasionally one flies on wings of white spirit. When Sally found a photo of our friend Michael Whitaker on his horse Portofino and showed it to me I felt the tingle that comes only once or twice a year. Whereas Venice and Mannon have taken years between them, the power in Michael and his horse seemed to give power to my brushes and in just over a week from start to finish he was done.

Now I have to do a bit of work to the last oil of the Cavalry and then I can get on with the watercolours that I was going to write  about this time.

Keep painting and have fun.