I paint more ghosts

Sat, 02 Mar 2019 17:05:23 GMT

This time, a ghostly barge-horse and bargeman.

They are walking along the Tavistock Canal, under the railway viaduct. I walked this way in early spring a couple of years ago and tried to take a picture of the white wood-anemones and yellow celandine flowers along the banks, but they didn't really show up at all in the photo, so I thought I'd try painting them. Then I added a pair of ghosts, because, as my art class says 'you always put in something weird, what is it this time???'

The canal was built in the early 19th century, to carry goods, and particularly the products of the mines, down to the Tamar River and on to Plymouth. As so often with mining projects, it ran into difficulty at the point where the builders had to drill a tunnel through some unexpectedly hard rock, and by the time the tunnel was completed, the price of the copper that it was designed to carry was already falling. It was built to have an unusually high flow rate, the idea being that this could power water wheels used by industry along the canal, creating further products for the canal-boats to carry, and also power the inclined plane rail to transport goods from the canal down to the river 72 feet below it.

The canal is still not just decorative even now. It powers a hydro-electric power station, and has done with quiet efficiency since 1933.

The railway that runs over the viaduct above was completed in 1859, and quickly killed off the canal as a working waterway. Now the railway is gone too.

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Repaint, A Large Hole, A Cat.

Sat, 26 Jan 2019 15:46:07 GMT

I took my Scottish scene along to art class, because something about the composition bugged me and I couldn't quite work out what it was.

Colin the Art suggested moving the figures left and making them slightly larger, so that they would be outlined against the and the pier would draw the attention along to the skyline. And also that the figures should be wearing brown, not black, because that would 'bring them forward'. So I did that:
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On Wednesday I went out to lunch with my Mum, and we found a tunnel we had never visited before, which is odd, because it runs very nearly under one of our favorite cafes. It was originally built by Brunel as a railway tunnel and opened in 1859, and that's approaching the height of the mining boom, so I'm going to tag this as 'mining' on the grounds that no doubt it was the mines that made a railway up to Tavistock seem a good idea.

No railway to Tavistock any more though, so it has been left to moss, stalactites, and cyclists and walkers on the new Drake's Trail which runs into Plymouth along the old railway route. When you stand at one end, the other end seems Very Far Away. There's a good echo, too.

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We have adopted our third cat! After extremely long negotiations, she has been named Nenya. Fankil, obviously, hissed at her, despite their closeness last time they saw each other... Cats! She has retreated under the sofa for now, but she does seem like a friendly and confident girl. She's met Rosie, who behaved impeccably, and Gothmog, who was a little alarmed, but not for long.

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bunn

I paint more ghosts

Repaint, A Large Hole, A Cat.