This t is a watering point which may have been called Station 68 on the Atbara line in the Sudan as I recall it looking some 60+ years ago. Having been seeking in vain for gazelles on the Surrey savannahs these last few weeks I have been driven once again to raid my earliest memories for a theme. Somehow those early memories are the ones that made the deepest immersions. So I am pretty sure this would have been the view looking south, except I don't think there were any hills. I introduced that because I wanted an arc to play against the rectangle.

Watering Point

Painted in oil on canvas, this springs from the shape and colour of the fish. The indigo mackrel suggested the red and ochre used for the bread and background. The three oval loaves echoing the oval fish pinned the corners of the table, the colour of which combined the ochre and blue. The grain is scratched in.

Loaves and fishes

Walking out to the lock recently I looked again at the options. I rejected the temptation to paint a big sky scape with clouds and a diminutive landscape with a canal and looked north. Somewhat shamefacedly, as I thought I had shaken off all that conditioning, I slipped back into being an architect-as-artist. If I treated the lock architecturally I could focus on a man made artefact in the landscape, and crop out, as it were, most of the landscape elements. My sketch suggested that there was an enigmatic icon there.  The image in my mind had a sombre background of trees which had yet to flush out their greenery.   I set it up as an almost symmetric view. In my mind the arms of the lock gates are tipped with white as they are in reality but if I included them that would have meant widening out the view to include them and that diluted the impact the massive gates themselves. So I cut back so that they would dominate the picture. There are some shadows round the edge of the lock gate on the left and there is an indication of a wooden hand railing top right. I was particularly keen to have a few flecks of blue in the reflections of the gates to liven up the area. On the centre line there is stand trees that I had noticed growing on the river bank and by making them spread to the left it emphasised the asymmetry. 

Lock on the Wey

This is a painting of a moment in time. Everything is simplified to reflect the emotional intensity of the encounter. This hind is caught on the point of flight as I crept up on her under the oak trees in Richmond Park. So in the A5 sketch I made afterwards I have her balanced with her feet gathered under her and her body leaning in the direction she is going to break. I then transferred this to the canvas without any changes because the essence of what was happening could be succinctly delineated.

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Sinclair Webster

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