1890 Dutch Barge, watercolour on Arches Not, 10X14in (25.5X35.5cm).
This chance to get out on the water came courtesy of the Cadogan Pier company at Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. Cadogan pier is certainly attached to the land but it is a floating pier and it feels like it, moving and shifting underfoot just like a boat. After an abortive first painting (abandoned because I started a long conversation with a fellow artist and totally lost focus on what I was doing) followed by a restorative cup of tea, I moved to the upstream part of the pier and worked on the intricacies of this delightful subject in the warm late afternoon light. Here I had to deal with the perennial problem with all such locations – riverbanks, quaysides, marina pontoons, wharfs, for all I know railway platforms, too – which is that you’re absorbed in the main subject (the boat or the ship or the bridge or the train or whatever it is) but then what do you do with that uncomfortable diagonal bit (on which of course you are standing) slanting across the foreground? Reader, I cheated. In this case I dropped a foreground shadow across the diagonal of the pontoon, but in reality, I confess, this compositional device did not exist