The Thames at Embankment

Charing Cross Bridge & Parliament from Cleopatra's Needle, on the Embankment

11.5" x 17", pen and sepia ink and coloured pencils in Large Moleskine Sketchbook

copyright Katherine Tyrrell

I have a fascination with trying to find the spot where Monet painted the Thames and the Houses of Parliament from the west (as opposed to from the opposite bank in the room he had at St Thomas Hospital).  This is too far west because ths sketch of Embankment Pier was done from the base of Cleopatra's Needle.

However it does provide an excellent place to sketch the Thames without having people peering over your shoulder!  You just need to avoid being on the lower terrace when the tide is coming in!

You can read more about this sketch and location on my sketchbook blog Embankment Pier and Thames at Charing Cross

Familiarity

I remember my very first painting of water. It was a view of the Thames out of the studio window (my mentor's studio) looking towards the under-construction Millenium Dome. It was AWFUL. Because I'd never tried to paint water and I was painting what I thought I saw - a big stretch of blue-green.

So it took me a while to move away from things on the water (boats, piers, bridges, etc) to painting the water. The method was twofold: learning to paint what I actually saw (rather than what I thought I saw) and actually sketching the water from life a lot.

Even now, I have to paint abstractly from coast trips I've actually taken. I paint where I've been, it's hard to paint from imagination though possible from memory to an extent. Painting from memory comes from familiarity - the more you've painted or sketched something the more mental reference material you have to draw on. But you still have to refresh the material every so often, the more often the better.

Though the sea is my love for now, I still enjoy the Thames River, and still always find something new from watching it. Ripples and waves are still a bit of an enigma, there's always room for improvement. And as you know the crashing sea waves boggled my creative mind over on Portland Island!

Something I started back in December is a 365 project, the popular "daily photo" activity on Flickr where people challenge themselves to take a photo everyday! (some choose self portraits, some random photos, some the same object every day) Mine was the surface of the Thames: Wavemechanics 365. Now I will admit straight off that I started the project before considering that I can't take my river with me if I leave town for a few days! haha! On that note, my 365 is probably going to end up a bit more like a 300.

But here's the fun part! I'm noticing completely new things. Seeing the river every day makes the tides so much more obvious. Colours changing with the sky and wind. Stuff floating by or not. Effects of boats. So I feel like I'm still learning.

And it's for you too. I decided when I started the project to make all the images Creative Commons copyright. You can use them, draw from them, jog your memory, or use them for elements in a larger work. So hopefully by the end of the year it will be a great reference library of water shots.

You can keep up with the images

• on my Flickr Wavemechanics set
• or through the Wavemechanics Blogger blog (which is automated from Flickr)

So how does everyone else practice their water? I know a few of us draw local spots, like Lindsay and Vivien but what about straight studio work? Or perhaps you're too distant to get a real view every day? What's your technique to stay familiar with your subject?

Introducing Tina Mammoser

Hello!

I first learned to paint here in London so my water paintings used to be of the dark, gloomy Thames river running through the city or rivers and coast in Scotland (where I first lived here in the UK). In fact I remember my very first attempt at painting the river - it was awful! Until then I had mainly painted figures and still lives, but soon became obsessed with the structures of bridges and piers along my shoreline. It was a seascape teacher at a local conservatoire who showed me how to paint light and shadow and colour of water, not lines and not what you think you see. But still, the objects and buildings were my focus.
(Hay's Gap, London Oil on board, 2001)

A few years later I spent time painting in Pouch Cove, Newfoundland (hi Jeanette!) which changed my work, in technique and vision, completely. I was snowbound on the seafront surrounded by the reflection of blue and lavender. How different was that from dark grey London? Light was like a revelation.

Now light is what my work is about. The first project really exploring the idea in depth was my Lake Michigan series, since I was born and raised in Chicago. (hi Lindsay! my parents live in Algonquin so I still visit often) The paintings first grew from studies I'd done plein air on the lakefront. But then the series became based on memories of seasons and times spent at Foster and Oak Street Beach, Belmont Harbour, and runs home from the Loop to Lakeview. This memory based work focused on mainly on light and colour more than any of my paintings previously.
(Lake Michigan study of Navy Pier, acrylic on paper, 2007)

• The gallery of the Lake Michigan paintings
  

Of course Lake Michigan is far away... and my nearer water provided a wealth of inspiration! I went to the Kent coast cycling for Christmas one year (to Deal) and realised how much subject matter was on my doorstep! Almost all of the Kent coast is within a couple hours on the train. But me being me once I have an obsession that's it, so I had to cycle and paint the whole UK coast. In time. So far I've done Kent, Sussex, the Isle of Wight, and parts of Hampshire, Yorkshire and Essex.
(Photo of studio and cycle assistant the Lt Col., at Scarborough beach on Yorkshire ride)

• The gallery of the English Coast series so far, including map of my journey!
• My blog, where I share tales of the journey and work in progress
  

Rather than paint a representation water I try to capture the way light and weather affects and reflects the water surface and sky. Part of that is because of the scientist in me; I'm fascinating by optics and colour theory and the way light works and reacts to mediums and surfaces. How movement and depth of water changes the reflections or colours seen through the surface. Unlike some of the other artists in Watermarks I'm not aiming for a sense of place, but more a sense of space.

(Slideshow: The English Coast series)

Introducing Katherine Tyrrell

I've never talked about my interest in water before joining this group and starting this project. What happened while writing this post was I discovered what I do when drawing water. The back of the brain had known it all along - but now it's got the front of the brain engaged and able to explain it!

When I draw water I want to produce a sketch or a drawing that has a clear sense of "place".

A very long time ago I did a degree in geography (and also studied geology!) which used to involve me in doing a lot of thinking about very different places and then analysing them from a lot of different perspectives. It's not easy to leave all that behind! What this all means is that when I make a drawing of a place as it is today, besides the conventional artistic considerations, I also like to try and understand the place, what it represents and why it looks the way it does.

In a way I'm trying to see the story of the landscape behind the surface of what I can see.

What that means for me is that I also tend to think about water as my subject in terms of:

• where it is in the world
  
• what the water has done to the land and/or how it has influenced structures on the land
  
• how the water has influenced the importance of this place in the past
  

For example, I live in London and never forget that this city is what it is today because of the River Thames! The slideshow at the top is some images of water in London - the lakes at Kew Gardens and in St James Park and various views along the Thames starting at Westminster and finishing at the Old Royal Naval College at Greenwich - which actually stands on the ground where Henry VIII had his Palace of Placentia (see Greenwich - very nearly sitting on zero).

This is me standing on the hill at the top of Greenwich Park. It contains places with huge significance to maritime history . I'm looking at the Meridian at the Royal Observatory, the place where Greenwich Mean Time starts, the Old Royal Naval College is just behind my head down on the banks of the river and the big loop in the River Thames is just above my fringe!

I'm really passionate about drawing and sketching. I sometimes draw in pen and ink but usually draw in colour using dry media - coloured pencils and soft pastels. I often sketch scenes up and down the River Thames. On my website I have a gallery of sketches of the River Thames and London Canals - from Kew in the west to Greenwich in the east plus the lakes in the Parks and Gardens - hence the slideshow!

Here's an extract from the text which accompanied this sketch in The shoreline at Bankside on my blog Travels with a Sketchbook in......

Bankside shoreline
8" x 10", pencil and coloured pencils in Moleskine
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

Out of the picture and on the other river bank, next to the railway station was the site of the Norman fortress Baynard's Castle which stood in the southwest corner of the City of London, where the walls met the River Thames. It burned down in the Great Fire and the site is currently occupied by an awful lot of concrete. I used to have an office (on the same site) in a completely undistinguished concrete slab office block at Puddle Dock where I was based while working all over the UK in the nineties. Those bridges were the view out of my office window - so they're a very familiar sight for me.
The shoreline at Bankside

I also find that I often think about which artists have painted this place and this water before me! In the past, I've also tried to study and work out how certain painters I admire - Turner, Monet, Singer Sargent, Whistler and Winslow Homer - actually created their paintings involving water. A project I've had in mind for some time is to try and draw the Thames from the same places where people like Monet and Whistler stood to create their own artwork involving the Thames in London.

I also have a waterscapes gallery on my website devoted to various coloured pencil and pastel drawings of the watery aspects I've found on my travels in places as diverse as Big Sur in California, Cape Cod and Maine in New England, Greece, France, Venice, Bali, Singapore, Suffolk and Sussex!

Path to Nauset Beach
coloured pencils
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

I really like learning about how water varies in different places and different contexts - such as why the water becomes a deep blue off Cape Cod when the waters affected by a major hurricane in Florida are moving north - as was happening the day I visited Nauset Beach on Cape Cod. I even read Thoreau's Cape Cod to find out about how he found the beaches and the sea in his day and ended up discovering all about the phenomenal erosion rates on Cape Cod and the fact they had to move the lighthouse! (See Cape Cod National Seashore). I also visited Prouts Neck in Maine to inspect the water that Winslow Homer used to paint next to his home there! (See Travels with a Sketchbook in New England)

Vivien was the person who had the bright idea for this new project - and I've had a lot of fun with both Vivien and Lindsay in working through the logistics to get it off the ground - besides the blog we've now also got a ning community - also called Watermarks!

We're now getting underway as a group of nine artists and I hope you'll come back to see what the rest of the group are about and what we're likely to get up to in future. If you'd like to keep up with us the links to how you can subscribe are near the top of the sidebar column.

Speaking personally, I'm finding that I'm walking around at the moment having little lightbulb moments as I realise more and more things that come within the watery remit of this project.........ice skating anybody?

Links:

• Sketchblog - Travels with a Sketchbook in......
• Main blog - Making A Mark
• Website - Pastels and Pencils