Tweedside Saturday Morning

Tweedside Road, Barbados. A 16 x 20 Acrylic painting
by Mark Phillips

It has been a while since I attempted a painting depicting a busy street scene. This is usually the type of painting that I find the most challenging and the ones that I have to stop and go back to many times before I am satisfied.

This is my depiction of a typical Saturday morning in Tweedside Road, Barbados. The men liming in the shop door and the customer chatting with the newspaper vendor.The young lady just getting off the minivan and the old lady dressed for church.

The challenge with a painting like this one with so much going on is to represent the figures in the correct perspective. 

You may be wondering ...What is perspective? 

You will appreciate that an artist is working on a 2-dimensional plane like a piece of paper or in my case a canvas.  I need to create an image that looks 3-dimensional so that when you look at it, your brain is tricked into believing that you are looking at the scene as you would see it in real life. Objects should appear either further or nearer to the viewer even though they are all represented on a flat piece of canvas! 

The master himself describes it as follows:-

"Perspective is to painting what the bridle is to the horse, the rudder to a ship……………..There are three aspects to perspective. The first has to do with how the size of objects seems to diminish according to distance: the second, the manner in which colors change the farther away they are from the eye; the third defines how objects ought to be finished less carefully the farther away they are." (Leonardo da Vinci)

Perspective was developed in the 15th century by the architects, Leon Baptista Alberti (1404-72) and Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446). For 500 years, perspective drawing remained one of the basic principles of Western art until it was challenged by the ideas of the Cubists at the start of the 20th century. Whether you are working with conventional materials such as pencils and paints or contemporary digital media, a knowledge and understanding of perspective drawing remains an essential tool to help you enhance your drawing technique.

The challenge in a painting like this one is the linear perspective. The sizes of the figures determine how you the viewer perceive their distance from your point of view and I have always taken time to get this just right. I am at an advanced stage in this painting and I am still only 80% happy with the correctness of the linear perspective. The height of the lady in the foreground in relation to the gentlemen in the shop door still says to me that she is very tall and the men, below average height. Some artists use this technique to draw attention to the focal point of the piece and this lady is my focal point. I have done this in the past. Over the next few days, I will decide if to leave everything just as it is or make some changes to the perspective.

What do you think?.

Art as in any discipline requires constant practice and I will be working on a few more of these scenes with people from around Barbados in the coming months.

As always, thank you for reading. I appreciate the comments and the kind words of encouragement. Until next time when I will share some more of my work and a little about what makes me, me, please leave a comment.  And, I will really appreciate if you share this post with your friends. To make sure that you don't miss any future posts, Please enter your email address in the subscribe by email box on the right.

Mark Phillips

Artist
Email:- mark@phillipsbajanart.com
Website:-www.phillipsbajanart.com
Online Store:- PhillipsArtStore