Lock on the Wey Painting

This lock is at St. Catherine's, on the Wey Navigation south of Guildford. I've crossed o this bridge frequently and have pondered long and hard as to whether there were the makings of a painting there. It is complicated. In one direction the water curves off to the left as it heads towards Guildford. In the other direction the ground is flat and the water goes straight as an arrow towards Godalming through a landscape of trees and scrub that remind me of Constable and Flanders might have looked like this before it became so densely settled. 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 as strong as the stile in "Surrey Stile." This all happened 9 days ago, so 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.

Painting:Oil on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:31.5 W x 23.6 H x 0.8 D in

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