River Thames sunset

I saw this River Thames sunset one evening on the way back to Waterloo station. I’m not much inspired by sunsets and famous locations, but there was something so utterly monumental about these clouds that I felt the urge to paint them.

The sky and the clouds very effectively dwarf the buildings of the river. Hubris is ridiculed by the power of natural forces. In that sense, this is a companion piece to my painting of Trafalgar Square.

It is sad to witness the growing number of eyesores on the London skyline and to reflect on the huge amount of money required to raise each new monument to profit and vanity, while thousands of people lie homeless on the streets.

Acrylics are not well suited to landscape painting. Clouds need the kind of subtle gradations that can be readily achieved by mixing wet oil paints directly on the canvas. Acrylics dry too fast, and retarders seem to affect the body of the paint. Here I used a lot of glazing with acrylic medium, and vigorous dry brushing.

For some reason, a painting with acrylic glazes is extremely difficult to photograph – the lens seems to ‘see through’ glazes, giving the photo a rough unfinished look that’s absent in the original work. This is the best photo I could take!