Fantasy, Tolkien, Pembrokeshire, Cornwall, Hounds
I painted this from a photo that I took in January 2019 – the Tamar Valley in Cornwall where I live doesn’t get a huge amount of snow, so when it does, everything stops because the roads are icy! So I walked with my dog up to the top of Hingston Down to take photos of the mine in the snow.
It was a rather gloomy day, so I’ve adjusted the lighting here to make the brick warmer and more interesting, and added an old shovel.
I made this painting to practice painting mists, and also folded fabric, but I rather like the result!
The figure is taken from a stock photo by Marcus Ranum, the landscape is one I photographed in the Tamar Valley, and the general idea was inspired by the Ravenloft setting for D&D.
A3 acrylic painting of the Tavistock Canal, with the ghosts of a bargeman and horse lingering.
I walked this way in early spring a couple of years ago and tried to take a picture of the white wood-anemones and yellow celandine flowers along the banks, but they didn’t really show up at all in the photo, so I thought I’d try painting them. Then I added a pair of ghosts, because I thought it would be interesting to reflect the past more graphically.
The canal was built in the early 19th century, to carry goods, and particularly the products of the mines, down to the Tamar River and on to Plymouth. As so often with mining projects, it ran into difficulty at the point where the builders had to drill a tunnel through some unexpectedly hard rock, and by the time the tunnel was completed, the price of the copper that it was designed to carry was already falling. It was built to have an unusually high flow rate, the idea being that this could power water wheels used by industry along the canal, creating further products for the canal-boats to carry, and also power the inclined plane rail to transport goods from the canal down to the river 72 feet below it.
The canal is still not just decorative even now. It powers a hydro-electric power station, and has done with quiet efficiency since 1933.
The railway that runs over the viaduct above was completed in 1859, and quickly killed off the canal as a working waterway. Now the railway is gone too: the line that ran above this canal is closed now, although there are apparently now plans afoot to re-open it.
The ghosts of two Balmaidens (female mine workers) haunting the ruins of Gunnislake Clitters Mine, not far from my house! Balmaidens often started work as children.
This was inspired by a challenge to paint inspired by the words ‘zeitgeist’, ‘ephemeral’ or ‘subliminal’. I thought of approximately 999 very depressing things I could paint for those words, but I wanted to paint something more cheering, so in the end I went for ‘Ephemeral’ and painted one of our old copper & arsenic mines which were once both deadly and blighting, but now are overrun with plants and beautiful in their own way.
Then I decided to push my luck and added a pair of balmaidens for ‘zeitgeist’ – either literally as time-ghosts, or in the sense of ‘well, things may not be perfect now, but at least girls are not routinely expected to take jobs working in arsenic mines at the age of 7 or 8 years old’. I used some of the photos on http://balmaiden.co.uk/ for clothing/ tools reference.
This is an A3 painting in acrylic on artboard.
