This is not the sort of painting you’ve come to expect of me, I know, but here’s a commission I did a couple of months ago. It was as a present for the father of a friend, the father having his 80th birthday party, and having been in Egypt in the armed services a very long time ago.There were shenanigans, and unproven accusations of syphoning off the British Army’s fuel and selling it to the Arabs. It was just before the Suez crisis… perhaps he even caused the Suez crisis, I am hazy on the details! My job was to re-create the story from nothing more than two photocopies of three-inch-high black and white photos of Arthur, scouring the internet for photos of 1940’s Bedford army trucks, camels, and the Military Police…
Usually I insist on better photographic information than I was supplied with, but when that’s all there is, and I have no time-machine handy… The things we do for friends 😉
Apparently the painting went down a storm. Always very nice to hear that commissions are well received, because that can be the nerve-wracking part of it! The media, by the way, is gouache paint, painted on and washed off (as per the foxglove fairy in my previous post), and then with coloured pencils over the top. This is actually a rather nice mixed-media technique that I don’t often use, but it allows a lovely soft blending of different colours on top of each other. Good for empty spaces and hazy desert air.
