Steve Williamson

Oils

These three oil paintings and the acrylic of the shunter express differing moods and styles. Oil painting is my first love, so I am very much at home and experiment freely.

The Secret Stream - Just one of the many tiny waterfalls which abound in the secret places in Wales. The single track road was overhung with trees, then where they fell back, the sunshine caught the tiny waterfall. So there are lots of flickering brush strokes, and strong contrasts.

The Red Barn - A different feeling here - it's a cold day, the trees are bare, the sky cloudy, the paint strokes clear, more precise. The rusty Dutch barn is the only splash of colour in an otherwise chilly landscape. It is almost a portrait of the damaged tree, - in fact if you know where it is, I'm sure you'd recognise it (Plas Devon Farmhouse, near Holt)!

The Explorers - Certainly nostalgic since the inspiration was a tiny black and white photo over fifty years old, so much of it has come from my memory of the day (I was behind the camera). I think the colouring has the feeling of a warm summer's day, and the impressionist style enhances the idea of a distant memory, manifest in the ancient design of the scooter and in the children's clothes.

Waiting for the Call - Actually this is painted in Acrylic, but I paint much the same way in both media and I love this picture. Terence Cuneo in one of my painting heroes, and I studied how he made his engines so weighty and powerful. He does it without making the necessary detail overwhelm the overall impression of power. I must have learned something of his magic. I was particularly pleased that in my painting the engine looks like a piece of heavy metal, just a shunter doing a mundane job, but the composition works well; showing the back end of the engine made for less broken shapes, and the reduced palette did the rest.