Painted building facade, King's Cross

click photo to enlarge
The UK is pretty reticent when it comes to painting the outside of buildings. Traditionally render has been painted, usually white or cream though sometimes branching out into drab pink, blood red, a shade or two of green, and sometimes blue or yellow. In recent years quite a few new housing developments have been built that make use of colour. There are regions, often highland areas, where farms and isolated houses in the countryside are sometimes painted white to make them more visible. However, the place where colour is most readily accepted on the exterior of a building is the seaside town. Here terraces are frequently colour-washed one or many colours. Blue and white - nautical colours - are favoured, but others can be seen too.

During the last quarter of the twentieth century painted facades with a humorous or artistic intention, sometimes like graffiti writ large, began to proliferate. I have mixed feelings about such buildings. Sometimes they are fun, but too often they are eyesores, a garish flash of colour that detracts from the locality rather than adding to it. Frequently the intention is to prolong the life of a run-down structure, though the fading paint soon contributes to the air of dereliction. The example in today's photograph is near King's Cross railway station in London. The paintwork doesn't acknowledge the building at all, but treats it as a flat canvas with shapes and lines continuing across windows and pilasters as though they didn't exist. This distinguishes it from most such work. It's the sort of treatment that I feel I should dislike but I don't, and I can't quite put my finger on what it is that appeals to me. Perhaps it's because, in its location, it isn't so garish that it demands to be looked at. But more than that, the combination of colours and the strong diagonals are very much to my taste.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Photo Title: Painted Building, King's Cross, London
Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 90mm (180mm - 35mm equiv.) crop
F No: f5.5
Shutter Speed: 1/200 sec
ISO:320
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Meliorative murals

click photo to enlarge
Most towns have a grubby corner, a place where time and weather do their work without anyone fighting back. Grubby, dilapidated buildings, litter, weeds and saplings growing wherever they choose, broken glass, rust and rubble; somewhere that slowly declines and tries to drag the surrounding area down with it.

On a recent visit to Ross-on-Wye in Herefordshire I came across just such a place. A site with rusty, corrugated metal buildings surrounded by rusty, corrugated fencing. I have no idea what it was or is - except an eye-sore. However, someone, perhaps the town council, perhaps the owner, perhaps guerrilla artists, had decided that something needed to be done to brighten up this corner of what is, largely, a pleasant town. The answer seems to have been to commission someone to paint murals on the perimeter fencing. And what a good job they have done. On the dark, end of November day that we walked by the fence was positively neon in its impact. I liked the unnatural colours, the contrast with the rust-brown beyond, the way I had to work a little to decipher the images, eventually picking out the people with their umbrellas (or are they parasols?). I've said elsewhere in this blog that I'm generally not particularly keen on murals as a means of brightening up an area. Here, however, I readily concede that they are doing a great job.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Photo 1
Camera: Sony RX100
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 17.2mm (46mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/200
ISO: 125
Exposure Compensation:  -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Kempley's unique wall paintings

click photo to enlarge

The village of Kempley in Gloucestershire is fortunate to have two wonderful churches. One dates from 1902-3 and is in a fine "modern Gothic" style, the work of the Arts and Crafts architect, Albert Randall-Wells (1877-1942), perhaps the subject of a future blog post. The other, redundant since 1976, is a Norman building of around 1130 that has some of the best early wall paintings to be found in Britain.

Schemes like the one in the chancel, shown above, are not unusual in the churches of Mediterranean countries. However, in Britain, for such work  to remain, it had to withstand not only the ravages of a damp climate but also the condemnatory hand of the religious iconoclast. The Reformation denounced such painting as "popish", idolatrous and unfitting for the newly independent, national and puritanical church. Consequently they were either plastered over, scrubbed or scraped from the walls, or painted over with whitewash. Of these three methods of removal the one most likely to result in some kind of later salvage of the paintings was the latter. And, in fact, during restoration work in 1871-2, whitewash was removed from the old walls to reveal the work of Romanesque artists.

The Victorians sought to preserved them by applying various clear coatings, all of which made the original colours darker. More sensitive conservation work was done in the 1950s and the figures and patterns in reds, ochres, blues and whites were better revealed. The centre of the ceiling has Christ in a triple mandorla giving benediction, the night sky, candles and the Evangelists surround him. Also represented are the Virgin and St Peter with the Apostles sitting under arcades on the north and south walls. The scheme continues in the nave, with interruptions due to damage, where it is joined by fourteenth century work and seventeenth century texts. Evidence of medieval wall paintings can be seen in many churches. In some, for example Pickering in North Yorkshire, it is reasonably extensive. Elsewhere it is often in the form of a "Doom" above a chancel arch. However, for the most part we are left with the odd figure, part figure, pattern or text, and splendours of the kind to be seen at Kempley are to be treasured.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 17mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/20
ISO: 1250
Exposure Compensation:  0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

A Sherlock Holmes approach to photography

click photo to enlarge
I have a rule of thumb for finding photographs that is loosely based on Sherlock Holmes' advice to Dr Watson for finding the solution to a crime: "When you have eliminated the impossible", the great detective said, "whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." My version goes like this: "When you have photographed the obvious, whatever remains, however unpromising, must be source of your next images." With that thought in mind, on a damp afternoon, the sky a solid blanket of grey, I ventured with my wife down a few lanes and back alleys of Boston, Lincolnshire that I hadn't explored before.

Half way through our meandering walk we turned a corner and came upon a brick building that had been painted an eye-assaulting blue/purple. My first thought centred on how anyone could commit such a crime. But when I walked into the narrow alley at the side of the building I realised how and why - it was a club, and the whole purpose was to catch the eye. Well, it did more than catch my eye: it poked it sharply and provoked tears. The area is one of mainly Georgian and Victorian buildings, and the stridently painted club was like an abscess on its face. Then I spotted the trumpet player. Now I'm no fan of this sort of wall painting, but in this context, and given the desecration that had already taken place with the cans of blue/purple paint, the sight of the trumpet player was quite welcome: he lifted the building and my spirits. So I took his photograph and reflected for a moment or two on the wisdom of Sherlock Holmes.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 40mm
F No: 10
Shutter Speed: 1/40
ISO: 1200
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On  

Trompe l'oeil window

click photo to enlarge
As a general rule I'm against the painting of pictures on exterior walls and brickwork. Why? Well, often the paintings are worthy rather than good, and are frequently a cheap substitute for doing something better with a location. Moreover, they rarely achieve their objective of giving the eye something better to look at, raising the spirits and improving the area: time and again I find the unadorned wall is preferable to what appears on it. Even when the painting has merit it starts to lose it when the paint begins to fade or flake off, water stains mar the image, and graffiti appears which mocks or disfigures it. All this makes paintings on walls look shabby. I'm quite even-handed in my dislike too. Whether it's "street graffiti" by Banksy, everyday graffiti by Anon, or a piece by a "community artist" commissioned by a public or private body, I'm against it if it's painted on a wall.

What I don't mind (and often like), however, is outdoor paintings on boarding, hoardings, or any temporary structure. The works that enliven the panels that are erected to screen building work, archaeological digs, etc, are, to me, absolutely fine, because they are not as permanent as wall paintings, and don't usually degenerate into eye-sores. I came across some interesting examples in King's Lynn recently. They were on boards over windows adorning an old building near the Customs House. There were several examples, and it looked like more than one artist had been involved (though in retrospect that seems unlikely). A couple didn't appeal to me, the others were quite acceptable, and this one I rather liked. I'm not a cat lover, so it wasn't the main subject that took my fancy, rather it was the general trompe l'oeil idea. A Victorian sash window with stained glass panels round the edge makes a good frame, and I'm a sucker for green and blue with red highlights. The appearance of a blind being down over the top window was a good touch, and the cats looking out invite passers-by to catch their eye and look at the painting, so that worked very nicely too.

When I photographed it I decided it needed something to break the symmetry. My shadow, though a photographic faux pas, seemed the ideal element, especially since it's also something that suggests rather than is, unreality. Today's photograph is a different take on the trompe l'oeil idea from the example in my October post.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 14mm (28mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/800
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.7 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Trompe l'oeil

click photo to enlarge
In a recent post I talked about illusions in photography. The art of painting has, of course, revelled in illusions since the time cave-dwellers' daubs were first committed to stone. The Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, a place that I visited a few times when I lived in the north-west of England, is currently showing an exhibition of Bridget Riley's art. In her well-known "op art" phase during the 1960s she sought to create optical vibrancy and the illusion of movement through very geometric, repetitive designs. Many other painters as disparate in time, place and style as Arcimboldo, Magritte, and Mantegna, have produced works whose intention was to deceive the eye during that moment of initial viewing.

It was probably the Italian Renaissance's discovery of the rules of perspective that instigated the greatest burst of illusionistic painting. Ceilings representing heaven, painted domes incorporating balustrades intended to look real, arms in portraits that "project" out of the frame towards the viewer, windows painted on walls that (from a specific position) appear to be real and show a view outside, and many other such devices were painted with the intention of surprising and delighting the viewer. The term trompe l'oeil (French for "trick the eye") has come to describe these painterly devices.

On a recent visit to Peterborough I saw such a work, clearly an amateur's endeavour, in the window of a Nepalese restaurant. It uses a subject found on many Italian Renaissance frescos; columns, vaulting and paving receding to a centrally placed vanishing point. The perspective isn't quite right in places, but it achieves the desired effect of suggesting depth, distance and scale, and (importantly) drawing the eye of passers-by. What made me photograph it, however, wasn't the artistic conception but the repair job on the cracked window! I don't know whether the damage resulted from an accidental knock, vandalism, or was a stress crack from a badly fitting pane of glass, but the temporary patch with lines of parcel tape gave it another, interesting dimension; as though there was an attempt to prevent the illusion being completely shattered.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 7.9mm (37mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f4
Shutter Speed: 1/400
ISO: 80
Exposure Compensation: -0.66 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

St Michael, Garton on the Wolds

click photo to enlarge
One of the things that visitors to medieval English churches admire is the stonework of the interiors. Walls usually display cut stone with mortar joints, or in poorer areas, and particularly the north and west, rough stone similarly treated. But it wasn't always so: this "fashion" for stark stone walls on the inside of the building is a reflection of Victorian and later taste.

The interiors of English Romanesque and Gothic churches were always painted to a greater or lesser extent. Columns and capitals were embellished with paint. The stone walls were plastered and "instructive" scenes painted in terracotta with colourful highlights. These decorated the spandrels of the nave arcades, the spaces above the chancel and tower arches, and any other flat area that lent itself to the painters' art. Popular subjects were St Christopher, martyrdoms (St Sebastian, St Catherine, St Lucy, etc), the "Dance of Death", scenes from the Bible, and "Dooms" (depictions of the fires of Hell contrasted with the righteous being saved.) The Reformation led to a removal of images of all sorts, and many of these paintings were white-washed over, to be replaced in in the C17 and C18 by pieces of text on painted scrolls and cartouches. Some of these wall paintings have been uncovered (as at Kempley and Pickering) either in total or in part, and restored, but most are gone for ever.

However, at the same time that many Victorian churchmen and architects were scraping plaster off walls to reveal rustic stone, others were painting them, though not in the manner of earlier centuries, but after the fashion of Renaissance Italy. This was particularly true where completely new churches were erected, but also occurred when older churches were restored, as in the example above at Garton on the Wolds, East Yorkshire. This work dates from 1872 when the local landowner, Sir Tatton Sykes, engaged the architect, G. E. Street, to design a decorative scheme for the whole of the Romanesque and Gothic building - the walls, windows, floors and roof! The spirit-fresco wall designs were completed over the period 1873-6 by Clayton & Bell, a prolific firm who specialised in stained glass. Old Testament scenes and the prophets fill the nave, whilst the New Testament is the inspiration in the chancel. In 1972, in the first edition of The Buildings of England - Yorkshire: York and The East Riding, the author, Nikolaus Pevsner urged the preservation of the decaying paintings. This was acomplished in 1986-91, fittingly, by the Pevsner Memorial Trust. The result is magnificent, quite unique in England, and has to be seen.

My photograph was taken a few years ago. It shows the view down the nave towards the chancel (with my wife looking at the reredos designed by Street). I don't know what I did to the camera to make the lights have their ethereal glow, - it must have been a combination of a long exposure, tripod and settings - but I quite like it!

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E300
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 14mm (28mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1.5 seconds
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: N/A