Photo references. Inexplicably dark. However. Top left gives me composition, top right gives me the light, and bottom right is all about tone, weight, and wet paving stones.

As always, the one cat gives me trouble and she may have to be painted out unless I can find a one-stroke solution. I’ve found this kind of strategy to be easier when I use gloss varnish as the dilutant, and in this instance it helps to stabilise the medium in the absence of the primer that I forgot to apply. I’m pleased with the shapes of the two cats on the patio and my job will be to avoid losing that when I paint them in.

I’m calling this Stealth.

23rd March. This is the horizontal aspect ratio painting.

I used a red underpainting this time but immediately wished I’d stuck to orange because it seems to me less likely to set a saccharine tone. Still, I find I have more confidence in the process of applying colours and light in places where their impact will be subtle rather than prominent.

This is where the practical impact of painter’s regret kicked in and I began trying, with limited success, to haul the painting away from My Little Pony territory

Here is the point where I began simplifying the image by removing items that don’t really contribute to the visual narrative. This is a tumbling tunnel of foliage with a bright light falling through it and casting both reflectivity and shadow. Some of the colours are what I’d like to term inherent in that they’re the reflective subtext to the subjective experience which will be different for everyone.

There is very little change between the painting above and the one below other than the light.

There are three things of immediate note here. The first is that the dark colours seriously affect the photographic image and I haven’t yet figured out how to control for that. Second is that I painted straight onto unprimed cartridge for the first painting but primed the second with clear varnish, which means that the paint was absorbed into the paper in the first but not in the second and I think this affects qualitatively the way the brush strokes appear, even though I used varnish as the dilutant. The third is the way portrait aspect seems to result in a tight focus of the image which I found surprisingly beneficial to the end result.

I’m also congratulating myself on painting cat qua cat, not my cat but less happy with the chair at bottom right which seems to be having a visually illusory moment (cf The Impossible Object, illustrated in Gregory’s, Eye and Brain, 1998, p238 which was actually achieved by way of photographic jiggery pokery.)

23rd March. After applying leaf after leaf and highlight after highlight, I finally remembered my own style and applied that. It’s a magical combination of a brush loaded with two or three different colours, a rolling action which forces colour out of the base of the bristles, and being left-handed. Then I tried to see if I could fool the camera by swooshing the lens up and pressing the button before it had time to adjust itself for dark tones.

Calling this Habitat.

Not at all bad! The dark images below are without Swoosh.

My next step for these two paintings will be the literary and the digital elements.

This has been another interesting journey along the pot-holed path towards graduation. The first step being the realisation that, if I were to have show locally, it would absolutely need to be family friendly, and while landscapes don’t generally include nudity, there are other ways in which people may be discomfited. Politically, for instance – small p or large; abstracts – ‘Very nice luv but what is it?’, or any kind of ism. This is a village near a town that has a significant art community and it likes its imagery to be safe. Which is not to say I see my future as a pet portraitist; I like a little bite in my work and there are other options open to me for that. Artsteps, for instance, and Second Life where I have a gallery that’s probably full of weeds and other people’s abandoned bits and bobs since I’ve only just now remembered it. Each of these has specifications regarding dimensions and file size and Artsteps has just moved to a platform where avatars are more visible so conversation is more likely. This may make it a better use of time than Second Life which serves a largely US population that doesn’t turn up till 9pm at the earliest.

I’m not quite done with this painting which still needs its digital and literary elements, but that’s never stopped me publishing before so here I go, pressing that button …

9th April 2025

A brief history of patios

1. The Early years

A modern invention, because who had the space or the money for them in the 50s and 60s, and when they first arrived, they were little more than a few paving slabs outside the back door with two plastic chairs and a table squeezed onto them. ‘Shall we take these out onto the patio?’ said the Mothers in their Sunday aprons, and off we’d all traipse to a place with nowhere to sit and someone would end up in a deck chair on the grass (‘the lawn, dear, it’s the lawn, and do mind the dahlias’). Then we’d all wait until …

‘Looks like rain’

It did but we gamely balanced paper plates on our knees and tried to eat chops with a knife and fork. No table brollies in those days so we dined in whatever conditions the day threw at us in the gathering gloom and developing drizzle on four square yards of scuffed flagstone. Cats sniffed the escaped tomato with the salad cream on it, your auntie’s slobbery dog ate it and threw it up again.

2. The ‘we made it’ patio

At some point between the brown and orange wallpaper and minimalist magnolia chic, patios became big business and not something your dad put together over weeks of digging and bashing at whatever was in his way. Water pipes, gas pipes, those sorts of things. Instead, men with digging machines rolled up. They had plans and they knocked your garage down to make way for them. Everyone had been abroad so they knew what a terrace should look like and they were hell-bent on reproducing it, forgetting entirely that these things didn’t come with their own sun. Sitting in the last sliver of light in front of a disciplined herbaceous border planted petunia hyacinth petunia hyacinth at 6” intervals, your gran bundled up in her big cardie, a hot water bottle, and two pairs of socks and your dad still in his shorts pretending his knees weren’t frost-bite red, no one wanted to be the first to crack, not in Yorkshire anyway. Then there’d be a slight creak from one chair. Another. A hint of throat clearing. And finally the golden words, ‘I’ll put t’kettle on shall I?’ The bomb squad couldn’t have cleared the place faster.

3. Pergolas

By the time pergolas put in an appearance, people approached patios with exaggerated familiarity, as if they got out the red wine every evening and half a dozen French or Italian best friends would turn up unexpectedly to drink and make smart people jokes in a perpetual golden sunset. Pergolas made outdoor dining rooms of patios; exotic places with vines and wisteria that they hand-reared from an egg and where it was bad manners to mention spiders.

Now even that has changed. Pretending to be posh (Port Out Starboard Home) doesn’t make you posh it just makes you apply etiquette in a way that marks you out as not being posh. Instead, people these days generally keep it real. Yawning at 10 pm because there’s work tomorrow. Sober because no one wants points on their license. Transitions are often tricky but this has been a slow melt, turning patios from ceremonial cos-play arenas to places you can sit and eat, but only when the weather is clement.

What hasn’t changed is the ownership. Only nominally ours, when we’re not there patios are the territories of foxes, hedgehogs, our cats, other people‘s cats, starlings, doves, pigeons, sparrows, robins, blue tits, great tits, wasps, bees, hover flies, butterflies, moths, all of their larvae, cellar spiders, ittsy bittsy cutesy jumping spiders, giant house spiders (although they’re mostly on your ceiling waiting to drop on you in the middle of a tense drama), some leggedy thing with wings no one can agree on the name of, worms, leeches, snails, slugs, beetles, and if you have a pond nearby, the occasional baffled duck.

(c) Conboy-Hill 2025