Zeus

It did get cooler. We had a couple of days of rain. The plants around the house are lifting their heads with relief. The stinging nettles are particularly energetic.

I took the opportunity to stretch canvas.

The canvases are the platforms for paintings which I will show in November at the Flying Colours Gallery in Chelsea.

This is a detail from one, Zeus, a painting of a John Dory, (Zeus faber), or St Pierre in French.

The Flying Colours Gallery have taken some of my work to the Edinburgh Festival and are showing at 6A Dundas Street 11th – 19th August, Monday to Saturday 10.00 a.m. – 6.00 p.m.

If you would like to be kept informed of my shows and other events please email me at http://catherineforshallpainting@gmail.com

All photographs © James Forshall

The Sea in my Barn

It’s hot here. 40° degrees C or 104°Fahrenheit. It’s hard to work outside, except early in the morning. We’re under siege. The shutters on the house stay shut until after sunset. It works. The house stays cool and most of the windows in my studio face north.

Was that why I started painting the sea and its creatures? To bring the cool blue into this hot dry place?  That might have been part of it, part of why I enjoy it, why it makes me feel happy.

I’m painting sardines, Sardine pilchardus. I am calling it Sardine Shoal, though in the sea it would be only a tiny part of the huge murmurations of sardines that makes up a shoal.  Like many fish sardine numbers are under pressure from over fishing. Some scientists think that sardines help to keep the sea healthy and reduce the amount of methane sent into the atmosphere.

This painting will go in my forthcoming show, Coast, this November at the Flying Colours Gallery in Chelsea.

Here is a detail.

If you would like to be kept informed of forthcoming exhibitions please email me at catherineforshall@yahoo.co.uk

Photographs taken in the Lot, France © James Forshall

Low Tide

I’ve been working on a large canvas of sea shells

 

 

This is my palette.  I use anything to hand: a piece of old card board, a used envelope, or in this case a pad of lined refill paper.  I do have a proper palette but I find it a bit heavy. In this case I used the palette for mixing paint but also to display the shells which I am using as reference.

This is a collection of objects which I have used while painting ‘Low Tide’ and another recent painting, ‘Vortex’, the kind of things you’d find on the tide line, bottles, bit’s of bamboo, a yoghurt pot, a dead fish, seashells, a bit of old newspaper but all tidied, compressed into this rectangle after work. The liquid in the glass is diluted ink.

All photographs © James Forshall

 

 

Tidal Pool

This shoal of fish has been moving around my house as I work on it.  They’ve spent quite a lot of time in the kitchen. I look at it in different lights and in different places and now that I’m happy with it I’ve signed it and the shoal will be traveling in a van to the Moncrieff-Bray Gallery, near Petworth, West Sussex.

Photography http://www.jamesforshallphotography.com

Painting Lobster

I’ve been painting and sketching this lobster for a long time.  He has gone off.   There is a strong smell of bouillabaisse, but not as nice.  Our collie, Fizz, sniffs it appreciatively though.

I find him strangely comforting.

I can’t visit the Aquarium in Plymouth often, so my local fish monger, Richard of Gibson’s Plaice in Exeter supplies me with fish he buys down in Brixham. Of course they are dead. The colours go off quickly.

When I received this lobster he was frozen. A fine dusting of frost covered him. One of his antennae had broken.

I started by sketching him and then I painted him.  I have to imagine him alive. By the time I had finished he had turned from blue to black.

All photographs © James Forshall

New work for the Oliver Contemporary Gallery, London

 

Caught in the Wave 90 cms x 90 cms acrylic on canvas

These two recently completed paintings went off to London this week.  They will be on display at Oliver Contemporary

Trout 100 cms x 50 cms acrylic on canvas

Razor Fish (xyrichtys novacula) in Menorca

I am in Menorca.

     © James Forshall

We are staying with an old friend on the other side of the harbour and yesterday when the others went off to an organ recital I went to the fish market to sketch some of the local fish.  The market is surrounded by a windowed cloister where the merchants have their stands selling squid, octopus, spider crab, tuna, bass, bream and the friture of the mediterranean, small rascla, gallina, cerrano, cerrano imperiale, salmonetes, and Jureles.

          © James Forshall

A small orange fish with black and yellow eyes, a small mouth and blue stripes down the side of his face caught my eye. The local bye laws only permit him to be fished for a week a year, from the first of September. Fishing outside this period incurs a fine of 150 euros. When threatened he dives down and buries himself in the sand.

© James Forshall

 

Fish scales              © James Forshall

 

I had never seen this fish before and had to ask the fishmonger to write down his name, Rao, Lolitos or in English Razor fish, though I hazard the name Razor fish is the local name Rao anglicised by the English sailors who were stationed here after the island came into British hands falling the treaty of Utrecht (1713).

 

     © James Forshall

We went down to the harbour,  where some men, their equipment moved around in liberated supermarket trolleys,  were mending nets and where I did some sketching and then lay on one of the  pontoons between the boats, dozing in the sun.

                             © James Forshall

 

Lolitos, Rao, Razor fish sketch                          ©  James Forshall

                 ©  James ForshallFish sketches      ©  James Forshall

I will use these sketches for some large scale paintings when I return to Britain.

 

 

Painting Sardines in France

Painting Mackerel in my studio in France.  The weather here has been very mixed. That may explain the very green view, but it’s cooler which is nice. I notice that the young children who visit us find the cooler weather easier, and even the locals are beginning to enjoy it.

Studies of water

Sketches of mackerel.

 

All photographs © James Forshall  http://www.jamesforshallphotography.com

 

Herring Triptych. Painting the silver darlings.

I’ve been asked to paint three panels (canvases) for a collector who has a house in Cornwall.

For over a thousand years herrings were one of the protein staples of Europe. Stocks are probably diminished. At Clovelly in Devon, where records go back 400 years there were 100 herring boats in 1794. Now there are only two able to earn a proper living, fishing in a sustainable way, with drift nets and lines.

Go to the Marine Conservation Good Fish guide  http://www.fishonline.org/fish-advice  . This easy to follow guide will tell you which fish are currently plentiful. The list changes with the seasons but at the moment herring get the green light.

Photography © James Forshall

Sylvia Earle’s wish

My daughter sent me this link.  I am very moved by this exceptional woman’s vision.

Has anyone put this better?

http://www.ted.com/talks/sylvia_earle_s_ted_prize_wish_to_protect_our_oceans.html