Plymouth – Tim O'Hare

Tim O’Hare Art is open for business! #art

Over the last couple of months I have been gradually gearing up to start trying to sell some of my artwork. Obviously, I am not thinking that there will be crowds flocking to part with their hard-earned money to the extent that I might become rich through my artist endeavours. Rather, people who see my pictures often pass comment that they think I could sell them, and the inquisitive part of me thinks that it will be interesting to find out whether that is true, and if it is, which pieces of my output people like enough to pay for. [Okay, okay – I admit it – I’d also love to have the implicit praise and external validation that would come my way if my artwork attracted interest in this way… but I know that it’s far better for me not to get hung up on this aspect of things and, instead, to focus on simply enjoying the process of creating art and then allowing it to leak out into the world.]

So far, my art selling has only gone as far as listing prints of my Dartmoor Stone Circle painting on eBay (two copies sold, albeit to the same buyer, in almost four months…) and, more recently, to set up an online shop on Etsy. In this shop I have listed my Dartmoor Stone Circle print (one copy sold) and lots of different Greetings Cards based on some of my miniature watercolour series: Dartmoor Scenes, House Plants, Capital City Landmarks, Cornwall Landmarks and Exmoor Views (of which I have sold the grand total of two: one of ‘The Forbidden City, Beijing’ from my Capital City Landmarks series and one of ‘The Roundhouse Gallery, Sennen Cove’ from my Cornwall Landmarks series). Clearly, it is slow going, partly because I need to master the art of marketing and try to drive some traffic to the shop, but also, because I doubt that there are many people shopping online for greetings cards of random places or plants! Nevertheless, it was a bit of a thrill when my phone pinged to tell me that these sales had been made..

One of the things that I wanted to make sure of before I launched my online shop was that I had all of my art-related points of contact joined up nicely. To that end, I managed to get hold of an email address and accounts on all of the major social media sites (Instagram, X, Bluesky, Facebook, Meta) that matched the name of my etsy shop (@timohareart). To help with future networking and promotion activities, I designed some business cards to convey all of this information to anyone interested. For these, I decided that I would paint a picture of Plymouth’s most iconic landmark, Smeaton’s Tower, with Plymouth Sound and Cornwall in the background to use on the front of the card. It took me several attempts to set up the picture so that I could add the name of my art ‘business’ without the text crossing the darker parts of the picture and that could be cropped nicely into a circle for use on the back of the card and on my social media accounts. The picture at the top of this post is final version.

The final form of the business card is shown below (front and back)…

… and just in case you’re reading this and are tempted to explore a little more, here are some direct links:

shop: timohareart.etsy.com
web: timohare.blog/art
instagram: @timohareart

(Instagram is probably the best social media site to see all of my artwork as I produce it, but you can find my art via the same social media handle on the other sites, although these are not all updated to the same extent.)

Dartmoor Panoramas #art

The proximity of Dartmoor to our home in Plymouth generally means that it is our go-to place for weekend walks, so it is hardly surprising that my phone is full of photographs of Dartmoor landscapes. I’m a particular sucker for ‘big views’, but my attempts to capture these in photographs are always something of a let down. Looking with the naked eye, big views fill my visual space with rich detail, but on camera everything seems to shrink, recede and flatten, resulting in a rather distant picture that is dominated by sky, and especially foreground, that the brain somehow filters out of the live view. I expect that this phenomenon is well understood by photographers, and it probably even has a special name, but to me it is just known as ‘disappointment’. This is compounded by the difficulty that I face when I subsequently try to capture this same kind of open, expansive view in one of my paintings. The part of a photograph that I want to paint seems to be only a small component of the whole, and no amount of zooming in seems to really help.

On one recent trip to Dartmoor I was pondering this issue when it occurred to me that what I was seeing with my eyes was a little like the view I got when I used my thumbs and index fingers to create a rectangular, letterbox-like, frame and then looked through that frame as if looking through a window. Despite there being so much more that could be seen, my brain seemed simply to ignore that part of the view that would have outside this frame, whereas my phone camera played no such trick. I began to wonder whether the key to painting this kind of view was to change the size and shape of the picture, adopting a similar letterbox, or panoramic, format. So, for a few days I played with this approach. The results are a series of four small painting that I refer to as my Dartmoor Panorama series.

I’m pleased with these pictures, at least to the extent that they better capture something approximating to the kinds of spacious views that I like best. Using a panoramic format does seem to work. In the third picture I was brave enough to include some people standing on one of the tors and gazing out at the view> I think this little piece of detail adds a lot to the picture, including a splash of contrasting colour. I was even more brave in the fourth picture, including a group of Dartmoor ponies. I tend to think that I’m not able to paint animals, but perhaps I am improving, because at least some of the ponies in this picture seem to have come out pretty well. I am particularly pleased with the grey pony in the foreground and the somewhat lively pony furthest to the right.

I feel sure that I will use this approach to painting expansive views again, and I suspect that at some point my curiosity will lead me to explore some photography guides to see whether I can find a proper explanation of my observation. It might have something to do with ‘foreshortening’ and/or ‘depth-of-field’ (words that I am vaguely familiar with that at least sound like they could be contributing factors). Who knows, perhaps someone reading this post will be able to point me in the right direction!

Plymouth Postcards #art

Smeaton’s Tower Lighthouse, Plymouth Hoe

Back in April, after completing four series on miniature watercolour pictures (Dartmoor Scenes, House Plants, Capital City Landmarks and Mysterious Britain), I decided that I would give myself a new challenge by scaling up my paintings a bit and keep my subject matter close to home with a set of pictures that I described with the working title ‘Plymouth Postcards’. I wanted to try to keep the same kind of fairly loose style but I thought it would be good to be able to capture a bit more detail of each scene. My miniature watercolours had been just 5cm square (or 5cm x 7cm in the case of the Mysterious Britain series) but this new series was, naturally, postcard sized (roughly 10cm x 15cm). That’s an increase in area of up to six times, and so it gave me quite lot more sketching, drawing and painting to complete!

My first picture (above) focused on what is probably the most iconic view associated with Plymouth, the red-and-white striped form of Smeaton’s Tower – one-time lighthouse on the Eddystone Rock which was moved to Plymouth Hoe when it was replaced in the 1880s.

Next up, I remained close to the waterfront with a view across the inner basin of Sutton Harbour towards the old customs house and the Three Crowns pub. I am not sure that the colour of the water there is ever quite as blue as my picture suggests, but I like the bright and cheery feel of this painting…

Third came a view of one of Plymouth’s most distinctive new buildings, the Roland Levinsky Building, home of the Arts Faculty at my workplace, the University of Plymouth. Again, the sky is perhaps a little too bright, but I like the three-way competition between the blue sky, the green of the grassy area in the foreground, and the coppery-orange cladding of the building itself…

The Roland Levinsky Building, University of Plymouth

After painting a fairly new building, it was time to visit a much older one with a ffront-on view of one of the main buildings at the Royal William Yard, formerly the victualling yard for the Royal Navy but now a home for swanky apartments, restaurants, various studios and art spaces, and a cinema. I think this is one of my favourites from the series…

Then, it was back to the city centre for a picture showing the Charles Church, bombed in the Second World War and left in its broken state as a memorial to lives lost. Behind it, the angular exterior of the eastern end of the Drake Circus Shopping Centre forms an interesting backdrop which was surprisingly challenging to paint…

Charles Church and Drake Circus Shopping Centre, Plymouth

For my sixth Plymouth Postcard, I took a trip down to the Barbican area of the city for a view of the Plymouth Gin Distillery on Southside Street. It was difficult to get the perspective of the curved road right but I think I have just about managed it…

Plymouth Gin Distillery, Southside Street

It was time to get a bit ‘arty’, so my next picture was of the interestingly illuminated Theatre Royal, with the imposing form of the statue ‘Messenger’ in front of it. I think that I did pretty well with the theatre itself, and the shape of the statue isn’t too bad, but my initial attempts to shade its dark form resulted in it looking like a hairy gorilla, and so I coloured it black with a permanent marker to try to salvage the picture. Unfortunately, this was only partially successful and I think I would have to describe this one as something of a ‘fail’…

Painting number eight took me back to Sutton Harbour, this time looking across the swing bridge towards the Fish Market on the far left and the National Marine Aquarium, with its wavy roof in the centre. I’m please with the way I captured the blue colour of the windows and the advertising poster on the left of the building, and I like the foreground detail of the boat and bridge. Sadly, my attempt at a Union Jack flag was not quite so successful and the flag of the USA seems to have lost its stars…

My ninth picture took me to very familiar territory, with a view of the old turnstiles at Home Park, home of Plymouth Argyle Football Club…

Home Park, Plymouth Argyle Football Club

… and then it was back to the waterfront with a view of the art deco Tinside Lido with part of Plymouth Hoe, Smeaton’s Tower and the war memorial in the background…

I finished my series with two pictures of contrasting buildings. First up was the Devonport Town Hall and Column, with the oddly coloured and spectacularly fronted (and named) Odd Fellows Hall on the right. Finally, my subject was the sharply-topped, and so highly appropriately named, Beckley Point (a Hall of Residence for students in the city). This is, apparently, the tallest building in the southwest of England (although I don’t know what is being counted as the southwest in this case)…

Devonport Town Hall and Column and the Odd Fellows Hall

Beckley Point Hall of Residence, Plymouth

This was a fun series to do, taking 17 days to complete, and overall I was pleased with the results of my efforts. It was interesting to try to capture some of the more striking buildings and views that Plymouth has to offer, particularly as it is generally regarded as an architecturally bland and unexciting place (largely as a result of the fact that much of the city centre was flattened by bombing raids in the Second World War).

I am sure that I will do plenty more paintings of Plymouth views in the future, but I think this set forms a good initial collection, showcasing some of the different areas and places of interest in the city nicely.

A Walk Around Peek Hill #other

We are blessed by the fact that although we live towards the centre of a fairly large and busy city (Plymouth), we are just 10-15 miles drive from the open moorland and wonderful walking landscapes of Dartmoor National Park. I know that some people love the really bleak, wilderness sections of Dartmoor, but my own preference is for what I think of as the ‘edgelands’, where the rougher terrain gives way to wooded valleys and the surrounding farmland. I have always liked landscapes that mix wildness with areas where humans have worked with the land over a long period of time in a relatively unchanging manner. The edgelands of Dartmoor certainly fit this description.

A couple of months ago we drove up towards Princetown and parked a little way from the rocky mass of Sharpitor (above and immediately below). It was a fine day, but one with plenty of interesting cloud formations that arguably made our view of the sky as interesting as the views of the hills and valleys around us…

Our walk took us just north of Sharpitor, from where we were welcomed with expansive views to the northeast of classic Dartmoor moorland:

After rounding Sharpitor, the prominent, rather pointed, conical peak of Leather Tor came into view…

… and we were greeted by a typical group of Dartmoor’s sheep, grazing on the rough hillside…

Having passed midway between Sharpitor and Leather Tor, we turned southwest towards Peek Hill, and from here the view opened out to reveal the waters of Burrator Reservoir, with Plymouth visible towards the horizon…

Our route took took us northwest, down the slope from Peek Hill towards the Plymouth-to-Princetown road, and along the way we passed one of my favourite sights, a lone tree of a type that I like to refer to as a symmetree…

Then, just across the road stood this wonderful row of Beech(?) trees, planted into the old stone wall, their dark, essentially leafless, forms making beautiful patterns when viewed against the bright colours of the fields, sky and clouds beyond…

This row of trees – in fact any row of trees like these – are really one of my favourite sights of all, and although there was still a little more walking to do, down towards an ancient stone row that we then followed back towards the car, I think that they are a fitting place for me to end this little photo-tour of our April walk around Peek Hill. I often think that I ought to have a go at painting this row of trees one day… but there are so many branches, so many, many branches… I am not sure that I have the patience for that!

Plymouth Waterfront from Plymouth Sound #art

I painted this small panoramic picture of Plymouth Waterfront as viewed from Plymouth Sound as a bookmark to accompany the birthday present (books!) that my wife gave to one or her friends back in March. They enjoy a weekly walk down to the Plymouth Waterfront on most Friday mornings and so this scene was the obvious subject matter to choose.

It was interesting to paint in this wide format, and it’s an approach that I have been using more recently for some Dartmoor pictures. I think that when we view a landscape in real life our brain naturally provides a somewhat wide-screen view, and that this might be why, at least to some extent, it is often somewhat disappointing when you take a photograph of a view and much of what you see in real life seems to be condensed into a very small part of the picture.

One advantage of adopting this kind of panoramic composition, at least for a novice and completely untrained painter like me, is that it reduces the amount of sky, as this is often tricky to paint. And in this particular picture it also reduced the amount of water that I had to paint, something else that I’m not especially confident with.

All in all, I really liked this picture with its pops of colour [did I really just write ‘pops of colour’ – this seems to be such a trendy turn of words these days on TV programmes relating to art, interior design, home improvement etc. I must have caught it from there…]. I am sure that this is a format and also, with its obvious local interest, a view that I will return to in the future.