​Most artists will tell you, it’s quite an isolating profession, and generally they don’t mind it. However, when we get the chance to go out and play with fellow artists, we will jump at the opportunity. 

So it was with me that I ended up with the Northern Boys, including their only female ‘northern boy’ Haidee-Jo Summers (who also leads her newly formed Lake District Plein Air group), for a couple of days this week, painting in one of the Lake Districts favourite spots. We were joined by the legendary David Curtis, ROI, RSMA who rolled up in his rather antiquated but smart VW camper van. 

My second ‘Postcard from the Lakes’ therefore comes to you from Elterwater and Skelwith Force in the Langdale Valley. 

The village of Elterwater itself is about half a mile from the lake Elter Water, located to the south of picturesque Grasmere, west of Lake Windermere with great views of the Langdale Pikes. If you walk through the forests that surround the western side which leads downstream, you will end up at Skelwith Force, a very accessible waterfall which surprisingly isn’t that well known to the many tourists that hit the area. Elterwater itself relies on tourism as it’s principal source of income and the village is popular with fell walkers. Only a quarter of the houses in Elterwater are permanently occupied. The rest are holiday cottages.

The ‘boys’ had been painting in the area all week and I joined them on the Sunday along with the Lake District Plein Air painters. Having recently recovered from covid and not wanting to walk too far, from the car park, I set my easel up close to the historic Grade II listed Elterwater Bridge which dates back to the 18th century. The bridge spans the Great Langdale Beck which bubbles and tumbles into Elterwater. 

The weather was extremely kind and not only provided the warmth we needed but also the light and shade that helps to make a painting of good contrasting colours. 

After a full day of painting, we retreated to one of only a couple of watering holes in the village. The Britannia Inn, a fantastic 300 year old pub in the centre of the village.

The following day, I joined the ‘boys’ at Skelwith Force, a delightful and very impressive little water fall not too far from Elterwater and a short 10 minute walk from Skelwith Bridge. This waterfall is very accessible yet relatively unknown and very lightly visited so we pretty much had the run of the place. 

After taking a photo of the ‘boys’ for their album, I perched not too unprecariously on a rock and completed my only painting of the day. Skelwith Force has probably never been painted by so many people in one day, though I enjoyed seeing the ‘boys’ immortalising each other in action, on canvas for posterity.

I am predominantly a studio painter and will gravitate naturally to the studio most days but living in the Lake District and having so many prolific artists visit on a regular basis makes a wonderful recipe for inspiration. Some days, you are so much better out than in.

Do you meet up with fellow artists often?  Do comment below and let us know. I’d love to hear from you. 

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Well! If this sounds like an Agatha Christie Whodunit, it probably is…  to me anyway!

I often wonder what happens to my paintings when they leave my studio, and even though I’ve kept in touch with a few buyers who are now valuable collectors, I don’t think I was prepared for the message that landed in my inbox a couple of weeks ago.

It was from a young student, well I imagine he is young even though I’ve never met him. 
“ Hello” he began, “I am a student at Rhode Island School Of Design, and am currently doing a project in which I will be creating a placard for one of your works ‘Alley At Agigya [sic]’ 1982… if you have some time would you be able to provide a little bit of background for the painting…?”  

‘Alley At Ayigya!’ (pronounced Ayija), My goodness! What a trawl back to a past I hadn’t thought much about in a long long time! After all it was all of forty years ago and I was a 21 or 22 year old art student! The memories came flooding back thick and fast as though it were yesterday. I remember in detail when and how that painting came about, and yet I have no recollection at all of what happened to it after I painted it or how it came to be in the US, or why it was now one of the subjects of a class called Curating The Modern: Modernis (sp?) at RISD. I had so many questions!

I fired back my reply immediately “Hello… thanks for your message! Gosh what a blast from the past! Do you have an image of the painting? How did you come to know of it? It was one of my student pieces from when I was at the College of Art [KNUST]  in Ghana. 1982 means I was in my second or third year… I’d be able to tell you more about it… It’s ‘Alley at AYIGYA’ by the way…”

And so continued our dialogue, “Hi Anne, thanks for getting back to me so quickly… I don’t currently have a picture… I can send you one this Thursday… I came to know of it through my Professor… for a class called Curating the Modern: Modernis(m?) at RISD… I’m so excited to learn more about it…”

”Thanks so much… if I recall, it’s a watercolour piece I did en plein air, we used to go out as a class to paint outdoors…, there was a lot of political unrest…, clashes between students and government…, the university closed for an entire year…, I was happy…. I was relatively carefree… “

It’s amazing how certain situations like sights, sounds or even smells evoke certain memories. The title alone had got me going but it wasn’t until the picture of the painting landed in my inbox that I began to piece it all together - properly.

“Here’s a picture of the piece…, we’ll be putting it in a exhibition at Brown in the near future…, my Professor is very excited you responded to my message…, is interested in doing an interview with you over Zoom…, thanks so much for your response…”

”Oh my word”, I wrote back, “my head is really spinning with memories…, that’s an oil painting…, the original sketch was done in water colour en plein air (we didn’t call it that in those days, I think we called it field painting)…”

Ayigya is a small village a short walking distance from College Of Art at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology where I studied Fine Art from 1979/80 through 1983/84. As students we spent a bit of our time there doing field drawing and water colour sketches which we brought back to the studio to complete our larger oil paintings. 

It wasn’t just the memory of the man, drunk and half asleep, trying to balance on an incline, or the little boy with the pot belly who wandered off to find a toilet, or so he told his mother when she called him back, it was also the memory of the small plank of wood that made up the makeshift footbridge and the artist Isaac Levitan who influenced my work then, and to an extent, now. The school library at my secondary school had a load of books on Levitan and I spent hours poring over these.

Art materials were scarce and expensive and that is pretty much where most of our grants went. We made our own canvas stretchers out of cheap wawa softwood, and helped each other stretch them, we didn’t have stretcher pliers, just our thumbs and a box of tacks and a small hammer, one person would pull and stretch, the other would tack and hammer. That’s how it worked. For canvas, we used whatever bits of board we found, plywood, MDF, chipboard, or whatever thick fabric we could lay our hands on - often White Drill fabric  (used for making school uniforms) from the market. For ‘Alley At Ayigya’, I ripped up a thick cotton bedsheet. We had learned a good emulsion paint with a good glue content would make a good primer. If we ever run out of Titanium white paint, we used household oil paint. That’s just how we rolled.

So forty years later and ‘Alley At Ayigya’, created in Ghana, has surfaced in Rhode Island, USA. The image looks like it’s been in some kind of storage. Where has it been all this time and how did it get to the US? I am intrigued and want to know more but for now I am really looking forward to the Zoom interview. If they have any questions for me, I am pretty sure I have more to ask. Loads more…

Do you often wonder where your paintings are, what sort of questions would you ask in a situation like this? Do please share your comments with me below ⬇️.


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