The 4.45 Train to Barmouth

My very good friend June has moved into a new cottage that she has just finished renovating. For her birthday, her son and daughter very kindly asked me to paint something for her brand spanking new white walls. Well... June said she would very much like a Barmouth scene. So very calm and collected I agreed that such a thing was possible and then went back to my studio and had a series of panic attacks. It occurs to me that one of the reasons I paint mostly abstracts is that when I have a paint brush in hand and a blank canvas before me, all wordy thought goes out of my head and I think merely in disjointed images.. hence the disjointed, abstract nature of my work. To have to not only compose a scene of the town that both June and I live in, but also then translate that composition to a canvas 48" x 36" in dimension was a daunting task. One that I feel perhaps I may have done not too badly at. Here are a series of 6 work in progress photos, followed by the final result... lovingly titled The 4.45 Train to Barmouth.