Dog Day Afternoon

I had done one.painting of four men on a shoot with their dogs following behind them. The weather was rough - the sky yellow with streaks of rain falling from top right to bottom left. Weather was never allowed to. stop a day down in darkest Surrey. However, I decided to show more benign shooting conditions, based on a fine day up in Cumbria. ( Iy was only fine half the time.(On one occasion when we stopped for lunch to be joined by our wives we all stripped off our soaking jackets and breeks and set our clothes to dry in front of the fire while eating in our still damp shirts and underpants. Then got dressed again and went off for the afternoon. That time I saw a duck I had shot washed over the lip of a weir and float away down stream.)

The painting has four horizontal-ish bands of colour to suggest a landscape, more or less evenly distributed and two dark green verticals offset to the left so that an area of wall can be featured. There are a couple of timber posts shown that would have been carrying barbed wire to control where you can cross but the wire would have been an incongruous linear element in a painting of blocky shapes.

Cumbria has stone walls, which you don't come across in the south so I wanted very much to paint one. I made one run across the middle third of the picture dropping away to the left in the direction the two figures are heading. The top of the picture is filled by heather moorland in its best September livery. Maybe I exaggerated that a bit, but the colour had to be strong to offset the dark greens of the men's jackets and breeks. I

I introduced a Weimaraner because , essential it is the same colour as the stone wall. Neither are plain grey. The wall holds a host of other colours from the minerals in the stones and the lichens that grow on them and the dog has a lot of colours in his coat which show when he moves. Being notoriously hard to manage, here he is walking at heel whilst putting his own scent on an interesting mark b the stile the men have come over. I used some of the colour from the heather to liven his coat.

The sky is a rain washed blue so that I could have four bands of colour from top to bottom played off against the dark greens of the two jackets and the dark brown gun slips. The man on the left has a very red face partly from the cold and partly from an excess of port at lunch time.