The Lent Bumps on the Cam are when the spray from the blades can freeze on the oars and chafe your hands. You can see a bit of spray along the waterline. Nevertheless, these fellas manage to have pretty raw hands.
This started as a painting of THBC, where I rowed without great distinction during my time there. I am too small for an oarsman so I sat in the pointy bit in the front, as Bow. It was not meant as a tribute but it gave me a short cut into the clothes and the colours. More recently in the mid 2020s I stood on a footbridge over the Sile in Treviso admiring the clarity of the water that allowed me to see the trout as clearly as if on a chalk stream in Hampshire when a single sculler came by and I thought I must try to paint that. Back in the 1960s I painted two Flemish fishermen rowing a boat. That was a vertical picture dominated by the rowers. Recently I showed a fellow artist some photographs of these early works and I thought the more rowers the better. My thoughts went back to rowing in an VIII and to riding along the tow path yelling encouragement ”Six, stop bum shoving!” That kind of thing. A special argot, like thieves’ slang.
Drama precluded showing the whole length of an VIII. I wanted to contrast the looming powerhouse of the oarsmen in the back of the boat with a jockey sized cox.
There are wonderful views of the whole boat from the bank. You would have to be in the water rather than on the tow path to get this close up a view.
The Cam is a very murky river so the water is shown full of darkness, contrasting with the reflections of the hull of the boat. The yellow fibreglass shell suggested the green for the river water. On the other side of the boat in the top of the picture I have shown the puddles left by the oars as they are feathered out of the water, a different shape to contrast with the triangles of oars and ripples. The white rings are depicted by unpainted canvas. Elsewhere in the picture I used blue and yellow lines for graphic emphasis and to break up the large areas of flat colour.
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