Shucking beans

This one has been a bit of a fight. The inspiration comes from a long held memory of sitting in my grandmother's back yard - koer in Flemish - shucking broad beans into a collander in her lap. Moments after this, I jogged her knee, spilt the beans (ha ha) and swore for the first recorded time in my life. So I was never allowed to forget it. This, therefore is an exorcism.

There is a lot of repitition of colours as I tried to unify elements of the paint. The colours came easily. The wall behind her was limewashed every year and glistened white, so that it reflected every bit of sunlight, as here. The base of the wall was painted with a bitumen paint to keep the damp at bay. The wall got damp because the back yard was brick paved and rain got splashed up. So the base of the picture shows the red brick paving. I have seen this combination of materials in Denmark and Sweden and in the houses that frederick built for his Dutch veterans in Potsdam near Berlin. The brickwork in the wall and floor were heavily textured so I have indicated coursing shadows in the sunlit section and highlights in the dark section.

If you were to measure these areas you would find that the red brick paving and the limewashed part of the wall take up about half on the non figure areas of the composition because of how I have placed the old lady so that she fills the space almost entirely.

Her glasses gave me the opportunity to anonymise her, countering the specifics of her pinnafore and hair. I used the same mixture of Naples Yellow and white that I used on the sunlit brickwork to indicate the swirls of her one time blonde hair which shone in contrast to the greyer partsTheese i apinted using the dark shadow mix lightened with a lot of white.

"Paddleboarders" had taught me how to unify elements with area of dark tones. I used the same approach here withe the bluey -brown shadow to her body running into the chair and up the wall behind her head. I then used a related colour for her stockings. My problem was her pinnafore. These were usually covered by an all over floral pattern of small flowers. I tried to simplyfy this into a pattern of red and blue dots on a white ground. The dark shadow creeps over her shoulder and the coloured dots gently migrate into tis area and into the shadowed parts of her skirt.

I invented the chair rather than recalled it, which allowed me to suggest caning to the back.

I kept the unifying idea going when I painted the boy, using the colour I had used for the bitumen walls in his hair, the dark hoops on his tee shirt and his shorts.