Wokingham Art Society Return to Archive

Paul Banning - President's Evenings

Visit him at www.paulbanning.com. - See his wife's article about his life.

Paul Banning's Slide Show of his Paintings: 16 Feb 2010
Paul's annual President's Evening was very different this year. Instead of painting a watercolour, he presented a slide show of his paintings, covering his 69 years of painting in watercolour and oils. It illustrated a lifetime of learning, improving and developing his distinctive style.
His first painting was of a yellow jug and seashell, done when he was just 7 years old. He was born and brought up in Trinidad, so many of his early works were of that island's scenery, painted in vibrant greens. Paul loved model making in his youth and studied at Art College to be a Furniture Designer. A series of slides showing chairs, tables, suites of the late '50's / early '60's followed. All the rosewood furniture in the ocean liner "Southern Cross" was designed by Paul. In 1962, Paul was working for London County Council, subsequently the GLC, designing furniture for their buildings, including the Festival Hall renovation. At this time, he visited an exhibition of watercolour masters' work between 1740 & 1870, which inspired and influenced his future approach to painting.
Redundancy loomed in the early '80's, so Paul returned to art and painted many pictures to prove to himself that he could still do it. Obviously, he could, because in 1986 he had his first painting accepted by the Royal Institute. It was in the style that we identify with Paul, of an old barn containing a wheelbarrow and a pair of farm gates, lots of clutter around the floor and some planks balanced on the roof rafters. It had been carefully drawn and then glazed with watercolour many times to get the deep darks. Many of Paul's paintings were in similar vein - cluttered workshop benches, with more items stuffed under them; the sunny façade of a French cathedral, full of tiny detail, with a shady street busy with traffic and people in front; an antique shop on Ile de Re with its goods overflowing onto the pavement; most of these were painted on a full Imperial 22" x 29" Two Rivers 200 lb. 140 gsm watercolour paper, costing around £8 per sheet. When painting en plein air, Paul uses an 8" x 10" pochade box, which is easy to carry and can hold 3 oil paintings. When he needs to put extra lights into a watercolour, he uses acrylic ink, watered down and tinted with watercolour. He often uses grey paper when the subject is buildings. His palette of watercolour paints is limited to Winsor yellow, violet, a blue, a red and a green, permanent rose, cadmium orange and cobalt turquoise. He uses about 15 oil colours, including several neutrals.
This one is of a barn near Paul's home and . . .	. . . to prove that it is always worth revisiting a scene here is the same scene in the winter.
Paul has also painted some wonderful pictures of Venice, not only of the Grand Canal, but also of the interior of the huge cathedral there, with the light shining through the ornate windows and creating fascinating pale passages on the marble floor, which was achieved by lifting the paint out. In 2 weeks in Italy, Paul created 70 paintings! He looks for pleasing shapes within the composition, rather than what the shape actually is. For instance, bridges make elegant curves and buildings are geometric. A picture taken from Covent Garden's glass walkway looked down on solid, blocky buildings, and dark figures on a light pavement. Parliament Square was shown, full of people and traffic; the London Eye was suggested in dabs of oil paint. He looks for atmosphere from the subject matter. In India, he captured the hustle and bustle of street scenes, with people, bikes, ochre buildings and bright canopies. In Petra, Paul sketched while his family explored, producing a detailed drawing which he subsequently developed into both an oil painting and a watercolour. He has even had his bustling Detroit street scene exhibited in the Royal Academy. His local village scenes are gently pastoral, painted at different times of year, in different light conditions, making the same view always interesting, with barns, implements, bonfires. Cooler colours are used for distance. Paul has also painted the Devonport boatshed, which Russell Flint did in 1941. It was bombed during the war and rebuilt by English Heritage in 1993, thus restoring the soaring arched rafters to their former glory.
This is Petra, one of several very interesting paintings of this location which features on a BBC list of 40 places you should see before you die.	This painting of Venice is the one he demonstrated to us the year before last, 2008, and which was subsequently accepted by the RI.
To see a collection of Paul's work was a real treat. To see his gentle character revealed through his paintings was a privilege. Thank you, Mr President! Now, off you go and look at the Gallery on his website at www.paulbanning.com.. I'll never paint another thing ever again. Madeline Hawes

Watercolour Landscape, 17 Feb 2009
After a plug for the April Exhibition of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours at the Mall Gallery, Paul got straight to our consciences by extolling the benefits of painting "en plein aire" and of using a viewfinder to help with the composition.
Tonight he had prepared a very detailed 6B pencil drawing of the scene on 200lb (400gm) unstretched paper. He went straight into this with a mop brush, wetting the paper and adding cobalt, turquoise and purple washes and, finally, yellow to get the foreground greens. Before these has started to dry he used kitchen paper to mop out the smoke from the central bonfire. Then the hair-dryer (which was used several times to make absolutely certain that sequential washes did not become wet-into-wet). For this sort of painting it is important to keep the whole picture going, not to get obsessed with one part. He kept dabbing apparently random thin washes of colour all over the picture but he was, in fact, paying close attention to the underlying pencil drawing, an integral part of the finished work.
Paul uses a limited pallette: mostly transparent (permanent rose, windsor blue and windsor yellow?) and with a little more-opaque cadmium orange. He advised against buying colours like burnt sienna which are already mixed and so can lead to a muddy effect when mixed with others.
	He knew exactly where each subtly different colour was going (bits of roof, shadowed sides of buildings etc.). Because the washes were so thin and colour differences small, mistakes didn't matter. Where wet paint ran or formed an unwanted bead he picked it out with a dry brush and used it somewhere else in the picture. The puddles of paint in his pallette got slightly mixed and he was also sometimes mixing several colours on the paper - all contributing to the unity of the picture. The buildings behind the smoke were painted with a very watery grey. To kill the white, the smoke was very gently washed in blue with a soft brush (wipe out any hard edges). Then identifiable areas were repeatedly strengthened. It is possible to put on so many layers that the paint lifts off but you are unlikely to get that far without deciding you want to change something. In that case, the picture being a whole, Paul would advise starting all over again! This painting was well short of that state.
He said he would probably go on for another day, maybe as much as 8 or 9 hours to make it a saleable work. He has now (late April) sent us this 'nearly finished' version. His colour rendition is better than I was able to get from the projector screen at the demo and much extra detail seems to have appeared. He rang later to say that this painting has been selected as one of 80 from about 800 to be exhibited at the Singer and Friedlander Sunday Times exhibition. What a star!

Return to Archive - Top of page