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Paul Banning - President's Evenings

Visit him at www.paulbanning.com. - More information, including his wife's article about his life.

Watercolour demo, "Evening Market in Marrakesh", 15 Feb 2011
In December 1994 Paul did a watercolour sketch from a balcony looking down on the evening gathering in the square in Marrakesh. The following year he turned it into a prize-winning painting but, not wanting to sell it, he had to paint something similar to satisfy a potential customer. Tonight was the start of another interpretation. After dark the square came to life with market stalls selling food etc. and hundreds of people, including many men in traditional flowing robes, walking and talking. The scene was lit with the vivid white of pump-up Tilley or Primus lamps, giving strong contrasts between the lit areas and the dark shadows, background trees and sky.
	His photo (including spurious reflections from the room behind the balcony) more clearly shows street lights that help with the composition and also an interesting dark "angel of the north" shape (my words, not Paul's) which extends left and then doubles back to sweep the eye back into the picture. A painting of this size (full Imperial sheet?) normally takes Paul some 10 or 20 hours. For this demo he had pre-prepared a quite detailed but very free pencil drawing to define the positions of things. He said nothing about how he had done it, but the markings around the photo seem to show that a lot more thought goes into it that he mentions.
His board was almost flat, 10 or 15 degrees, so don't be fooled by the photos which are taken looking almost straight down (see the water pot). Using a large flat squirrel brush he went straight into the middle of the picture with very wet red and orange washes onto dry paper, following these immediately with Winsor blue across the top. The red and blue combination makes a good background for an interesting dark sky. These very wet washes were carried down across the whole picture, and yellow added, but long before they could start to dry Paul lifted all the paint out of the lighter areas with kitchen towel.
	Three or so times during the evening he used the hair drier before either lifting out highlights or adding further washes or details. Normally, in the studio, he likes to leave paintings to dry whilst he goes out, perhaps for a walk in the garden to clear his head. Although it seemed that Paul was adding paint almost randomly the shapes of the buildings and the market stalls gradually emerged. This multiple glaze wet-into-wet technique is how he gradually establishes the shapes and colours he wants. You need a good quality, 300lb, paper if it is to survive this repeated wetting and lifting out.
Part way through, even before he had finished with big wet washes, he started to introduce the darks, with smaller brushes: in the sky, above the market stalls and to represent the silhouetted people. And still he was lifting out lights, although he will put some white paint on eventually, for the real highlights. The palette held pools of dark watery paint but every time he used this to reload the brush he dragged some unmixed paint into it so the colour in the brush changed continually. Many apparently random dots of paint were converted into heads by moving the brush (by then a rigger) down, to form rudimentary bodies or a crush of people or even (with a flick of the wrist) a solitary bicycle.
As we approached the end of the demo Paul continued to treat us to an enthralling stream of hints and comments: only some paintings work, keep several on the go keep painting - he also has about three oils on the go it's worth tipping arab musicians try to paint places you've visited (not just from a photo) it was so humid in Dubai that watercolour took ages to dry, even at 50C dress well and use oils if it's below freezing! beware sample packs of paper - often second rate see his paintings at the Mall Gallery
As always Paul gave us a most inspiring evening. He said that it would take several more hours to complete, because much more detail was needed. When it was finished he was kind enough to send us a photo of the finished work.

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 demo, 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!

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