Sunshine on the Southbank – watercolour painting

This week’s featured painting is from our recent sojourn to London. We stayed in a hotel near London Bridge that was about 10 mins walk, via the fabulous Borough Market to the river Thames. It was a joy to be able to promenade along the riverside, taking in the sights, sounds and smells of the capital!

On the Saturday, as we were returning to our hotel after a wonderfully rewarding day spent at London Zoo with our daughter, the sun was shining and the atmosphere along the river was great.

This view is looking along the river Thames towards the Millennium Bridge opposite Tate Modern and, further in the distance, Embankment Bridge.

It’s one of those paintings that came together rather quickly and, while there are some elements about it that niggle me, overall I really like the simplicity, the immediacy and the sense of light in this painting.

One of the things I particularly liked was the graphic-ness of the trees, which look as if they’d recently been pollarded. A little further investigation into ‘what these trees might be’ lead me to a most remarkable resource, The London Tree Map that shows the location of trees across the whole of London! If my map reading is correct, the trees in this painting are either London Planes, or Small-Leaved Limes.

I’ve already started a larger painting of the same view, albeit from a slightly different angle.

Painting this reminded me just how much I’ve missed travelling. I love my hometown, and have enjoyed painting more local views of it recently, but there’s something about being somewhere different or somewhere new that really heightens the senses.

I managed to get a few other photographs that I think have some potential for painting from so, hopefully, there’ll be some more ‘capital’ views to come!