In this July 2023 edition of Light you can see:

• Another watercolour in the 2023 False Bay project.
• Some portrait demos for the watercolour class
• A small adventure to The Place of No Return
• An update to a Commissions posting on my blog

All accompanied by another piece of guitar music from Mike.

Therefore pause…
Sit back.
Close your eyes and take a deep, breath.

Now

Read on…

This is my latest painting for the 2023 project.  This is Bikini Beach in Gordon’s Bay.  I will probably do this view again or at least will touch up with some serious darks.

I was thinking about another False Bay view and realised I had no paintings of The Pipe.  Which is not good enough.  Therefore here is a view from the boardwalk at The Pipe – looking over to the Hottentots Holland above Gordon’s Bay.

You can see the collection at the link below:

We have been working on Portraits in the class and I have been doing some demonstrations in the class and in the evening.

“Light is Sweet” is the official SJQ Watercolour newsletter.

Please drop me a comment on the blog posting and share this post and email with abandon.

The 2023 False Bay project may well form the basis for a 2024 Calendar.  If you know of organisations who offer year-end gifts to their clients please let me know or show them the page about “Calendar Projects”.  And drop me a note.  The clients who gave away the 2023 calendars received positive feedback from their clients.  Thank-you

In July my consulting work took me to Accra in Ghana. While I was there I was able to visit Osu Castle. Nii Okaijah who took me for a drive around the city told me there is written above a gate in the wall “The Door of No Return”. We walked across the beach to see this gate. A sombre reminder of our capacity for savagery, for profit. Revelation 18:13 in talking about the fall of the great city Babylon talks about how the merchants weep because no-one buys their cargo anymore. Then follows a long list of the wonderful things they sold, ending with “… and slaves, that is, human souls”.

This is just one of the slave castles on this coastline. I did the watercolour sitting on a beautifully constructed breakwater, protecting fishing boats pulled up on the shore. The beautiful tropical scene in which stood this horror was also marred by the stream flowing into the ocean which was raw sewerage. The smell pervaded the area making it necessary to speed up the watercolour.

Here I sit on the breakwater doing my sketch photographed by Nii Okaijah.

And here is the irrepressible Nii Okaijah.  He is a driver for my consulting client.  We had a short gap on the day we finished the work and he showed me around the city.  

This is another photo Nii took of me starting to paint the watercolour.  

I have engaged the services of Hagen to tighten up how SJQ Watercolour is presented online.  As I reworked the Home page I realised I do not have a posting about commissions and have just created a first draft which I will keep updated.

This watercolour comes from a commission for a set or paintings all about the apple industry.  My client supplies Nitrogen  technology for the industry and wanted a set of watercolours to hang in his boardroom.

Well there goes July 2023