Ian Archie Beck

The twenty four or so paintings reproduced here represent a series of adjuncts and extra thoughts on the ongoing set of watercolours I started to paint during the first lockdown in 2020. The former were subsequently published in book form as The Light in Suburbia (due to be republished shortly by Unbound). These newer images were painted using acrylic paint on canvas. The medium allows for more over-painting and glazing and subtleties of colour and tone which would be difficult to achieve using watercolour on paper.
There are a series of paintings of my kitchen window at various times of day and in varying lights. I tried to achieve a proper sense of trapped interior light against and through the glass and the patterned curtaining. Others show the surrounding streets or the view of the house from my garden studio at different times of day, from early morning to twilight and in different lights and weather. There are also some memories of the light in Verennes in southern France made poignant not only by the passage of time, but also from the impossibility at time of painting of actually going there.