Painting buckby cans

[Blake]

do you paint the inside of the lid flaps?

lol Victoria on Blake

[Phil Speight]

do you paint the inside of the lid flaps?

lol Victoria on Blake

There are no rules. However , if you mean "decorate" inside the lid and if your concern is to do with how it was done years ago , the answer,by and large, is no. Frank Jones of Leighton Buzzard painted some canal stuff for a travelling exhibition in the fifties which was much photographed . He painted castles in the lids of the cans purely because it was a special occasion. Now people copy him. It`s not wrong , it`s not right , it just happened and anyway cans nowadays are for the most part simply decorational - so why not.

Enthusiastic modern painters seem to have adopted a set of conventions and turned them into laws. "You must this , you must have that , castles must have flights of birds " and so on. It`s absolute nonsense. Paint an appropriate object , decorate it with flowers and maybe a landscape ( or a few landscapes). If an old working boatman and his family would have admired it and used it on their boat you`ve got it right. If they wouldn`t you`ve got it wrong.

The best book on the subject ( probably the ONLY book on the subject that`s of any use ) is Flowers Afloat by A.J.Lewery , the best examples are to be seen in the museum at Gloucester. The real boat decoration tradition is fast dying - if you are really keen to learn about it , so your work helps rather than hinders

it`s survival , you will need to study historic examples. Most of what you see today is either good but compromised or downright bad but there is enough good stuff left for you to learn from. By the way, a Buckby can is a water can that was bought in Long Buckby at the little shop there in the fifties. Anythingelse is just a water can.

If you want to take it seriously good luck.

Cheers

Phil

[David Schweizer]

The best book on the subject ( probably the ONLY book on the subject that`s of any use ) is Flowers Afloat by A.J.Lewery , the best examples are to be seen in the museum at Gloucester.

 

Not forgetting "Narrow Boat Painting" also by Tony Lewery (recently re-published).

Edited October 31, 2007 by David Schweizer

[Phil Speight]

Not forgetting "Narrow Boat Painting" also by Tony Lewery (recently re-published).

Quite so - but I really think Flowers Afloat supercedes the earlier book - certainly Tony felt that was so when he decided to write the second one. If this appears 6 times I apologize!

Cheers

Phil