Tank and Teapot

oil on canvas 51x51cm

This painting was finished in December, so this is me catching up a bit.

I was getting a bit fed up with a palette of blues and buffs and wanted to get to grips with a good blaze of red. In this particular case a strong light red with a touch of alizarin crimson layered on with loads of medium. Very glossy, but very rich, and quite enjoyed doing it, though had a bit of trouble telling how the horizontal creases around the tank work.

The tank itself is a plastic model of a Panther tank I made years ago, with the camouflage lushed up a bit. The teapot is part of a full tea-set. It has an almond section, not round, reminiscent of the 15th century breastplates designed to deflect blows, in the same way that the sloping armour of this tank was designed to deflect anti-tank rounds. Incidentally, for those who care, the colour of the teapot is just about the same as ‘Panzer Grey’, the factory finish of German tanks up to about 1942. Which is a coincidence.

There is, of course, an overall similarity in the two shapes, with smaller echoes within them. Their functions, whether one reads the tank as a small model, or as a huge, noisy, dangerous machine, are entirely different.