Morning Harbour

	Artist: Ian Fleming
	Title: Morning Harbour
	Year: c. 1971
	Medium: oil on board
	Dimensions:
	Suggested topic: natural environment
	Source: RSA Diploma Collection
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© the Fleming family
Description: Ian Fleming developed a fine reputation as an etcher and engraver and also painted in both oils and watercolours throughout his career.Morning Harbour represents Fleming's output as a mature painter and shows the way he used the landscapes and marine activities of the north-east of Scotland for his work. Here nets, weights, masts and other marine objects are painted against a luminous, rising sun. This light source partly helps to define the objects in the foreground and also to dissolve them and create a romantic view of an industrial scene. In earlier centuries, paintings by Claude Lorrain and Joseph Mallord William Turner employed light in a similar way. Fleming has painted a semi-realistic scene of a harbour, but the real subject of this painting is the light and the atmosphere it creates.The painting is executed boldly, with sharply defined edges and angular patches of colour. The palette is earthy and warm, and the tonal range of the painting is deliberately pale to imitate the strong direct sunlight. Fleming has found an excellent way to show the glare of the sun and the highlights reflecting from the surfaces; he uses rough scrapings of pale paint over the surface resembling glittering shards of light in the misty air. This is a complex composition, with many verticals drawing the eye upward. The direction of these vertical lines which veer to the left and are counterbalanced by other smaller lines veering to the right create the impression of movement in the same way that a boat might sway from side to side.These lines are set against three horizontal bands which define the sky, harbour and ground. The hanging buoys add a splash of colour to the composition and help to define the foreground from the background. This painting is filled with the fresh feeling of a cool sunny morning. Do you know of a place you draw, paint or photograph which would allow you to study weather, light or atmosphere?