Battle of Britain incident which led to pioneering eye-surgery to benefit over 200 million patients world-wide

Painting Completed. No 4 in a series of pages showing an aviation painting develop as it happens

"One Ran up the Clock"

by John Howard Worsley : Number 4

Seeing it through

Having had a successful flight over Winchester, I returned to the Frontline Museum to start the colour work. By now, the line work had plenty of time to dry and I was able to mix three small breakfast bowls of background colour:- Cobalt and white for the top right corner of the canvas, gradually blending diagonally down through a sort of straw colour (mixed from yellow ochre and white with a spot of blue to grey it up) to a darker browny grey at the bottom. There was no fuss here, the paint was spread on right over the linework so that it barely showed through. Normally on smaller light canvases, I would use a lamp to shine through the back of the canvas to show the line work but this canvas, because of its size, was a heavy, close weave and I had to resort to wiping back to the image as the paint got sticky. I was lucky here because the day was quite warm (a condition which didn't prevail) and as I had mixed a fair bit of Liquin drying agent in with the paint, it got to its controllable condition quite soon. Generally I find it best to paint over the entire canvas and then paint into it when its gets sticky. This method allows the overall hue and colour theme to become part of the main subject and can become quite exciting later when detail is suggested where the subject blends with its background as it would in life.

To allow me to work over the wet paint, I devised a long painters' mahl stick with a tapered paddle-end which I rested on a movable pin. This pin could be quickly placed into a series of holes drilled around the frame of the easel. The taper allowed me to make fine adjustments to the stick's angle by sliding it on the pin. This was a great help when painting straight lines such as wing edges.

After several days, working through wildly changing temperatures, the Hurricane was coming on well and as it was silhouetted against the southern light, I let it dry so that final details like the fuselage stringers could be traced on from the master drawing. At that stage, a few discrepancies emerged which I was able to correct but I made sure that where I altered an outline, I re-painted the background at its edge so that the image could be blended in and not leave a hard, paint-on-paint finish. I like to keep the whole work blended until the final stage when only a few hard highlights are applied, these generally in-line with the motion of the subject.

Eventually, the painting reached its finishing stages where I had a last check on details. One of the items to be changed was the way I had done the exhaust stubs. For some reason I'd painted them as the fish-tail type which I now believe was used after 1941. When a painting takes a while to do such as this one, I find I am constantly pouring over photos and stories in the evenings and sometimes instead of resolving a detail, it gets confused. This mistake was corrected and it was time for the media interviews and promotion photo/video work. Rayner Intraocular Lenses Ltd. who are hosting the celebration at the Science Museum in London for which this painting has been done, had engaged an American promotions firm to cover the various aspects of the occasion, my painting being just one small part. David Carlin King, the most charming of chaps from across the lumpy lake, arrived and set to work with his TV equipment. Just in time! For as he was packing his gear away, some blokes in overalls came in and started mucking about with the Red Baron's Dri-Dekker, beside which, I'd set up my easel.
Big spanners and screwdrivers were ominously placed around the quivering aeroplane.

The painting is finished,.... Just in time,..... so is the Museum!

The writing was on the wall! Virtually the next day, I was told the sad news that the Frontline Museum was to close. All those wonderful artifacts of the Battle of Britain, the aeroplanes, the displays were to be dismantled and dispersed. Within a week the furniture was sold off and the ad' signs were taken down. Now the great double-hanger building remains empty and forlorn.
It was the heavy local taxes which killed it. When will they learn?

Click here to see the final presentation in the Science Museum

Click here to see the preliminary stages of the large painting