Planes

I have a longstanding interested in planes which began when I was a child and my father worked for the Royal Aircraft Establishment, the RAE, at Farnborough in the UK. Many of my earliest memories are aviation-related because we lived quite close to Farnborough airfield which was then a busy RAF base as well as being home to the RAE experimental aviation, and to the annual airshow which brought in many interesting planes of all sorts from all over the world.

As I am slowly ebbing away from Motor Neurone Disease I suppose I ought to say that while, for example, in 1939 – 1946 we had to fight for freedom, fundamentally I agree with Isaac Asimov’s fictional Mayor of Terminus Salvor Hardin in the book Foundation “violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”. My father, the late Dr J. D. Nelms and the man I admired more than any other, recognised that whilst it should never be anything but as last resort, sometimes it cannot be avoided. For this reason I quote his obituary in the British Medical Journal after his untimely death in 1981, ‘Dr J D Nelms, until recently the Director of the Army Personnel Research Establishment at Farnborough , Hampshire… … his grasp of the deeper implications of the establishment’s work was masterley’.’ So I post some of these pictures having had a lifetime to think about my attitude to war. I post them because they are beautiful, but I recognise that it is a savage beauty and I do not post them lightly. They represent a time when freedom was truly on the line. Reluctantly I accept that the savage beauty of these machines was necessary, but I do not post them with any sense of the glorification of war. War occurs only when every other avenue of conflict resolution has failed.

I am glad to say that some of the planes I have painted are not instruments of war, but were produced either solely for fun, or for transport, or to push the boundaries of the possible. Some indeed have been used to facilitate transporting the Gospel Good News to places to which it would otherwise be very much more difficult to transport it.

Paintings showing a variety of Missionary Aviation Fellowship aircraft, from trainers, to amphibious floatplanes to classic bushpilot planes. MAF featured because I have been able to find good inspirational public domain images of their planes, there are a number of other Mission Aviation organisations.

Cessna 172s outside the Mission Aviation Fellowship building at a training base in the Netherlands. A successful sketch configuration of Dynamic Auto Painter created a year or so ago, specifically to paint buildings, with clear lettering but nice brushwork skies – no brushstrokes, virtual or otherwise, were used in making the painting, it was all done with maths – looks like a painting though, and that was the aim, an A4 preview of an A2 sketch.

I have fortunately found two more good Public Domain images of MAF aircraft. The first is a Cessna 208 Caravan float plane in Patharghata, Bangladesh after flooding in November 2007. Needless to say, the plane is attracting great deal of interest. Its purpose was to assess the needs of the affected communities, working with other organisations. This plane is a reliable and proven single engined turboprop design, which has a good power to weight ratio and low wing loading so can take off and land on short runways. Often such floatplanes have wheels as well, built into the bottom and font of the floats so they can act as amphibians, landing on water or land. This particular example is an amphibian because one can see a wheel in front of one of the floats. Although you cannot see the registration letters in either the original photo or my painting, I suspect that this is S2-AEC, as I have access to a number of non-public-domain images of that aircraft, one of which is labelled Bangladesh.

MAF Relief Efforts after flooding in Bangladesh, 2007.

The other painting is somewhat based on an older photo, and represents a De Havilland Canada Twin Otter, operating in Papua New Guinea, as shown by the prominent P2-MFU registration on the aircraft. MAF still operates in New Guinea, alongside other Mission organisations including Ethnos360, whose pilot, Ryan Farran, flying a Quest Kodiak, a similar plane to the Cessna Caravan, has a brilliant Youtube Channel at Missionary Bush Pilot, which really re-ignited my interest in supporting missionary work in the ways that I can. These planes obviously are used to move the missionaries, bibles etc around, but also provide massive support for local communities, taking coffee, for example, out of the hinterland to where it can be sold, and supporting schools as well as acting as ambulances in case of emergency. Ryan is also a superb pilot and really good at explaining what he is doing and why.

Missionary Aviation Fellowship DHC Twin Otter on the rural grass airstrip somewhere in Papua New Guinea, probably around 1994, as I have just found another good public domain image of the same aircraft. The Cessna Caravan and Quest Kodiak have a single turboprop engine and can accommodate about 10 people or an equivalent weight of baggage. The Twin Otter, because it has two turboprop engines is a somewhat larger aircraft, seating 18 to 20 people or an equivalent weight of goods. All three have powerful engines, low wing loadings, effective flaps and simple, robust fixed tricycle undercarriages, which make them all very suitable for operating from short grass runways in places that are not always easy to get into, as some of Ryan’s videos show vividly.

Paintings mainly featuring the UK Red Arrows display team

Here is one of my first paintings, of the red arrows, tidied up and signed. The original painting is A0 in size and this preview is A4 at 300 dpi and should print quite nicely if you downloaded it and had it printed onto an A4 art quality medium , for example by laminating it onto art paper and 3mm recycled board. Please, if you do that, make a donation to the Motor Neurone Disease Association or the equivalent in your country. If there is any problem, for example the image you download being of a size other than 3508 pixels by 2480 pixels, or you wish to make a larger print than A4, please email me at drrickz@gmail.com and I will send you the correct sized painting.

‘Spiral’, the Red Arrows doing the kind of precision aerobatics which is their forte, from a public domain image, painted using my own configuration of Corel Painter 2023 and a modified impressionist brush set.

‘Curvaceous One’, the Red Arrows again, from a public domain image, painted using my own sketch configuration of Dynamic Auto Painter.

‘Curvaceous Two’, the Red Arrows again, from a public domain image, painted using my own sketch configuration of Dynamic Auto Painter.

‘Curvaceous Three’, the Red Arrows again, from a public domain image, painted using my own sketch configuration of Dynamic Auto Painter.

‘Curvaceous Four’, the Red Arrows again, from a public domain image, painted using my own sketch configuration of Dynamic Auto Painter.

‘Vulcan and Red Arrows’, from a public domain image, missing smoke from a failed smoke generator reinstated, painted using my own sketch configuration of Dynamic Auto Painter.

The underlying photograph from which this was cropped was taken with an early Fuji digital camera, and was the first of just two photoshoots of aviation subjects. There are several very nice shots, not bad considering I normally photograph flowers… The Red Arrows do a display at the end of Cowes Week in the Isle of Wight, late in the afternoon, before the evening fireworks. I caught these two planes about as spot on as possible and it makes a wonderful moody Dynamic Auto Painter painting. I tidied up the skyline, removing the petrol refinery and power station so that the planes can be the focus of the painting. Richard Cannon, a well known photographer https://www.cannonpictures.com/HOME/MND/5 looked at the painting and said in astonishment “You took that?” High praise indeed.

Corsair flying at Duxford from my second photoshoot of flying planes and the second-last shoot I did with my faithful Canon 350D and 200mm zoom lens, painted in Dynamic Auto Painter 7 using a configuration making the most of the new functionality in DAP7, which includes the brush direction being taken from the visual stimulus in the photo for the first time in DAP. My wonderful first generation digital SLR camera stopped the propeller, so in making the painting I took the propellor off and made successively more transparent images of it in GIMP, rotating the view a little between each layer. I love this photo and the painting made from it. I was just developing MND and I could hardly hold up the camera – for the first time I borrowed a mobility scooter and it inspired this photoshoot because I was not absolutely exhausted after half an hour. I took around 100 photos and about 40 of them are astonishingly good. I didn’t find this out at the time because I just emptied the camera’s card into my PC back in 2015 and only looked at the photos in 2021. Finding these photos and starting to make paintings from them is a big part of the reason for re-starting loading up my artwork here and at Flickr. This particular plane was built by Goodyear to Vought’s design and is called a FG-1D. The Corsair was at first hampered by difficulty landing it on carriers but a simple triangular stall strip mounted to the starboard wing helped counteract the effect of the enormous propellor so that the aeroplane at least stalled symmetrically. The British Royal Navy eventually solved the problem by developing a long curved approach so the pilot could see around the nose, which could be tilted upwards by as much as 17 degrees during the approach, and the Corsair became an immensely successful fighter aircraft, knocking down 10 opponents for every one lost. So successful was it that the last of the 12,571 Corsairs was made in 1953 and the aircraft played a leading role in the Korean war. There are 35 still flying.

Curtiss Hawk P36 at Duxford taken the same day as the Corsair, painted using Dynamic Auto Painter and a quick and simple Azo based configuration. One of only two Curtiss P36 Hawks still flying at the time of writing, both at Duxford. I am astonished by this photograph. It was only my second ever attempt to photograph flying planes. I used my trusty Canon 350D and Canon’s excellent 200 mm zoom lens. I was intending to do a more sophisticated painting, but I love the crisp simplicity of this and so the painting is as it is. The fast shutter speed, essential as I could scarcely hold up the camera, has frozen the propellor, but in this shot the ground provides context and a sense of speed, so I left well alone. This crop from the original photo is pretty nearly my idea of the perfect composition for a fast moving object, with space in front of the plane for it to fly into and the long axis of the plane and the ground level pretty much bang on the ‘rule of thirds’ strong composition lines. I will never take a better photograph. Another painting which Richard Cannon greeted with an astonished “And you took that?” accompanied by a shake of the head. “You just have a natural eye for composition…”