Many many moons ago I was in Singapore and remember well the river running through the city and the hustle and bustle of the Quays where an enormous amount of trade use to take place. Literally hundreds and hundreds of junks and sampan boats used to ply the river picking up and dropping off from and to the large warehouses along the banks. Today of course all that river trading is a thing of the past and even some of the bends in the river have been straightened and reclaimed land put in place and so difficult to recognize anything. The city I remember is long gone, had few high rise buildings and no skyscrapers, but despite the new Singapore I have many old photographs of how it was.
1960 Singpore skyline
The Singapore skyline across the river towards the main city center I’ve shown here in a photograph from 1960 – the color’s not that good as it was taken in the rain, another feature that seems to have improved. Dull days and an old Petriflex 35mm camera were very much the “norm” and in fact that was the first 35mm SLR camera I bought and I remember to this day it cost £18.00 and I was so pleased with it.
So finding this old photo I thought maybe I could bring it to some sort of life by managing a painting style illustration from it and just see where it took me. Added in some color here and there, got rid of the gray skies and added some atmospheric elements, reflecting the river, which in the old image was almost colorless.
I have used blues instead of dark grays and blacks – maybe as I find blue such a nostalgic color tone and that’s how I was feeling as worked on the image. I finished it off by adding a virtual white frame to contrast the piece and titled it too.
Singapore memory
Had quite a bit of fun doing this, though did find my mind wandering off into past times and in the process found many more “snaps” taken at the time – each of which brought back amazing memories, so many of them forgotten. Found some that showed some of my old friends – well I doubt if I’d recognize them now!
It’s sobering to realize that this was over 50 years ago – thank goodness for this wonderful thing called “memory”. Artistically I find pictorial reference or “associative memory” seems to trigger incredible remembrances, each of which tends to influence a brush stroke here and a color there.
Isn’t memory a magic thing.
