This is my second version of this subject, a group of yews sprawled over the stones of Wakehurst Place’s rock walk; the first sold straight off the drawing board! This is a little bit smaller and a little bit looser than the first version, but…
Continue reading Congregate
A tangle of roots help this veteran Hawthorn cling to the hillside. Ink on kaolin-coated board, 18 x 24″
Brook Vessons was a mining village in Shropshire. Situated on a hillside by the Stiper Stones, it must have made for a remote and, at times, bleak place to live. And then the mine closed. The village was abandoned in th eearly twentieth century. This…
Continue reading Tumbledown (Brook Vessons)
Wood garlic, wild garlic, ramsons, cowleek, buckrams, bear leek, bear’s garlic… it has many names. Botanists call it Allium ursinum and it is am indicator of ancient woodland. It flourishes in early spring, before the trees get their leaves. Its balls of stellar white flowers…
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This is a path made by animals (possibly sheep, given the wool caught in the branches). It is at eye level when I stand on the sunken path going down Ladle Hill, and the branches hang low over it. I would not be able to…
Continue reading Untrodden Path
Bradgate Park is within a volcanic stone’s throw of the East Midlands city of Leicester. The area of Charnwood Forest, in which the park lies, contains “some of the oldest rocks in England according to the British Geological Survey web site (I’m guessing that Scotland…
Continue reading Precipice – SOLD
Two of the many ancient oaks in Bradgate Park, in Leicester, looking all grizzled and wise against the January wreckage of the bracken. I fancied that they were having a discussion on some suitably serious oaky topic. The orange of the bracken balances the cool…
Continue reading Elder Statesmen
It’s always rather sad to discover a dead creature. This bee, which looks like a buff-tailed bumblebee queen, expired in our house and when I found it, I decided to draw it. I used a magnifying lamp, but very little, if any part, of my…
Continue reading Queen Bee
This year’s INSIGHT picture is a new drawing of an old favourite subject. There is a little group of beech trees on the henge at Avebury, Wiltshire that have a particularly impressive set of roots visible. I think that they are called the three sisters…
Continue reading Interwoven
This is the wall of rock that rises from the sunken road’s surface to the viewpoint of Multistorey. The title, Elevation, refers to the elevated pathway above it as well as to its verticality (a plan drawing lays out the detail of a horizontal surface…
Continue reading Elevation