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
Some of the extensive branches of an oak tree growing at Calke Abbey, Derbyshire. The tree itself bears a plaque, screwed to its trunk, “In loving memory… ” There is a name, and dates indicating that the gentleman in question died in 1984 at the…
Continue reading Branching Out
A tangle of roots help this veteran Hawthorn cling to the hillside. Ink on kaolin-coated board, 18 x 24″
Winner of the President’s Award at the Society of Graphic Fine Art 104th Open Exhibition at the Mall Galleries, London, 2025 The origins of this drawing and the photograph it was based on are quite involved and not very interesting, so let’s just say that…
Continue reading Squeee! – SOLD
This was done from new photographs, but I have worked with this view before in ink (2019) and in oil (2018). It’s at Danebury Hill near Andover, Hampshire ; there is a splendid hillfort there and this is looking along the outer embanked fortification ring.…
Continue reading Embankment Revisited
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…
Continue reading Wood Garlic
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