January was made completely within its titular month, from snowy photograph to completed drawing. It took me longer to find a scene I wanted to represent the second month – I eventally settled on snowdrops in a sunken lane and made a start on the…
Continue reading January, February
A pair of intertwined oak trees in the park at Calke Abbey, Derbyshire. I could see extrvagant gestures in the limbs as if the two were dancing a tango. inks on kaolin-coated board, 12 x 16 inchesframed size 34x44cmprice £420
This is based on a photograph I took at Calke Abbey of some storm-damaged sweet chestnuts. They were significant entities and these are a couple of limbs that had parted company with the trunks. Someone came along and tried to make a den but I…
Continue reading Lean-to
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…
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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