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
Memories of summer under the beeches… these trees line the side of a minor road that snakes up Nuthanger Down. We’re looking at them from the side that the road is on; on the other side, there is a steep, grassy slope down to the…
Continue reading Driftwood
This is based on a fairly old photograph from 2018, albeit of a place I know well and visit often. There is a distinct blue cast in that photograph that I found attractive, but it was difficult to reconcile the blue-green of the trees with…
Continue reading Effervescent
There’s something very dramatic about viewing something “against the light”, or from the shadow side with light seeping around the edges. And I rather like dramatic. This is another scene from Church Lane, in Witley, Surrey. The lane is less sunken here, near the top…
Continue reading Contre-Jour
Mary, Mary, quite contrary,How does your garden grow? With silver bells and cockle shells and pretty maids all in a row. The dainty plants that are “all in a row” in front of the main tree brought the quoted nursery rhyme to my mind and…
Continue reading Quite Contrary
Elegantly curved, reaching to the sky, three living beeches and a dead tree seem to dance on the high ground to the side of a sunken lane. This is another scene from the wonderful sunken lane in Witley, Surrey. Ink on kaolin-coated board, 12×16″
Multistorey is a drawing of Hartley Mauditt Lane in East Hampshire, from the vantage of a public footpath that runs alongside and above the sunken lane itself. The drawing is in Indian ink on a full Imperial size sheet of handmade Sunn Hemp paper. It…
Continue reading Multistorey
A closer look at one of the spectacular beeches, and its exposed roots, at Snelsmore Common (see alse Epic, Chorus Line and Reciprocate). Ink on kaolin-coated board, 16 x 12″
I decided to make a large drawing of the long tree roots in Folly Wood Gorge, using a full imperial sheet of watercolour (approx. 56x75cm) paper and coloured inks. I exagerrated the colours and indulged in a bit of careful splatting (an excuse to add…
Continue reading Folly Wood’s legendary roots (part 2)
There’s a ridge in Wiltshire not far from Devizes, that has a gap in it, a place where the bedrock cracked, perhaps. A track (it’s a bridleway) passes through the gap. The sides are high, and trees grow on the chalky high ground. It’s a…
Continue reading Folly Wood’s legendary roots (part 1)