Here are a few reflections about my practice: why I draw, how I draw, what I draw. I enjoy artist’s biographies and I like the insights that they offer. I find it encouraging. If this kind of thing encourages you and others, or helps make my work more interesting, then this has been worthwhile.

Mental Health

I will start on a field outside Sassoferrato in the province of Ancona in Italy. Despite being Italy, it feels like an unremarkable place. During the day we’ve been to Fabriano, the home of Italian paper. Seduced by very high quality stationary and art supplies, I have visited the factory shop and bought a pen and sketchbook. The aim is to escape the regular evening screaming of my young son by heading outdoors to find solace and a bit of peace. I haven’t done this much since becoming an academic. It feels like drawing might help me find some purpose beyond my then job as a lecturer, and also something to focus on when I get a little freedom from the pressures of having a young family.

The drawing is of the landscape, with the building we are staying in in the bottom right corner. It takes maybe half an hour. I’ve never drawn a landscape with a pen before. As an exercise in managing my mental health, it makes perfect sense. As a way to record a landscape, it doesn’t, but I enjoy the challenge and I start to wonder how historic etchings recorded such scenes. The image marks my return to art and, specifically and selfishly, art for myself. Over the years I’ve noted the solace that art gives me, essentially from this moment. In many respects it is an area of my life that I can control.

The link between medium and subject

I like the link between how we engage with our environment and what we see or become interested in. Despite a keen sense of art history and a wide ranging appreciation of what artists have done and do, I tend to be drawn in a particular direction because I draw with ink. I do this because I studied with architects, and I always enjoyed the fact that they also think with a pen. I have simply taken that practice from my work into my art. It was a choice.

Because of my academic and professional background, and because I draw with a pen, I like urban subjects. I’m also drawn towards aspects of our environment that are rich with detail. This is reflected in how I represent nature and landscapes, where there are few impressions; but instead a somewhat relentless interest in outlines, textures and tones.

More recently I have also used colour to help me define aspects of what may otherwise be an overly complex image, or to help me represent aspects of an image that I otherwise might struggle with. I’ve played with watercolour for this, but prefer the simplicity of just using a limited number of coloured pencils that come to represent a preferred narrow colour spectrum.

Into the trees

I have three ways that I represent leaves on trees, which I suppose is an insight into technique, but also may help you to do the same. Close up I try and represent each leaf, which is clearly time consuming and probably finished at home. At a common medium distance I will use cross hatching in various small iterations, which I find very representative. Distant trees are typically just outlined, and highlighted with tone or colour as appropriate. Distant trees are typically harder to represent well with a pen, or appear sketchy and unfinished. I will use different versions of green and blue to help define the various levels of depth within foliage. The combination of colour and line can be striking.

Specific themes of interest and why

I do tend to draw certain things, but certainly not a narrow range. I love the Glamorgan Coast, which has an incredibly distinctive geology. I have a collection of piers. The post-industrial landscape has been a significant part of my life. I enjoy the juxtaposition of sometimes hard legacy of mining or quarrying within an otherwise natural setting. My grandfather was a quarry manager in Ecton in the Manifold Valley, and so maybe this is me picking up on early memories of that landscape. I also enjoy the early mills or canal and rail infrastructure that is now softening into a greener frame. There is a lot of this stuff where I come from and where I live now.

Interesting townscapes will also always be an important subject. A favourite is a quick sketch of Grey Street in Newcastle-upon-Tyne which maybe took about an hour one lunch time.

It was just after this drawing that I went into a book shop and found a book about urban sketching; so then I noted that this is a thing. I enjoy the famous townscapes of Europe, pulled together from travels, but I also enjoy the more humble or vernacular town setting closer to home. I feel lucky to live in a part of the world where some of us have looked after and still celebrate that urban heritage, and the local and more intimate lifestyles and relationships that such places support. It is under threat though.

I’m obsessed with trees. Our care for them is obviously an ecological imperative, but I like to celebrate their dense, rich complexity and therefore beauty. My work is a reaction to all the people who just rip out trees to create space for development, or because they find that they get in their way – dropping leaves, taking light, or stopping them from parking their car. I also enjoy interiors. This comes straight from Dutch Golden Age painting which I love. My interiors are places that I can spend time; so home, and at friends or relatives, who are typically annoyed that I didn’t tidy up. Over the years these form a great memory bank of places that I have enjoyed being. Finally I also love allotments and gardens, the more chaotic and natural, the better. My wife has an allotment where she grows fruit and so some of the images are of the plots nearby, or of various family gardens where I can spend time

A lot of my drawings I start on site and then finish at home, but some of the more finished pieces are just derived from photographs, in part because they just take so long, and the places that the images represent are probably not that straight forward to stay in for hours. My wife wouldn’t appreciate that, and it will rain. Some of these latter images are large, with many forming wide panoramas.

Panoramas

The interest in panoramas comes from my job, where I design streets and the spaces between buildings. I have often photographed wide views or used software to stick together various photographs to more carefully represent what interests me. I simply took this tendency into townscapes or wide landscape views, where the panorama allows some greater sense of the urban or natural grandeur that various environments have. Often this allows some kind of juxtapositon, with a high foreground or some element that is pretty close.

High Foregrounds

Compositionally, I sometimes like to include a high foreground. In a practical sense this allows me to introduce the detail that my use of pens draws me towards, but Ive also come to enjoy the overall balance of the images which have a interesting quality and which I think is a bit original.

Drawing and Sketching

The history of art has always treated drawing as provisional, and only a step towards the use of other media to produce a finished work. This is despite a history of art in which painting itself has moved a great distance towards and beyond impression and expression. Some of my work has taken a long time and I hope that it is a celebration of drawing for its own sake, and not merely considered secondary to the work of others, by virtue of the choices I’ve made about my preferred medium.

I am not a professional

Many years ago I reflected on whether it would have been possible to be a professional artist. I realised then that I only wanted this to be a part of my life, and that I didn’t want to be defined by it. Drawing is a part of my job, but it doesn’t typically afford me the kind of freedom that doing it as a hobby does. I don’t have to worry about pleasing people. I could turn down commissions. More critically I suppose I wanted to have a job that was a little less self indulgent, and confronted other issues that are also important to me. So I am an amateur by choice and design, and I tend to think that that has been the right place to have this kind of thing in my life.