A hot sunny British Bank Holiday. Inconceivable! But here it was so Husb and I went for a stiff walk up to Rosehill Quarry, where I stopped awhile to draw the view over the Cretan Labyrinth, was cut into the turf in 1987 by Bob Shaw and a team of local volunteers. I don’t find it easy to work with landscapes, but I’m practicing hard to develop a style and approach that suits me. I guess my starting point is to define some key shapes and colours within the landscape and scribble them in place. Then I move away from the view and work with different drawing materials and colours, making marks and expressing what I want on the paper. It stops being about the subject and becomes about me. That sounds conceited but I’ve always thought of myself as an Expressionist and that’s what I’m doing, expressing myself.
I drew onto a sheet of newspaper using charcoal, carbon and Daler Rowney artists’ soft pastels. The Quarry is an amazing place. A lot of the city centre is built with stone quarried from there and in the 1980s it became an inner city environmental project and was converted into a community park and wildlife corridor. Husb and I met while we were both wroking on the project so it’s one of our favourite places. Awwww there’s romantic 😀 . You can just see the labyrinth in the bottom photo.
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