Category: Drawing

The Hogweed Jungle

hogweed

Monday morning and I’m back drawing by the tangle of hogweed, hemlock, nettle, dock and cleavers at Newmillerdam car park.

hogweed

Coffee Break

Happy birthday to Andrew (in the former Charles Roberts wagon works, where he started his career the Coffee Stop has opened in the room adjacent to the old drawing office).

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June Sketches

Recent sketches from my pocket-sized A6 landscape sketchbook.

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Robin Hood’s Grave

Photographs from our weekend tour of Kirklees Park where all that remains of the Priory are lintels and stone recycled for use in the buildings of Home Farm and the Gatehouse where, according to tradition, Robin Hood died (see my earlier post). The barn would have been in use at the time Cistercian nuns occupied the Priory.

There’s only a fragment of the original tombstone left as over the century so many visitors have chipped off fragments – Robin Hood’s stone was reputed to cure toothache. As Dr Borlik pointed out, the plant debris (larch needles?) scattered on the surface of the stone seem to have picked out a faint impression of the shaft of the cross that early drawings show carved on the stone.

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The Yorkshire Robin Hood

Dr Todd Borlik and an online Dr Alex Brown were the speakers at The Yorkshire Robin Hood talk and discussion at Huddersfield University yesterday.

Todd, a Shakespeare scholar with a special interest in Renaissance Ecocriticism put the tradition of Robin Hood’s death and burial in Kirklees into context. He mentioned that shortly before Shakespeare wrote As You Like It, set in the Forest of Arden, a Robin Hood play had been performed in the Rose Theatre, just across the road from the Globe.

Brown and Borlik

In his talk Riding the Wheel of Fortune with Robin Hood, Alex looked at how the fear of downward social mobility in post pandemic medieval England is taken up in some of the earliest surviving Robin Hood ballads, particularly in the story of the poor knight Sir Richard of the Lee in A Lyttell Geste of Robyn Hode.

Kirklees guide
Margaret Nortcliffe, our guide at Kirklees Priory and Robin Hood’s Grave

In the afternoon we got a chance to visit Robin Hood’s Grave and the gatehouse of Kirklees Priory, recently restored as a private home.

kirklees guide

Four Lane Ends

Lee and Briggs lino cut

Once known as Four Lane Ends, this is the view as it was in 1967 from Tithe Barn Street looking across Westfield Road to Jenkin Road, with Arnold Tattersfield’s newsagents on the left, Lee & Briggs ironmongers on the right. The fourth ‘lane’ on the near right is Manor Road.

I drew the little sketch that it’s based on while sitting at the Tithe Barn Street back entrance to the old Congregational Chapel (extreme left) while working as a teller when my dad was standing for Horbury Urban District Council. I had to politely ask every voter as they walked in for their number on the electoral roll. Towards the end of the day the local ‘independents’ (really Conservatives) would go around rounding up anyone who had promised to support them but hadn’t yet turned up.

The original of linocut was black on white but I like this reversed version, made by going for the wrong keyboard shortcut in Photoshop (Control+I instead of Control+Alt+I. After all these years I still get that wrong when I’m resizing an image). I’m currently re-scanning drawings of Horbury for a reprint of my local guide to the historic buildings of the town.

I was influenced by Daily Mail cartoonist Trog’s bold pen and ink drawings in the paper’s long-running cartoon strip Flook.

Feathers

feathers

Canada goose, mallard and what may be crow feathers which we picked up in the Deer Park at Wentworth Castle this morning.