Category: Art

Ernest Bowler, Castleton

Ernest Bowler
Moors somewhere near Castleton, Oil painting, Ernest Bowler, 1920s, canvas approximately 24×20 inches.

Does this moorland scene look familiar to you? I’m guessing that it’s somewhere near Castleton in the Peak District but I’ve never been able to pinpoint the exact location. Please let me know if you have any ideas.

Bowler’s painting of Peveril Castle in my 2006 book, High Peak Drifter, a sketchbook of the High Peak in spring.

My grandad Maurice Swift, a cabinet maker and funeral director from Sheffield, bought this painting and a another of Peveril Castle from Castleton artist Ernest Bowler in the 1920s.

My mum inherited both pictures in the 1960s so I’d long been familiar with them, although I didn’t get to visit the area until the spring of 2006 when I drew my High Peak Drifter sketchbook. I’d always wondered if Bowler had romanticised the view of the Castle but no, when I drew in Cavedale, I discovered that is pretty much the way it is.

The Secret Life of Paintings

I re-hung the moorland scene today, which gave me a chance to take another look at the back of the painting.

back of painting

A few years ago, Robin Taylor (see link below) cleaned the painting and revarnished it, bringing back colour to a moorland scene that had always looked rather dour and brownish. You can see from this back view of the canvas that it has been around for a while, but that’s understandable because we’re pretty sure that the painting was hanging in grandad’s house during Sheffield Blitz, 80 years ago last Saturday. The house was damaged beyond repair but grandad managed to salvage some of his possessions, including a boyhood portrait of his father George. This was also oil on canvas and was damaged in the raid but grandad repaired it using a puncture repair kit. The rubber patch is still in place on the back of the canvas.

label

The ‘fine art restorer’ George Wilkinson, who either framed the picture or repaired it after the bombing raid, was to crop up in grandad’s life a few years later in a rather dramatic fashion.

Sarah Ann

Sarah Ann

This is my great-grandma, Sarah Ann Swift (nee Truelove), doing her bit for the war effort by making dolls for the Penny-a-Week fund which raised money for hospitals. She lived next door to grandad in a substantial stone-built semi-detached house on Nether Edge Road.

Comic strip account of the air raid, drawn from my mum’s description when I was 14 years old.

As the Dorniers and Heinkels of the Luftwaffe flew over, my grandma and grandad and my mum sheltered in their air-raid shelter in the back garden but my great-grandma Sarah preferred to head for the shelter of her cellar, along with Queenie the Pomeranian and her pet bird. Great-grandma’s side of the house was so badly damaged that rescuers had to bring her, along with Queenie and the bird, out through the coal chute.

Sarah
Sarah at the time of her marriage to George Swift.

After the raid, grandad and grandma and my mum relocated to Bradway Road, while Sarah Ann not only bought her own house elsewhere in Sheffield but also another house to rent out as a source of income. This didn’t go down well with her only son, my grandad Maurice. He thought it was ridiculous for her to saddle herself with a mortgage at her age, so he bought the house for her.

A few years later when Sarah died, he might well have assumed that she would have left the houses to him. It didn’t turn out like that.

As the funeral cortege drove through the streets of Sheffield, it started snowing. Maurice’s driver, Billy Elliot, pulled in:

“We’ve lost the rest of the party Mr Swift, would you like me to wait for them.”

“Let the b*****s find their own way!” snorted grandad.

After the funeral, organised by my grandad (he was an undertaker, as I’ve said), family and friends gathered for a funeral tea.

A rather nervous solicitor got up and read Sarah’s will. Sarah had left a small savings book to Maurice, which probably didn’t cover his expenses in organising her funeral, but she had left her houses to two young ladies (but that’s another story).

“Does anybody have any questions?” the solicitor asked.

Grandad stood up: “Yes, I’ve got some questions!”

“This should be interesting!” my mum whispered to her friend.

So, the connection with Geo. Wilkinson, ‘fine art restorer’? He acted as one of Sarah’s executors. A brave man to face up to my grandad!

Ten or fifteen years ago, when my mum and I were researching the family tree, we ordered a copy of the will. In the family archive we’ve a letter to Maurice from his solicitors, explaining that although there were defects in the way his mum’s will was worded, it was a valid document.

Further Reading

books

High Peak Drifter Richard Bell, available from Willow Island Editions, ISBN 1-902467-16-7

book

Nether Edge in the Second World War compiled by the Nether Edge History Group, Second World War Research team, ISBN 09514003-2, paperback. You can order a copy, £10 plus postage, from the group via this e-mail: nenghistory@gmail.com

Sheffield Blitz

My thanks to Andy Beezer, member of the Nether Edge History Group, who a week ago, on the 80th anniversary of Sheffield Blitz, hosted an online Zoom tour of the air-raid shelter for my brother and sister and I. Grandad’s house may be long gone but the robustly-built concrete air-raid shelter survived.

Link

Robin Taylor, Bespoke framing and oil painting restoration services covering Wakefield, Leeds and Dewsbury.

First Fruits

mug

Testing out my new Lamy nexx M fountain pen with the De Atramentis Brown ink, I drew the Habitat mug on the coffee table in front of me, then rounded up the available fruit: this time a lemon and two Royal Gala apples. The apples are British and in these days of tense Brexit negotiations, I’m pleased to say that they are flying the Union Jack the right way up on the label, I’ve just checked.
You can see that there’s no problem with the ink running when I add the watercolour wash. Compared with my first drawing of my feet yesterday, the pen is settling in and producing finer lines, which is what I want.

fruit

Bananas don’t survive long in this house but here are some that I drew at the beginning of the month, resisting the urge to add colour in this case. These were drawn with a Lamy Safari loaded with De Atramentis Document Black ink.

bananas

You might be wondering how my attempts to improve my handwriting are going. Not too impressive so far, but showing slow improvement. These long and short downstrokes improved as I got down the page. In the next exercise, I get to practice real letterforms, ‘hb’ and ‘hp’, as the authors of Improve Your Handwriting point out, these are ‘closely related letters that share the same lines and arches’.

writing exercise

Lamy nexx

Lamy nexx

It was writing my Christmas cards that made me realise that my handwriting needed some attention, so I’ve been reading Teach Yourself Improve Your Handwriting by Rosemary Sassoon and Gunnlaugur SE Briem, and I’ve taken their advice to try another pen.

Lamy nexx

The Lamy nexx M94 is a bit larger than the regular Lamy Safari that I’m used to, with a rubber grip, which makes it particularly suitable for someone like me with large hands. I’ve gone for an F, fine, nib because I felt a larger size would make my writing a bit larger than I’m aiming for. The F nib will also be more suitable for drawing details in my sketchbook.

feet

While I was ordering the pen and its filler from The Writing Desk, I went for a bottle of De Atramentis Document Ink in Brown. I’ve been using De Atramentis Black ink in all my pens recently, so going back to brown is intended to be a way of getting back into the habit of drawing from nature. The woodland subjects that I have in mind should work well drawn in brown.

Squirrel, Jay and Fieldfares

Trees at the top end of Coxley Valley
sycamore

There’s no better time than the present to get started, so on our new regular walk around the Woodland Trail at Earnshaw’s Timber Yard at the top end of Coxley Valley, I got Barbara to buy the takeaway lattes and tiffins while I drew the view from the picnic table in one of the garden shelters in the displays there. As you can see, the De Atramentis Ink soon dries enough to allow me to add a quick watercolour wash.

I didn’t have time to add the watercolour wash to the sketch of the sycamore in the Cluntergate car park in Horbury, so I photographed the tree with my iPhone an added the colour later.

This morning as we entered the Woodland Trail, a sleek-looking grey squirrel dashed across the path in front of us, no doubt well-fed on the bumper crop of acorns we had this year. At the diagonally opposite corner at the top end of the wood, a jay flew to the top of the tallest oak, acorn in its beak, before flying off deeper into the wood.

squirrel

Amongst the hollies which form the most conspicuous part of the shrub layer, great tits were checking out the branches, while blue tits, in the same mixed flock, worked the bare branches of the oaks above. Three brown birds shot out from the lower branches of the next group of hollies which we think were redwings, although we didn’t get enough of a look of them to be sure. I miss a lot of bird calls but Barbara heard a rattly ‘chack-chack-chack-chack’ call, like, as she described it, ‘like running a pencil along the corrugations of a wash-board’, so they might have been fieldfares.

Links

Lamy nexx M fountain pen

The Writing Desk fountain pen specialists

De Atramentis Document Ink

Gunnlaugur SE Briem design, handwriting, lettering.

Free Books by Gunnlaugur SE Briem on Operina

Rosemary Sassoon at Sassoon Fonts

Stoneman

stoneman

Just another Monday morning in Illingworth Park. This ageing rock star was cobbled together from details of the sandstone walls around the park.

After Robo-Parkie and Elderman, I’m getting familiar with the Photoshop techniques involved. Especially useful is the ‘Select Object’ lasso tool and for finer tuning of the edges having Photoshop on my iPad Pro and being able to draw with an Apple Pencil makes things so much easier.

Dust Sheet

dustsheet

I often end up drawing modular chairs when I’m in a waiting room but today I’m in luck, the decorators are here and they’ve left a folded dust sheet and a little still life of carpet tiles and cardboard cartons stacked in a bin. I can get absorbed in the deep folds of the sheet just as I might if I was up in the Dales drawing a rock face. Why should a dust sheet make a more fascinating subject than a modular chair? Writing in a different context, author Lia Leendertz suggests a reason in her article Our garden, our refuge in this month’s The Garden:

‘When I felt calm and happy there, it may have been because my garden contains plenty of ‘fascination’ – a not-very-scientific-sounding, but entirely scientific concept which suggests that or brains are calmed by certain shapes, such as unfurling fern fronds and the centres of aeoniums.’

Lia Leendertz, The Garden, December 2020

Link

Lia Leendertz, garden writer and author living in Bristol

RHS, the Royal Horticultural Society publish The Garden magazine

Tai-Shan

Tai-Shan

Dannii Minogue was our model for Sky Arts’ last one-hour live session of Portrait Artist of the Week. I wanted to go back to my regular sketchbook style, the quick sketches that I’d do if we were watching people go by from a cafe, rather than building up a single drawing, as I did in previous weeks.

I struggled with Dannii but presenter and portrait painter Tai-Shan Schierenberg worked better as a quick drawing. I’ll miss the weekly sessions but I feel that I’m getting geared up to travelling around with a sketchbook and hope that before too long in the new year we’ll have more freedom to travel.

sketches

Royal Gala

Royal Gala
king

“Uneasy lies the head that wears the throne.”

W. C. Seller & R. J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That

Another fruity character, this time a Royal Gala, so I’ve gone for an apple-shaped monarch suffering the after-effects of a Tudor banquet. This was as far as I got with him, as he didn’t have the same a-peel (see what I did there?) as Cavendish the banana-inspired butler.

One-point Perspective

perspective drawing

It’s back to the drawing board with the online course that I started last summer, Mattias Adolfsson’s The Art of Sketching: Transform Your Doodles into Art. This was the technical challenge, to draw a re-imagined version of your room in one-point perspective. Mattias suggested that once we’d established the framework, we should add a few hand-drawn touches but I decided that I’d like to stick with the drafting head on my parallel motion drawing board for all the right angles, adding the perspective lines with a ruler.

Cavendish

fruit and cartoon characters

The Cavendish banana accounts for 47% of world production and makes the perfect name for a butler, especially as the Cavendish originated from the hothouses of Chatsworth House, the ultimate setting for a country house murder mystery.

I try to catch the individual character of a fruit as I draw it, so how would I bring that out as a cartoon character? The Royal Gala apple made me think of an overindulged Henry VIII character, the lemon of Poirot’s secretary Miss Lemon but it was that last banana, with a deferential hunched stoop and a slightly over-ripe seediness that made me think of an imperious but dodgy butler from a creaky 1930s murder mystery.

His colours are taken straight from the banana my watercolour sketch, using the Photoshop eye-dropper tool. Only the flesh tone needed lightening.