Some sketches from a couple of days in Dungeness last week. I’ve written about Dungeness before; a shingle spit, the second largest in the world after Cape Canaveral, an hour and a half drive from London but that feels like that end of the earth. I’ve been six or seven times now, but it never fails to delight and perplex me, it’s just so weird. Strange engines are dotted around the beach, used to winch boats in and out of the water, there are sheds, containers, twisted metal, melted plastic, and what looks like space junk littered all over the wide, desert-like expanse of shingle. It can feel utterly bleak and desolate, but very beautiful too, it’s a unique place, and I never tire of it.

We’ve been visiting the place regularly over the last 8 or 9 years or so and it is changing, as it must I guess, nothing can stay exactly the same. Derek Jarman put the place on the map when he moved down here in the late ’80s. He wrote wonderful books about his experiences living in cottage on the beach and creating a garden in the unforgiving, exposed environment of the shingle. Dungeness became ‘discovered’ and now there are plenty of chic, architect designed new houses on the beach and old buildings such as the  coastguard look-out and the pump station have been done up and put out to Airbnb.

Some of the old boats that were looking weathered and picturesque when we first started coming here have now collapsed and will soon be gone. The landscape is both ephemeral and timeless. But while you might now be able to get a skinny latte at the pub on the beach and one of the tracks has a ‘private road, no access to beach’ sign across it, the strange magic of the place remains intact for the time being.

We drove down after i’d had a stressful week at work and it was the perfect anti-dote. As you wander around the moon-like landscape, everything is put in perspective and the little things that seemed so important and demanding the day before evaporate away…

Just been trying some more forest themed studies this week, trying to refine the shapes and learn how to handle the coloured pencils better. I find coloured pencil such an unforgiving medium but I keep returning to it as i’ve seen some wonderful work by other artists that inspire me. As i’m also thinking of trying out making screen prints of a couple of images (we’ve got the wonderful Print Block here in Whitstable so it would be a shame not to use it) the coloured pencils helps thinking about separating the colours and shapes as you can’t really correct or work over the image much. It’s good practice and it gets me out of the acrylic paint mindset where I can just sand down, paint over, throw paint about, etc. It feels a bit perverse, persisting with a medium that I feel so clunky with, but each time I go back to it I learn a little bit more and i’m a little bit happier with the results, so just keep going is the thing I guess.

Very much stuck in the woods at the moment, i’m just enjoying the shapes of the trees and exploring winding paths through the forest, wondering where they go, what you’d end up discovering if you followed them…

 Lost in the Woods– study, coloured pencil, 20 x 58 cm, July 2017

Trying another woodland drawing this weekend, more illustrative in approach; basically i’m trying to capture an expressionist style with a ‘folk horror’ feel, two aesthetics that don’t naturally go together but I like the idea.

This drawing is about that classic scenario of  ‘the car broke down in the middle of nowhere, the phone’s dead and the only place I can find to get help is this spooky old house’ story. Some of my favourite books and films cover this territory, everything from Beauty and Beast, to The Rocky Horror Show; you just know things are not going to quite according to plan when somebody walks up to a rickety old house in a thunderstorm in the middle of the night!

This line from Angela Carter’s The Courtship of My Lyon exquisitely expresses the mingled hope and apprehension of approaching a mysterious house on a dark winter’s night, looking for help:

‘It was almost night; that house, with its sweet, retiring melancholy grace, would have seemed deserted but for a light that flickered in an upstairs window, so vague it might have been the reflection of a star…’

I’ve been sketching trees recently and I wanted to use some of the wonderful shapes of pollarded trees I’ve encountered in the countryside over recent months. I’ve always loved these trees, they often turn knobbly and twisted where branches have been lopped off and look like strange creatures with old gnarled faces peering down at you. When we’re out cycling in the countryside around Berlin I sometimes come across a whole row of then along the side of the road. Here are a few snaps from a trip up to the forests and lakes north of Berlin;

And some sketches:

I haven’t done much drawing over recent months so planning a composition felt tricky; If I made a mistake I couldn’t just paint over it as I can with the acrylics, I’d have to know what I was doing from the off. So to help cut it down to size I used some paper shapes to arrange on a background as a mock up. I could photograph different compositions, adjust and get it going along the right lines before I committed to starting the drawing:

And then with a photo App I used an infra- red filter to turn the sky black (I love this pic actually, i’d like to try and capture some of its weirdness in a drawing sometime):

The mock up helped sketch out the drawing and the process was less intimidating. Then it was just a case of crawling across the page with the drawing:

A year or two ago I constructed a model of a pollarded tree and we used it in a promo video made with Clive Hicks-Jenkins and Peter Telfer for Clive’s brilliant Hansel and Gretel picture book. Published by Random Spectacular, you can see a link to the book and the promo film  here on the St. Jude’s website (and follow this link to a great post on Clive’s blog about the story behind the ‘witchy tree’). And here are a couple of photos of the model:

Last weekend I went to the art shop here in Berlin (my favourite art shops, they have everything, but a bit tough on the credit card) and stocked up on some model making materials again as i’m about to go back to making some 3D work. So, more spooky trees coming soon!

Blean Woods, study, coloured pencil, 28 x 28 cm, July 2017

If you head out southwards from Whitstable you soon climb up onto a ridge of hills and you find yourself in Blean Woods. There are lots of cycling and walking trails and it can be a nice change from the coast to get lost in the trees. I’ve posted recently about going back to the woods in my work and delving further into the world of the forest that I explored in the Hansel and Gretel work I did a year or two ago. Blean Woods are pretty extensive by English standards, and most of it is classed as ‘ancient woodland’ but you’re never really very far from civilisation and there are usually plenty of people about, walking dogs, cycling, hiking or on family days out. They are at their most lovely in the spring I think, when the ground is carpeted in anemones and then bluebells. They can be magical then, but on the whole, I prefer the wilder woods of Wales, where the trees are twisted and gnarled and you feel a long way away from the mundane world. And when I’m over at our home in Germany, I love getting out of town and into the ancient beech woods to the north and west of Berlin. The trees are huge, the shadows dark, and you don’t see a soul for miles. I love woods where you feel that the place is alive, a place that is ‘other’, where you sense you’re being observed, that you’re a visitor, out of your own element. These lines from Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring sum it up well, from the chapter when Tom Bombadil is telling the hobbits all about the Old Forest;

…’they began to understand the lives of the Forest, apart form themselves, indeed to feel themselves as the strangers where all other things were at home.’