Drawings
a pack of poundshop pens
Suffolk skies are mountainous and ever changing and trying to record them has become both a release and an obsession
Pakefield is one of our towns many delightful secrets
Printemp Embers charcoal plague drawings with foraged twigs
Lowestoft, metaphorically & literally the edge of the earth
Idle hands or how I fell back in love with drawing
/ a beacon /
After a hiatus of decades as a pixel pushing designer, I fell back in love with the physical act of drawing whilst lying in a dry tent at a wet festival propped up on a bed made from bundles of Stool Pigeon music newspapers, whilst mournfully sipping calvados and looking like a pikey Hugh Hefner. Eyeing the filthy boots I had on lit in the unzipped tent’s bright triangle of hilly Yorkshire farmland that me and hundreds of other indie kids were camping in, I began to study the surrounding countryside and, for the first time in years, I wanted to draw it.
Our tinted valley’s confident colours showed more query and optimism than all the music and earth being trodden over at the main arena, so instead of troshing over to see another band of skinny white men on stage I found the half-inch black Sharpie pen that Phil and I used for labelling bundles of papers with and used it on the only paper I had to hand, our own half berlinner newspapers.
/ sheet 137 /
Sheet 137
This drawing is part of a collection of drawings taken from an old O.S. map centred around Lowestoft. 
This ‘score’ is as old as the town itself and for a while was known as Denny’s Score, probably after Amy Denny, one of two elderly Lowestoft widow’s executed in the 17th century for witchcraft. A gate in the flint knapped wall led to the prominent trader Samuel Pacy’s garden and he would sell herring to local women from it. Denny went to buy fish here one day but Pacy wouldn’t sell to her and she, after the third time of asking, cursed him and his family with the same sharp-witted Lowestoft tongue that you can still hear every day of the week down the High Street.The pensioner was arrested, bound and then hauled fifty miles on foot along the Waveney valley in winter to Bury St. Edmunds for trial at the assizes court.During the proceedings Samuel Pacy’s ‘bewitched’ 11 year old daughter Elizabeth played dumb, spat out nails and performed convulsions and fits like Linda Blair in front of her audience and jury in court. All present were beguiled into a ‘guilty’ verdict with the sentence of death. Amy Denny, along with the also innocent co-accused Rose Cullender, she swang for it on the 17th March 1662.
/ suffolk skies /
Mental Floss
The linear patterns that occurred when taking a single screen grab of video footage from an old-school tape camera were works of art in their own right. I used the technique several times and the results for this Hawaiian shirt feature were some of my favourites.
“The sky is the source of light in Nature and it governs everything”
John Constable
When Constable was a lad his father tried to curb his artistic leanings by sending him out into the fields to learn how to look after the livestock and land that would one day be his. Constable would skive off and lie down in the Stour valley’s grass, look up at those huge rolling skies above him and wonder how on earth he would learn to paint them. All of his working life he tried to capture the skies beauty in his work, and I am honoured to follow in his footsteps.
/ charcoal /
Printemp Embers
My daily walks to assuage the effects of the plague would usually take me north of Lowestoft along the Gunton cliff where one day I collected the charcoal remains of gorse bushes burnt by the local kids. This annual contest between our bored youth and the fire service happens every spring and provides me with free raw resources to draw with. Most of this collection was drawn with that charcoal, and because the gorse recovers quickly I wait eagerly, as I do every year, for the spring to return.
/ patterns & lines /
/ pakefield /
Doggerland
Our connections with the Dutch go back a lot further than our modern-day consultations with them about ways to keep the sea water at bay on our shores. There is archaeological evidence that around 700,000 years ago the first settlers arrived on our shores here via the Doggerland marshes that, at the time, linked us to the mainland before the sea levels rose and created our xenophobic little island. These primitives were the first humans to settle in northern Europe, right here in the broadleaf woods and marshes amongst the mammoths and giant deers. Some would say we haven’t really evolved that much in all that time.
/ lowestoft /
Lowestoft is often described as a pimple on the arse of England. There are no motorways in East Anglia and our train station is at the end of the line. It is a place that you don’t pass through accidentally. You have to choose to come here, and most people do not, but their loss is our gain.
