Early Crayon and Watercolours

Soul being laid bare again. Today I've put together a collection of my earliest forays into colour sketching and painting. Dating from 1992 to 1994 I had only picked up a pencil again since leaving school a mere 2 years before and standards had not yet reached the dizzying lows that I achieve today. So: stop that sniggering and adopt your most appreciative expressions as we take a look at scribblings from some thirty years ago. Oh blimey... thirty years! I'll carry on after a bit of a sit down...

This view of Portmeirion in Wales started life as a pencil drawing during the early days of my sketching when I used to draw on site (or pleine air as we artist types like to say) but with the main concern being to get it done and stop before anyone came to look over my shoulder and laugh. I needn't have worried too much. The only person who came anywhere near just shouted "I am not a number - I am a free man!" and carried on running, followed by a marching band and a huge bouncing ball. The crayons were added later at home in a secure and safe environment.

An experiment that to-date has never been repeated was this sketch on black paper with pencil crayons of Lytham windmill in Lancashire. It's only small, probably around 5x4 inches (12.5 x 10 cm). Even at home there was a sense of get it done and put it away quick!

First ever watercolour since finishing GCE O Levels (I just managed to fail my art exam...) at school in 1970. Actually the traction engine isn't bad, but the forest that only existed in my head is pretty dire I admit. Perhaps it says something about the state of my mind at the time? Complex is not the word!

This is a view of Coniston Water from the north west corner of the lake at Monk Coniston. Done from one of my own black and white photos it was as much an excercise (ha! experiment!) in handling distant hills and reflections in water as much as anything.

In 1993 we spent a fortnight's holiday in Florida and visited Cape Kennedy Space Centre one day. You don't get a lot of time for sketching on such a visit and I did this once back at home from a postcard we bought. We were quite narked as our flight home was within a couple of days of a Space Shuttle launch, though in the end it was called off because of the weather anyway.

This was the first sort of serious attempt at a watercolour, again from one of my own photographs of a Blackpool tram. I had bought an A4 pad of watercolour paper boards. This now hangs in the hallway of my mate who insists it was because he liked it rather than just to make me feel good. It did anyway.

I think this may have already sneaked into one the UK sketches articles but it belongs here just as much. I was getting ambitious by this time. This is on a massive A3 bit of paper and is another sketch done from one of my own black and white photos, this time of Knaresborough in Yorkshire. A bit scribbly as yet, particularly in the tree department, but it did take me a long time to get to grips with drawing trees which I still do with a sort of slightly more controlled scribble these days. This marked a start at using several colours in the same spot to achieve some form of texture or effect.

This technique was taken to extremes in the eye of this eagle portrait, this time from a detail of someone else's painting (I'm not that daft as to get so close to the real thing...). I spent ages on the eye and feel it did pay off. There are lots of different colours in there!

After moving on somewhat with pencil crayons I fancied trying something a bit more ambitious with watercolours. This was on another of the A4 boards, but suffers a little from sticking to a wholly inappropriate brush that came with a child's watercolour set and putting down large blocks of dark colour instead of building up layers. A bit of laziness is a factor here too in that decision! The dark grey of the smoke at the side of the loco is probably the worst of it, the fields could be better but the area around the station buildings and platform at least made me keep it instead of chucking it in the bin!

This watercolour was done from a sheet of paper from the A5 sketch pad and showed me how badly paper reacts to being soaked! As wet parts expanded and dry parts didn't the surface became anything but flat. Again the difficulty in producing fine work with a stiff flat-ended brush led to a 12 year gap between this and my next attempt at watercolours. By then, though, my drawing techniques were getting better.

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Sketches from Outside the UK, Part 5

Here we are, ten months of Covid-19 lockdowns, hardly leaving the house and moving from one hobby to another trying to stay sane! So it's time to revisit the sketch book and bring you up to date on a few drawings done in happier days!

In 2018 we were on the first cruise of the Marella Explorer after it joined the Marella fleet. A far bigger ship than we were used to and whilst we both enjoyed it, I prefer the smaller ships for the way in which you can strike up relationships with fellow passengers. On the larger ships you just don't bump into them as often. We joined an excursion that included Sorrento and Amalfi and it was in this second of these lovely places that I started to sketch the hillside in the A4 sketchbook, but then having to stop because of rain. Luckily for some reason I had started to draw from right to left against my usual habit so I was left with an A5 view which would probably have got smudged if I had carried on drawing to the left anyway.

Later in 2018 we were back on one of our favourite ships, Marella Celebration on a cruise called Venetian Vistas. Its first port of call was a place called Bar in Montenegro, where we strolled along the seafront, stopped in a bar in Bar for a drink and then sat on the low wall along the beach walk to do this. A very relaxing day. I could do with a few days like this right now come to think of it...

Korcula in Croatia. I have never yet been to a place I disliked in Croatia. In fact I'd go further and say there hasn't been anywhere in Croatia that I've been where I wouldn't jump at the chance to revisit. And indeed this was our second visit to this Croatian island. We had walked around the city, criss-crossed the hill from different directions, sat for a much-needed drink for a while and then braved the burning sun to do this sketch of the landing stage and martello tower (and to do the lamp post the disservice of making it lean over - it didn't really).

The following May we found ourselves in Monte Carlo for the day, within a few short days of the annual Grand Prix race. We were able to walk along the pit lane and enjoy the most expensive drink of Sprite I've ever had... I drew this from the side of the ship once I'd recovered from the walk and checked my bank balance had the funds to cover the Sprite!

Two days later we were in Livorno, Italy and went for a boat trip around the canals in the pouring rain. We had no coats and, being the last in the queue, we were sitting outside the limits of the awning that didn't quite cover the entire boat. Photography and sketching were just about impossible in the circumstances and I did this one later to accompany the blog entry of the day. The canals were lined with moored boats - something I find very hard to draw. So I left them out...

The next day we were in France at a lovely place called Sanary-Sur-Mer and I was feeling a little ashamed at not attempting any boats at all. This place was likewise full of the blooming things, so I picked just one and made myself include it in a drawing. I returned to our cruise ship later that day feeling full of self-righteousness and goodwill. Though it's a bloody awful sketch really...

Towards the end of the cruise, Barcelona gave me a better chance of redeeming myself. I surprised myself with this one to be honest and had I gone on to practice drawing a boat a day for a few weeks after this then I should have got over my reluctance to draw them. But I didn't and so I am... Still...

In September 2019 we were on our other favourite Marella ship the Marella Dream. Both the Dream and the Celebration have been sold and scrapped during the horrible year that was 2020 and we will miss them and like so many other fellow travellers are hoping with all our hearts that we can meet up with our friends, the entertainers Tomas and Maris who sang on these two ships for almost ten wonderful years. One of the joys of smaller ships is that they can visit lesser known and smaller ports and if you don't want the restrictions of an organised day out to famous places, you can just mooch about a town and feel more a part of life in whatever country you are in. This is Propriano on the island of Corsica. It gave us a perfect morning's walk along the seafront where we sat on a low but very hot wall while I drew this. Well I sat on it - Miss Franny upped sticks and left me to shuffle about on a nearby bench which had a smidgeon of shade, but which pointed the wrong way for me to draw. The buildings top right are a cemetery and the scrub bottom right were my imagination as it was a car park in real life. Afterwards we walked back along the roads into the town itself, stopping at a pavement cafe and just enjoying the bustle and swapping the occasional greeting with other cruisers who walked past.

Palamos in Spain has a beautiful beach but a coastline like Blackpool's - fairly straight and therefore not much in the way of rocks, headlands or mountains to make it all that scenic. It has some curved rows of arches every now and then to create a framework for viewing any antics on the beach and a cannon or two for bringing them to an abrupt end if they should get out of hand. By looking at an acute angle through them I managed to get a bit of land in. The shopping streets of the town near the harbour are pleasant to walk through and are waiting for a return visit so I can have a go at capturing those in the sketchbook.

I had long wanted to visit Portofino in Italy and on the September 2019 cruise we finally got to go there. The crowds made sketching almost impossible, I took photographs during the few seconds I managed to get to the front of the press of people and I did this drawing from one of them during 2020's lockdown. It's actually one of the views taken from the ferry from nearby Santa Margherita as we approached Portofino. I dare say I'll attempt more from these photos in due time - a watercolour from the famous Portofino viewpoint is included already in this blog article.

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My Metcalfe Ancestors

The first of a few articles looking at my Mum's side of the family. I am lucky enough to have personal memories of all four grandparents and three great-grandparents. Grandma and Grandad Burke were always called that when I was young, but for my first few years we lived with my Metcalfe grandparents and they were simply Nanna and Grandad, the latter often retaining (until old age) an earlier baby pronounciation of Gan-gan.

This is Charlie Metcalfe, aged around 14 somewhere around the year 1870. He was born in Cambridgeshire in a small Fens village near Ely called Haddenham on 16 August 1856 and he was my great-gt-grandfather. The family owned and lived in a 17th century coaching inn called Porch House. More of this later.

Charlie married twice, first to Great-Gt Grandma Lucy. Lucy Metcalfe was born 21 June 1850, was married 25 August 1878 and died long before Charlie on 7 January 1909. The photograph shows them with their son Frank. Frank was born 9 November 1882 and the photo must have been taken around 1884-85.

Frank was followed by a sister, named Lucy Mary (the Lucy after her mother, which makes me wonder whether either Charlie's or his wife's mother was Mary) on 27 October 1884 and lived to a ripe old age dying in 1989. The family were Baptists and baptism, involving full immersion, not just wetting the head, was deferred until the child was old enough to decide for themselves that they wanted to be baptised. Lucy was baptised on 14 February 1903.

This photograph dates from around 1900. Charlie is now aged 44. A note in the family bible mentions that his grandfather died 8 July 1876. The photographer is from a studio in Rochdale, then in Lancashire, now Greater Manchester. He took over the business of T Palmer who was a block and chain manufacturer at Franklin Street Works, Rochdale, though the main trade was leatherworking, making bridles and harnesses for horses.

Frank Metcalfe with his wife Jane. My great-grandparents, I remember him well as a kindly old man who had a twinkle in his eye and a ready throaty chuckle but who was prone to falling asleep almost as soon as he sat down. He worked well into his seventies at a chemist (J & J Thomas) at the lower end of Yorkshire Street, Rochdale.

My favourite photograph from the Metcalfe collection. It shows four generations from my grandad (also Frank), just a toddler in 1910 then clockwise, my great-grandfather Frank, great-gt-grandfather Charlie and my great-gt-gt-grandfather whose name I unfortunately haven't the foggiest.

The year before that photograph of the four generations Charlie's first wife Lucy sadly died in the first week of 1909. The small visiting card sized memoriam cards became very popular during the reign of Queen Victoria who was, let's face it, just a little into long-haul mourning.

Possibly taken on the same day as the four generations photo is the family home. Porch House, built in 1657, a coaching house on Hill Row in Haddenham. The entire family, perhaps family and some workers as there was an extensive orchard behind the house, are gathered. My four grandfathers of varying greatness, Charlie and great-gt-aunty Lucy both dressed all in black, my infant grandad held on my great-grandma's lap. The white picket fence still existed when I was visiting although by then it was no longer white and the strakes were all thin, worn, black and twisted. Somewhere there's an old cine film of great-grandad Frank wincing at the prick of a wooden spell as he grasps the fence... The main house by then had left family ownership, but Great-Gt-Aunty Lucy still lived in the attached tiny cottage labelled "Porch House" over the window. Until the mid-1960s it was still lit by gas mantles and had no electricity supply.

My great-gt-gt-grandfather with my grandad helping to feed the chickens from the coops behind the house. A generation later my Mum would be doing the same under the supervision of Charlie, who she called and still remembers as Pappa Metcalfe. He was a stickler and disciplinarian apparently. A family legend exists about Great-Grandma Jane chasing him around the kitchen table with a knife to stop him interfering in how she brought up Frank junior, my Grandad!

In 1996 whilst on a family holiday in Norfolk we drove back to Haddenham for a last look at the house. Sometime in the 1970s Great-Gt-Aunty Lucy was offered what no doubt seemed a huge amount to her for the house and in her late 80s, she sold without consulting the family. It dismayed the family quite a bit. Here the old porch where travellers had sheltered now has an external door and the doorway to the side cottage has disappeared altogether, the house probably having been knocked through into one. The fence has at last succumbed thus saving old men the pain of splinters. We will meet the family again.

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