#thedailysketch 2021

 

Top: My favourite place to sit is a bench in the shadow of those trees, Thoresby Park.

Middle: Thoresby Hall.

Bottom: The Witches Bench, Sherwood Forest.

All text, pros, poetry & artwork, copyright Ian Gordon Craig.

M-m-m-My Corona part 10.

 “Are you drawing Thoresby Hall?”

The voice comes from behind me. I am facing Thoresby Hall and obviously drawing it.

“No”.

She doesn’t get it. Or maybe it’s a sh*t likeness.

Now the lockdown has loosened its grip slightly on some of my favoured regions for sketching and strolling, my sketchbook opted for Thoresby Park as first choice. There are few visitors today.
Since UK TV has started to include several art programmes in its lockdown schedule, I am finding more and more people wanting to approach me with questions about what I’m doing, no doubt trying to imitate the judges and commentators they’ve seen on TV. Normally this would drive me nuts, but in the present circumstances the company is rather nice, albeit socially distant and possibly unsighted.

All text, pros, poetry & artwork, copyright Ian Gordon Craig.

All in good time. Thoresby Hall.

 I usually plan on a painting taking two or three weeks to complete; a time scale born of necessity during the years I was a full-time teacher relying on the school holidays in which to concentrate on my own art. Started in the late 90s, Thoresby Hall was probably one canvas too many of my Thoresby Estate themed paintings, obviously inspired by my childhood there. As the painting progressed my enthusiasm diminished and, never sure of what to do with the bottom right-hand corner, it was soon abandoned.

The rectangles in the composition were a probable result of my video making with a group of students in the 90's. It was all about what was in the viewfinder. Those rectangles also provided a way of putting a sense of time-lapse into the picture, something I’d been doing years previous when depicting the Primary School on Thoresby Estate.

During these recent weeks of January 2018, strolling around Thoresby Park, I noticed for the very first time how profuse the growth of mistletoe is on the uppermost branches of those trees nearest the Hall and the River Meden. There was my solution as to how to fill that right-hand corner! After c.18 years I finished the painting.

 All text, pros, poetry, photos & artwork, copyright Ian Gordon Craig.