When I'm booking my train ticket and I'm asked whether I have any seating preference (in a quiet carriage, forward facing, that sort of thing), it is only the next-to-a-window option that I go for. From the window of a train there is the time and space to project yourself into an endless theme of changing environments. And it is this view that I find much more interesting to draw than fellow passengers and the backs of seats.
It is exactly because the view is so constantly shifting that it is an interesting subject to draw. The narrative unfolds as you look. The sense of place is less focused and yet unmistakable: the landscape between London and Devon, and London and the East Midlands (the routes I draw most) are mainly rural, agricultural, with occasional long views to distant horizons. It's a character or an essence that is there to be drawn, rather than a likeness. Looking at it mathematically, if the train is travelling at 120mph, and I'm taking three or four minutes to draw each image (these are mostly in open A6 sketchbooks), then they can be an amalgam of about six to eight miles of landscape.
The whirring view gives the opportunity to be brief, immediate, stabbing and imaginative rather than be bogged down in the dullness of likeness. Here are a few I've done recently.
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| London Paddington to Exeter St Davids, May 2017 |
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| Rapeseed fields near Kettering, May 2017 |
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| (Above and top image) London Paddington to Exeter St Davids, May 2018 |
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| Between Taunton and Exeter, June 2013 |
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| Between Taunton and Exeter, June 2013 |
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| London Paddington to Exeter St Davids, May 2018 |
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| London Paddington to Exeter St Davids, 2017 |
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| Outside Luton, February 2018 |
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| Near Tiverton Parkway, the day Mum died, 17 August 2013 |
I've posted about drawing from trains before: From a train along the River Exe and Scene from a moving train.
