Landscapes in lockdown

Most of my drawings are about where I’ve been, what's caught my attention, what’s been going on. In these grim days of the UK’s third lockdown, things inevitably change and opportunities shrink, which needn’t be a bad thing. As well as the view out of the front windows and the view out the back, there are also the places where the imagination leads. 

Here are a few of the ink drawings - all postcard sized - that I have been working on over the recent months. Some refer to sketchbook drawings done on a trip to our farming family in Cornwall, and perhaps others have echoes of the Devon countryside where I grew up, but there’s no specific place about them and they’re all done from the imagination. 

The process of making them has been a kind of escapist release. 

You can see more of my work on Instagram at jameshobbsart.

Five pages from Sheffield and the Peak District

We get the train north from St Pancras to Sheffield, and then head on to Edale in the Peak District, which starts almost as soon as you are out of the city. Standing to draw on Sheffield's street corners with Saturday shoppers all about (above) makes using a pen the natural choice. I prefer to stand up to draw partly because I can work from exactly the point I want to, but also because I can shift around several paces in each direction to make better sense of what I'm looking at. Most importantly, perhaps, is that it means I work quickly and resist the temptation to worry about piddling detail or try to make things look vacuously pretty. There's no need to set out an array of equipment: it's just a pen and a book. I'm not keen to hang around. (The odd bit of colour below is added back in the hotel.)

Barely knowing the city, I end up taking the inevitable choice of city centre subjects, such as the cathedral and winter gardens, rather than the places that may have better represented the city if I'd had more time to explore or arrived with better knowledge. We find some of these places later – the great restaurants of London Road, and the post-industrial grit of Kelham Island – by which time it's too late to draw anyway.

Having travelled on to stay at the Rambler Inn at Edale, thirty minutes away by train, I get the inks out on the window sill to work. The railway line from Sheffield leads up through this valley and behind Lose Hill on the right. It's a less linear scene than found in the city, and the logistics of taking lids off three pots of ink are easier than when working outside, so it seemed a more obvious medium to use. Later, I do another of the same view...

... and then a final one looking out of a window facing towards Kinder Scout. The Peak District strikes me as a more inky kind of place than Sheffield. I'm not saying places always have a medium that is best suited to them, but, for me at least, it seemed like it this time.

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In a Cornish field

We had a week in the late summer visiting the lovely farming relations on the north Cornwall coast. We pitched our tent with a view down the coast towards Land's End, and between the showers there was time to get out a brush and black ink – I'd left the pens behind, intentionally, in London.

The way ink from a bottle is used has to be different from ink from a pen is used, yet my instinct here is largely the same. A few people mentioned the change in "style", but it doesn't feel like that, nor was it meant as that. The forms that can be created to show a tree or hedge seem more suited to a wash of liquid ink than the lines of black pen, as I mentioned in my previous post.

What felt new was perhaps not. They reminded Ms S, who would know these things, of what I was doing in the 1980s. So much for change.

You can see more of my work on Instagram and Flickr.

With black ink in Wales

Wales was wet when we went there, admittedly. We expected it to be, especially because we were staying under canvas. But I'm not sure it was quite as dark and forbidding as the drawings that I did there looked when viewed in my sketchbook now. I took a bottle of black ink, one waterbrush and one small sketchbook (one of three handmade by Daughter 2 and given to me for my birthday earlier in the year). It's easier to travel light, especially as the laptop with the unfinished dissertation was taking up space in the shoulder bag.

There's something about the landscape that seems to call for broader sweeps of ink than is possible even with a chunky marker pen. The feeling was the same when we visited the Brecon Beacons for New Year a while ago, except then I took green and blue inks as well.

The top two images here are from directly outside our bell tent (complete with woodburner) across the fields towards Cilgerran. This one, above, shows the contorted strata of the headland at Cemaes Head, which is on the cliff path that runs along the Pembrokeshire coast. It may not be the best way to judge a work, but of the three drawings it was the least liked when I posted it on Instagram, and yet it is the one I like most. It's a grim thing to be led by the hunt for "likes". The temptation is almost to try to post something that no one will like at all. I'm inclined to think it would lead to some interesting discoveries about your own work as you set about this task.

To Ireland's west coast

James Hobbs, Twelve Bens, Connemara, Ireland

We're back from a week in Ireland – last visited by us in the 1980s before the onset of daughters. We headed to the west coast, stayed a few days in Connemara and another few days on the Aran Islands. As part of my research into a new book (full details in time), I took a few bottles of ink (just black, blue and green) and a few brushes, but for all of Ireland's greenness, it was the greys that got me. And the skies, too: always heavy with clouds, always threatening, but rarely delivering.

James Hobbs, Gurteen Beach, County Galway

In Galway we met for tea with urban sketcher Róisín Curé, who lives down the coast and has a fantastic plot to cover. Galway is a livelier place than when we were last there – it is bidding to become European Capital of Culture in 2020. Perhaps that exposure would widen its appeal to UK visitors. If you heard a tourist's voice it would mostly likely have a French, Italian or American accent.

James Hobbs, Connemara coast

What remains entirely unchanged, though, is the friendliness of Ireland. There's a welcome everywhere you go. We won't wait 30 years before we go again.

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