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.

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.

Scene from a moving train

There is something stimulating about drawing from a moving train, as I did on recent trip from London to Devon. It is quiet time, perfect for getting out a sketchbook, but I can get tired of drawing the carriage scenery and fellow passengers. Drawings of the fleeting landscape can only take a few seconds: there is little that is constant or unchanging about the landscape on the Paddington to Exeter route, at least. The focus jumps to and fro, and you just have to sit and wait until an interesting view comes along for a few seconds or so, and make the most of it when it does.
I used a combination of sketchbook drawings to make this one, on a small canvas (about 12x15cm) with acrylic and marker pen, using a process of drawing and painting sections out until something emerged. It is the first time I've tried this. It won't be the last.