Interviewed in Drawing Attention

 

There's a short interview with me in the April 2021 edition of Drawing Attention. This is the link to it. 

Two days in Amsterdam

Happy family events meant I could only get to the Urban Sketchers symposium in Amsterdam for a couple of days – neatly arriving shortly before the closing reception. The newly launched direct Eurostar service to Amsterdam from London's St Pancras terminates in the heart of the city, close to both where I'm booked to stay the night, and the location of the symposium's final sketchcrawl around NEMO Science Museum. Bags dropped off, I head off with the small sketchbook and a few pens in an effort to meet old friends and perhaps even get some drawing done.

Korte Prinsengracht/Haarlemmerdijk, Amsterdam

It's a little while since I've been in Amsterdam, and of course things have changed. But one of the joys of going to the symposium is being able to explore a place while continually bumping into friends and acquaintances. Some are tenuously known only online, some are regular mates I've known for years, some I have only met a handful of times at past symposiums but feel like old friends, but all have their sketchbooks out and are communally soaking up the place on paper.

From the NEMO ramp, Amsterdam

Around the NEMO Science Museum there are dense thickets of people engrossed in drawing everywhere you look, standing, sitting on every available spot, on walls, in cafes, legs dangling over the dock. There are familiar faces focused on the job in hand, drawings interrupted by happy reunions, conversations about how to endure the intense heat wave that coincides with the symposium. Later, there is the huge group photograph, of perhaps more than 700 people standing in the sun by the dock: at the back where we stand we become just pixels, but it is enough to be there.

Closed to traffic: Willemsburg, Amsterdam, drawn from the Juice Brothers cafe

The closing reception is big, full on, with a cast of hundreds, and snatched conversations, all too brief. There are too many people to mention by name, but I must mention Gabi Campanario, the founder of Urban Sketchers, who it was great to spend time with again. He launched a fantastic movement more than 10 years ago, one he could never have known would develop as it has. Respect too, to those many people who have joined the vast voluntary operation that it has now become.

Anne Frank's house, behind the tree on the right, Prinsengracht, Amsterdam

The final day was spent around the city, drawing with friends before the time came to board the Eurostar home. Next year's symposium is planned to be in Hong Kong, not such an easy place to visit from this side of the world. It was interesting to see a discussion on Swasky's Instagram about the environmental effects of the symposium through the vast numbers of people it now attracts and the flights inevitably made. In my experience, creative people are more alert to this kind of issue than many, and so perhaps some already take measures to offset their carbon footprint, but when even world leaders refuse to accept there is a problem, the sense of emergency we face on the climate issue can be all too easily dismissed.

From the London-bound Eurostar train window

There are more of my drawings on Instagram.

Around London in 2017

Here are three drawings from recent Urban Sketchers gatherings around London: above, a glimpse of the Gherkin from Bell Lane in the East End...

... towards Commercial Street from the churchyard at Christ Church, Spitalfields...

... and a view of the charmingly brutalist Lambeth Towers from the grounds of the Imperial War Museum. There's a link to the planned programme of gatherings in 2018 on the London Urban Sketchers website, found here. Everyone is always welcome.

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.

New drawing show opens in Soho

I have a few works in a new small show of drawings and digital prints at Timberyard Soho, which continues into the spring of 2017. Here I am with fellow exhibitors Nick Richards, Isabel Carmona, Jo Dungey and Isabelle Laliberté.
Timberyard Soho (it has won so many awards it's impossible to list them all here) is at 4 Noel Street, London W1F 8GB, close to Brewer Street and Oxford Street. Our thanks to Darren and his great team at Timberyard for inviting us to show again. Works are for sale.
How to find Timberyard Soho.
Opening times and more info here.
Me on Instagram.

A Ford Cortina for Florian Afflerbach

I've had my eye on this 1970 Ford Cortina, which is parked outside a house around the corner, for a while since I heard the dreadful news about Florian Afflerbach. Florian was a German architect involved with the Urban Sketchers movement who was killed in a traffic accident in May aged 35. He made sensitive pencil and watercolour works of cars, among other things. A tribute to him can be found on the Urban Sketchers blog. There's going to be an exhibition of car drawings by Urban Sketchers around the world as a tribute to him at next week's USk symposium in Manchester, and I'm taking this one.

I never met Florian, and didn't know him, but I feel that I got a bit closer to him by sitting on the kerb to draw this. My parents had a Cortina in the 1970s, and just to look closely at this crumbling example took me back. I admire Florian's drawings even more now too; this doesn't look anything like a Ford Cortina.

Around Westminster

Home Office, Marsham Street

Two drawings from around Westminster, which were done on a recent gathering of London's Urban Sketchers. Close to the Palace of Westminster there was the usual tourist throng and road closures in preparation for the State Opening of Parliament. A couple of streets back, though, and you could have a street almost to yourself. 

Victoria Tower from Great Peter Street, Westminster

Back at Millennium Mills

London's Urban Sketchers had their second visit to the huge £3.5 billion Silvertown redevelopment site in the old Docklands earlier his month, currently a deserted, windswept wasteland, but within the next ten years or so, we are promised, a booming new high-tech neighbourhood of waterside homes, jobs, shops and leisure. We have been invited to record the changes to the 62-acre site as work continues, although the major building work has yet to begin.

Since our last visit, the changes are, it must be said, not too obvious. But with asbestos removal complete, this time we were able to draw from the 11th-floor roof of Millennium Mills, a cavernous, derelict flour mill on the site that is under restoration. From its roof we could trace the Thames snaking through East London communities on its way to the coast, with the skyline of the city's financial district in the distance to the west.

The place has a gritty charm. It's popular with urban explorers and location managers. From the rooftop we could see police cars and the flames of a burning vehicle on a distant part of the site – surrounded by a film crew. And for all the rubble, nature has a grip: the sound of birdsong rises in between the roar of planes at nearby City Airport.

You can find more about Silvertown and images by the visiting team – (above from the left) Adebanji Alade, me, Jo Dungey, Isabel Carmona, Simon Privett, Simone Menken, Nick Richards and Daniel Lloyd-Morgan – on the London Urban Sketchers blog, and there's more about our first visit here. Our thanks to Silvertown Development for inviting us.

Around Albert Bridge

I joined the London Urban Sketchers sketchcrawl around Battersea the other week — on one side of the Thames is the Norman Foster and Partners-designed Riverside complex, with its curved balconies, all empty despite it being a lovely day, and on the other side the historically burdened Cheyne Walk, festooned with blue plaques behind iron railings.

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.

You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram.

From the 32nd floor

I was lucky to be part of a group who were invited to draw from the 32nd storey of an office block in the City of London earlier this month. Compared with buildings in many other cities, the 32nd floor isn't really so high, but in London it gives you a phenomenal view.

It would have been easy just to spend the time gawping at the view and trying to make sense of which parts of town are which, but it's not often you get a chance to draw scenes like these.

Our thanks to Carlos Olvera for inviting us up. We are hoping to arrange another visit soon.

Across London's rooftops

Towards the Barbican

Here are two drawings from the recent London Urban Sketchers sketchcrawl around St Paul's Cathedral. They are both from the roof terrace of the hideous One New Change shopping centre, right across the road from the cathedral. The complex's redeeming feature, as the developers must have known when they were trying to get permission to build it, is the spacious terrace on the top floor, which has great views across the city. When it costs more than £100 to get a family of four to the top of the Shard, this is an excellent, free but much much lower alternative. The dome of St Paul's seems so close you could touch it.

Towards Tate Modern

Around the Victoria and Albert Museum

London's Urban Sketchers met up to draw in and around the Victoria and Albert Museum on Saturday. It was a great turn-out, helped by springlike weather. I stayed outside to draw for most of it, around South Kensington tube station (above), and across the road from the museum in Thurloe Square (below). The museum's first director, Henry Cole, lived in the house on its corner. It would have been an easy commute for him in the 19th century – easier than now, when crossing four lanes of speeding, outsized 4x4s and tour buses is required.

Sketchbooks at the Museum

London's Urban Sketchers are meeting up at the British Museum on this Saturday, 7 February 2015 from 11.30am to 3.30pm. (This drawing is of the museum's courtyard with the lovely Centre Point rearing up in the distance.) Everybody's welcome. Just bring things to draw on and with, and come and say hello. There are lots of places to warm up, and it's all very relaxed.

There's more information on the London Urban Sketchers website, if you want it. And join the London Urban Sketchers new Facebook page.

Euro-Coaster, Winter Wonderland, Hyde Park

The big winter fair in Hyde Park over Christmas, called Winter Wonderland, had this roller coaster among the labyrinthine commercial sprawl. Euro-Coaster? Get on that, Nigel Farage.

I drew these on a recent numbingly cold sketchcrawl with London's Urban Sketchers: why not drop in on the group's new Facebook group page.

From Piccadilly to Docklands

At Waterstones Piccadilly

It was a busy weekend this week, first at Waterstones Piccadilly's first art book fair, where it was great to meet publishers, writers, artists and book lovers in Europe's biggest bookshop, and sign copies of Sketch Your World. I sat with Owen Gildersleeve, the author of Paper Cut – he cut paper rather more meticulously than I drew the scene through the crowds to the Tate Publishing desk opposite.

The O2 arena across the Thames from Trinity Buoy Wharf, London

The following day London's Urban Sketchers joined the Dining Room Drawing Club at Trinity Buoy Wharf at Draw Britain Now organised by the Campaign for Drawing. The wharf is post industrial, right across the river from the O2 arena, the home of London's only lighthouse, and hosting work by 23 artists shortlisted for the 2014 John Ruskin Prize (the exhibition continues until 30 November). The rain came, and it started getting dark in mid afternoon, but there was still a lot of drawing going on when we met to compare work at the end of the day. (The Fatboy Diner got a lot of sheltering custom that afternoon.) The wharf is a great place to visit – I'm going back.

On the streets of Seven Dials

Seven Dials, a throbbing junction on the north side of Covent Garden, soon gets crowded with pedestrians, especially when the curtain is about to rise on Matilda the Musical at the Cambridge Theatre, which is at its heart. On Saturday it was busier still with people taking part in Moleskine City Stories, a drawing event organised by Moleskine in collaboration with Urban Sketchers at Moleskine's King Street store and the London Graphic Centre in nearby Shelton Street.
I was there representing Urban Sketchers with Andrea Joseph, Olha Pryymak and Adebanji Alade; we drew and led learning sessions through the day, and contributed to a growing gallery of drawings in each venue. It was a learning experience – for me, I mean. There was the usual fantastic range of people taking part, from children to elderly, and from totally inexperienced to professionals, and the usual amazing range of approaches to observational drawing. And to talk was to share ideas and connect in a way that you don't if you draw in isolation.
Thanks to everyone who came, and those who donated their drawings to the cause of the non-profit Lettera27, and its mission to support the right to literacy, education and the access to knowledge.

Coming soon: Moleskine City Stories

Like the idea of a live sketch event? Urban Sketchers and Moleskine are teaming up for a day of drawing in and around Covent Garden, London, on Saturday 6 September 2014 with events planned at the Moleskine store in King Street and the London Graphic Centre in Shelton Street.

James Hobbs, Covent Garden

I'm one of four artists – Adebanji Alade, Andrea Joseph and Olha Pryymak are the others – who will be drawing at the stores and in the streets nearby, ready to talk about drawing in sketchbooks and taking part in learning sessions, for which you'll need to reserve a place. I'll be at the London Graphic Centre with Andrea from 11.30am to 5.30pm, and Olha and Adebanji will be at the Moleskine store around the corner. During the day, an exhibition of drawings will gradually be built up in each store.

Moleskine is also giving away Moleskine Sketch Albums – limited to the first 150 visitors to each store who present a coupon downloaded from its website. Get one if you can, but if you're too late, come and draw anyway. And say hello.

To find out more, to book a place on a learning session, and to find out how to get a Sketch Album, have a look at Moleskine City Stories.

London sketchcrawl: Portobello Road, Saturday 12 July

There's a sketchcrawl along Portobello Road, London W11, this weekend on Saturday 12 July, attended by Urban Sketchers from this week's Oxford Urban Sketchers workshop. The weather forecast isn't looking too bad, so come if you can.
The plan is to meet at around 11am at Charlie's Portobello Road cafe, which is at number 58, and finish at around 4pm at the Castle pub.
There's more information here, and a plan of the route here.
Bring your drawing materials and join us.

London sketchcrawl: Saturday 24 May

Old Street roundabout

There is a London Urban Sketchers sketchcrawl on Saturday 24 May 2014, meeting at 11am at Timberyard cafe, Old Street, where there is currently a show of drawings by five of the London group (including me, actually). The idea is to then head east towards Shoreditch to finish around 3.30pm at the Shoreditch High Street overground station. Want to come? Need more information? There's more at the London Urban Sketchers website. It's free, relaxed and everyone is welcome — just bring something to draw on and with. And stay as long as you want.

Timberyard, 61-67 Old Street, London EC1V 9HW
www.timberyardlondon.com
@urbsketchlondon