ARTWORKS

My idea of a good time is to wander off the beaten track, find somewhere quiet to sit, and draw whatever happens to be in front of me. Usually this manages to include some combination of trees and buildings - preferably old, essentially deserted, and ideally in ruins. Having filled a large number of sketch books since discovering, around 1990, that my ideal medium was pen and ink, I've been persuaded that some of their contents might better be displayed in cyberspace than be left unopened to gather dust in my increasingly voluminous archives.

The following drawings are arranged in reverse chronological order (from latest to earliest) rather than by location or subject matter, but will be found to reflect a pretty repetitive round of haunts and habitats, namely:

1. Bits of Kent and Surrey countryside within easy reach of my home in Streatham;
2. Holiday spots in Wales, based either in Ogmore-by-Sea (which I have known since early childhood) or on the central region around Rhayader and the Elan valley;
3. Regular trips to Hay-on-Wye, the second-hand bookshop capital of the world;
4. A series of solitudinous retreats I used to take at Toot Rock, near the village of Pett Level on the Sussex coast between Rye and Hastings; and
5. Quaker centres such as Woodbrooke College (Birmingham), Charney Manor (Oxfordshire), and Claridge House (Kent).
6. There are also some Greek holiday pictures, done in and around Platanos on the northern coast of Peloponnesia.

Most are in pen and ink (specifically, a Pilot Hi-Tecpoint V5 needlepoint rollerball with a 3mm point), but I occasionally use Conté pencil or a charcoal stick.

The master scans are tagged image format files (.tif), from which it's possible to make quite detailed print-outs, but for speed of loading in the following pages I've reduced the canvas size and resolution and converted them into .gif (Graphics Interchange Format) files, with some loss of detail.

To do the complete tour, click on...

However, you probably won't want to go through all 140-odd at a sitting, so I've divided them into chronological groups of about 10 to 15 each and inserted 10 drop-in points as follows. Click on a date below (or top of page) to bring up the relevant batch:

2008 l 2006 l 2004 l 2001 l 2000 l 1997 l 1996 l 1995 l 1994 l 1993 l Early

Once you're in -

1. Click anywhere on each picture to get to the next one in the series.
2. To go back to the previous picture, click on "Previous;
3. When you've had enough, escape to this page by clicking on "Exit".

Art runs on both sides of the family. My mother's mother was by birth a Ladbrooke, several of whose family members are numbered among the early 19th-century Norwich School of landscape painters. Here's one by John Berney of that ilk:

J B Ladbrooke (1803-79): Woodland Landscape

The Parlett side produced three renowned comic-strip cartoonists, namely Harry (1881-1971) and his sons George (1902-1981), and Reg (1904-1991).

Harry's brother Thomas, my paternal grandfather, freelanced as a cartoonist for a greetings-card company, Raphael Tuck, most of whose product went up in smoke during the blitz. None of his work survives. I have had cartoons of my own published, but can't claim to be in the same league. My father Sidney (1909-1967), a motor mechanic and fitter by trade, was a dab hand with a pencil. Not surprisingly, it was cars he drew best, as evidenced below.

Looking at my own drawings prompts the conceit that they may be thought to combine the romantic landscape eye of my Ladbrooke ancestors with the flowing linear hand of the Parlett cartoonists, especially in the some of the repetitive passages where literal depiction is replaced by an impatient kind of suggestive shorthand.