Creative field trips and projects for 2025

Refreshed website …watch this space, project for 2025!

Creative field trips  I have been exploring local landscapes around Winton, particularly this winter with walks up from the village to our local fell.  I love walking the footpaths across the fields and also the minor roads and outgang, ancient ways trod since Prehistory.  There is detail richness of structures, textures and colours in the winter hedges and thorn trees, and also long views down valley to the North pennines. I enjoy seeing the close up and distant together, and making sketches often huddled up against the elements.

Excited to have rediscovered Allonby and the Solway coast and plain, an area from my childhood.  A contact from my Open Studio last year has kindly allowed me to use a holiday cottage there as a base for walking and sketching.  As well as the coast I have been visiting some ancient churches in that area, with cultural connections to the Upper Eden Valley – Celtic carvings and some Viking hog back tombs, as well as similarities of siting and likely pre-existing pagan worship.

I am planning to return to the Outer Hebrides this summer …. very overdue reconnection to an inspirational area for my artistic development.  I visited Taigh Chearsabhagh staying at an artsit flat there between 2004 and 2010 – with a few visits since.  Once I returned to the North of England to live the ‘easy’ trip and ready connection got a bit harder.  However reviewing the sketchbooks for last August’s Open Studio I realise there is unfinished business there.

Printmaking  Master-printmaker, editioner, and educator Alfons Bytautus runs experimental printmaking workshops out of Incubate in Newcastle, and I attend whenever I can, as well as printmaking from my home studio.  A modest re-start after several years away from printmaking, but very happy indeed to be interpretting field sketches through the languages available in print again.

Artist Walks along ancient routes  During the period of Lockdown and on in to 2020 / 21 I started working on a project looking at a speculative network of prehistoric routes crossing the Eden Valley, possibly taken by Stone Age man between the Langdale Axe Factories and routes through the Pennines.  I am walking and sketching along these old ways, and visiting other prehistoric monuments and rock art that may have been broadly contemporary.  Not a historical survey, but rather a way in to the landscape, to tune in to what lies beneath the surface in a more metaphysical way; recognising landscape mystery as important as landscape history.  I am developing some of the routes as Artist Walks, the basis of the field sketching courses I offer out in the landscape.