Doodling75
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Flamenco – Sacromonte
There appears to be a debate – heated at times – as to where flamenco music and dance originated. One of the early places where flamenco was to be found in the caves of Sacramonte near Granada, where the gypsies lived. These days those caves have been sanitised and host nightly flamenco shows for tourists,…
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Wild Flowers – Wisley
The Royal Horticultural Society Garden at Wisley seems to have gone big on wild flowers this year. Of course there are still lots of formal gardens, exotic plants, hard-to-keep-alive plants in rude health and immaculate lawns, but here and there a riot of multicoloured mayhem has been encouraged to happen, kept in order only by…
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Sundial
Sundials work better on some days than others. This one in the gardens at Polesden Lacey was working on the day that we saw it, for the simple reason that the sun was shining. Curiously however it was not quite showing the correct time – even after making allowance for the fact that our watches…
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Monte dei Paschi di Siena
Around about a decade ago, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena was attracting more publicity than the bank probably wanted, mainly due to problems they were having at the time with bad loans and losses. This general view of the bank’s historic headquarters accompanied many of the press articles at the time, but in the…
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Mondrian-esque Family Tree
Another activity with which I while away my hours is genealogy. So it is that, during a moment when my mind was idling (there are of course many such moments!), I came up with the idea of a colour based family tree – that is a relationship chart where the colour of a child would…
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Time to Peel
Here is another re-used (or if you prefer “re-purposed”) quick sketch from the lock-down era, intended if nothing else to burnish my credentials as an eco-artist! This one was originally a simple pencil sketch of a potato peeler, which through the magic of a drawing app is now the hour hand on a kitchen(?) clock.…
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BMW Graffiti
This is my first attempt at graffiti, albeit a piece of socially responsible virtual graffiti on the photo of a wall! The car that I have drawn is in the BMW Museum in Munich, and to my somewhat aged eyes is the absolute classic BMW design – the way that I remember BMW cars looking…
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Siding – Shenfield Station
Shenfield is a commuter town on the train line out of Liverpool Street in London, and happens to be where I grew up. Today the town has become one the the endpoints for the shiny new Elizabeth Line, but not so long ago this decrepit guard’s van was also to be seen in a siding…
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St Michael’s Church – Betchworth
Another place where our art group meets to draw and paint in the open is Betchworth, and one obvious thing to concentrate our artistic endeavours on is the parish church. This is a quintessential rural parish church building that found recent fame as one of the film locations for the film “Four Weddings and a…
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Murano Glass
The island of Murano is of course famous for producing stylish glassware, a lot of which seems to find its way into the tourist shops of nearby Venice. This particular vase was actually purchased on Burano, another island in the lagoon which is not geographically very far from Venice, but which is (to borrow Hardy’s…
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Murano – Canale San Donato
Venice is lovely, but quite intense. The nearby islands of Murano and Burano offer a respite of calm – both the building and the tourist density on these islands is noticeably lower than the slightly misnamed “Serenissima”. This painting is fairly faithful to the photo that I took during our visit to Murano, in that…
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Cologne at Night
It seems that almost everywhere you look in Cologne you can see the twin towers of the cathedral and the glass roof of the main train station. Of course there are places from which neither landmark is visible, but there don’t seem to be as many such places as one might expect. So, true to…
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