For the first 30 days of lockdown we enjoyed clear blue skies and wall to wall sunshine in London. Whilst I have been appreciating my south facing garden more than ever, I have also been making use of the flat roof that over looks it. For the best part of 2 weeks, for an hour or two at a time (it gets hot up there) I’ve sat up on the roof and drawn the view. Access unfortunately is via an un-elegant climb through my daughter’s bedroom window, a difficult journey that also involves tip toeing delicately across a floor strewn with the detritus of her own creative endeavours - fabric off cuts, tangled threads, squeezed paint tubes and piled canvases, and always a precariously balanced laptop permanently running Netflix.
I started my drawing in an A3 pad, getting down what I could see directly in front of me with no plan. Gradually the drawing grew, as sitting on the roof in the warm sunshine felt like a kind of freedom and I needed a reason to stay. The drawing extended outwards, extra A3 sheets glued on as I needed them, until I ended up with a 148cm long piece encompassing the complete 180 degree view around me. I found myself totally absorbed in carefully observing every tree branch and chimney pot, fence panel and shrub. I witnessed the blooming of the cherry blossom in next door’s garden, then watched when the tiny petals blow off & scattered like confetti, sharply followed by the sudden explosion of new bright green leaves. I tracked the movement of the birds, sparrows nipping from shrub to shrub collecting nest building material, blackbirds hopping across the lawn and the sporadic visit from a heron swooping overhead. I listened to the chorus of calls, no longer drowned out by passing traffic and power tools, the individual chatter of crows, sparrows, robins, tits, finches, and in particular the wood pigeons - a comforting sound that takes me straight back to my early childhood.
Photos from the 1970s, when I was happy to be amongst the pine trees
I grew up in a place surrounded by the sweet smell of pine trees and the incessant coo of wood pigeons, but juxtaposed by miles and miles of barbed wire fencing. A no-mans land on the Hampshire/Berkshire border, it was (and still is) a place neither urban nor rural, but ugly and sprawling, mainly made up of prefab 1950s housing stock butted up against the impenetrable barrier surrounding the MOD Atomic Weapons Research Establishment. I was quite happy living there as a young child, but was unaware of the warhead design and manufacture taking place on the other side of the wire. There was no ignoring it as I grew up though, especially once the women’s peace camp formed outside nearby Greenham Common Air Base in the early 1980s. I rode on the actual common every weekend, and briefly chatted to some of the women as I passed. On those rides I was also confronted by heavily armed, stoney faced American soldiers, standing at regular intervals guarding the cruise missiles stored in bunkers on the other side of the fence. Men, a symbol of power and control on the inside, women and children representing peace on the outside.
I felt trapped and suffocated as a teenager, this place was my home yet I was opposed to the development of nuclear weapons and uncomfortable being part of the community. To me it was also a cultural backwater where my life remained on pause, waiting the opportunity to leave. I am relating to that feeling now, trapped at home by Covid-19, life again on hold. It’s bizarre to find myself in a similar head space 30 odd years later, but escaping into drawing, making and daydreaming helped me enormously then, and it is my mental escape route again now.
The finished drawing, graphite and pen on paper, 148 x 30cm, with details below
