Right, the Christmas and New Year celebrations are over, the family have all departed and it’s time to start a new series of prints featuring the Fenland landscape. The new prints will have a different twist too so watch this space. There’ll be no more than four colour printings and I’m going to try to find the subjects for a series of eight. As always after a lay-off of a couple of weeks I have to find some inspiration to get the inspiration back on the boil and I start hunting through my old sketch books. Looking through the books I began to realise how devoid of people the Fenland landscape is, I suppose this is mostly because the farming has become so mechanised that the people are usually seen driving the massive machinery that does the work rather than human labour and toil working the land. So just to keep things going here are a few sketch book drawings of people gathered round a pool when we were in Spain, and they’re a bit of a reminder for me to introduce some figures in the Fenland prints. That’s almost a New Year’s Resolution and we all know what happens to them. The drawings were done around a swimming pool during the daytime and at night, individuals and groups just relaxing and talking and unaware of the pest with a pencil.
John Richardson Lino Prints 