Our daughter came to see us this last week along with the two grandsons to help the Boss clear her studio, a long complicated story, and while we waited for the skip to arrive she dived into my collection of posters from the sixties and seventies. While we were rooting around in the plans chests some of my old art school work materialised, as if by magic, and sent everything off on a separate direction. One of the drawings was this one of the High Level Bridge in Newcastle upon Tyne but viewed and drawn from Gateshead on the south bank of the Tyne. The bridge has trains on the top deck and road traffic on the deck below and the drawing goes back to summer 1965 when I was eighteen(!) and this drawing was produced on location on a dull Sunday morning. The medium was thin charcoal soaked in linseed oil to give a tighter black line with some unsoaked charcoal for some of the tones and the paper utilised for the drawing was Kentmere stretched on an Imperial drawing board. The drawing was unfinished and I remember one tutor saying make it an etching, another saying make it a lithograph and another saying just get it finished. I didn’t get it finished but it is always interesting to see where you came from.
The High Level Bridge from Gateshead. Drawing in charcoal. Image area, quite large.
John Richardson Lino Prints 