Back on the West Norfolk skyline

Blackthorn Winter. A linocut printed in six colours on 300gsm Fabriano 5 HP in an edition of ten. Image area approximately 150mm x 150mm. £50.00

Back with another ‘skyline’ print that was inspired by a lonely Blackthorn bush that seems to have escaped a farmer’s chainsaw, probably because he uses the Sloes from the bush to make his Sloe Gin. The Blackthorn bushes are now beginning to blossom with the spectacular display of white blossom that will finally cover the entire bush, thorns and all, then in the autumn it will be covered in small, purple, plum like fruit. ‘Blackthorn winter?’ That comes from an Uncle who was a farmer in the North Yorkshire Moors when I was a child, if we started to get hard frosts or snow at the end of March or the beginning of April he always used to say we were in for a ‘Blackthorn winter’, there’s nothing quite like an optimist. On the subject of Blackthorn bushes, not far from RAF Lakenheath, home of the USAF 48th Fighter Wing, there’s a hedge of Blackthorn that stretches for a couple of hundred yards, we must pay it a visit because that will be a sight worth seeing in the next couple of weeks. As long as it doesn’t snow.