I think I’m going back

Sorry about paraphrasing a song title on The Byrds 1968 album ‘The Notorious Byrd Brothers’. Was it 1968 or 1967? It sounds about right. I rather think I’m going back in more ways than one, never start a quick clean out of a packed plans chest drawer because when you start rooting through the store of old work it rapidly ceases to be a five minute job as you get drawn ever deeper into memories and ‘did I paint/draw/print that’ moments, old photographs work in exactly the same way too. This drawing/painting showed the back of a derelict miner’s cottage somewhere near Burraden Colliery in Northumberland not that far from Newcastle upon Tyne, probably a thirty minute bike ride from my digs at the time in Heaton. I suspect that the image was never finished because of the demands of College project work, which was pretty relentless, and didn’t leave a lot of time for you to do your own thing. Along with a couple of other old images I’ve recently rediscovered it will be turned into a print, what media I’m not sure. It could be a woodcut, or a linocut or another mixed media attack, we’ll just have to see what happens. When we go up to Tyneside next year I think I’ll go back and try and find this cottage but I’m sure that it will have been converted or demolished and bear no resemblance to the house that once stood there. That’s what rooting about in old plan chest drawers does, it arouses your curiosity.