TIM BAKER

Every spring I become obsessed with the pollarded (is that a verb?) Maple trees along my road, like weird alien antenna sticking out of stumps. I’ve drawn them before and they’ve appeared in the background of my works, but this spring I did a series of drawings and paintings of them. Like this fountain pen and watercolour on the street sitting in a chair…it’s weird how you do that neighbours come and talk to you, ones that never say boo to you the rest of the year?

I was running a campaign to stop a house being built at the back of our house, so it was a chance to drum up support for that. It worked, the planning application was refused.

You see, politics and art can mix!

The name comes from the cherry blossom in the bottom corner. I wanted to make a bigger feature out of it, but of course the tree took all the space. I need to learn to draw the thing I want to feature first, so it doesn’t get crowded out. I do still struggle with scaling like that.

Before all that street electioneering, I had done an earlier piece with fountain pen and graphitint – this was one of the first graphitint paintings I did, actually. It has a really pretentious title (I was intrigued at the contrast between brick and classical, nature and man at the time). There is a strange MC Escher perspective going on which I didn’t notice at the time…but again, like the bus shelter series this was made out of necessity since the porch in the Victorian house our tiny flat is part of is covered, and all of these days were grey and rainy and I had no place to go during lockdown.

So I used the shelter I had to hand.

This one is with our old friend, the Woody Pencil which I used a lot during life drawing. I love how these kid’s pencils work with water, it’s beautiful. I am currently testing them for the second round of lightfastness tests since June with pretty much all of my inks and some watercolours.

This was created also sitting in the porch. The title comes from what happened next. I finished this then started on a dip pen piece….and I then promptly knocked the bottle of indian ink down the side of the house which is of course, white. I then panicked because if it dries it’s very permanent and waterproof, so as dusk fell I found myself slooshing buckets of water against the wall next to a very deep gully to dilute it. I abandoned the drawing session!