On our recent holiday to France we stayed in a small cottage on the Cote d’Armor in the North West corner of Brittany. Holidays are great in so many ways that I can’t even begin to write about it but the real treat for me is to get my drawing book out.

I have pretty much kept a drawing book going in every year since I left college in 1983, which is a scary thought but one of which I’m quite proud. At art college in those days drawing was a critical part of the curriculum, as I still think it is in some institutions, long before the advent of technology.

I always found drawing therapeutic once I’d got past the sheer terror of having to draw nude women in life class. The act of looking closely at any object for the purpose of drawing allows the artist to truly see what you’re looking at. Those of you that draw will understand this and those that don’t will think I’m being pretentious.

Anyway the drawing above is no more than a sketch on a sunny afternoon and unusually for me it drawn with pencil, a medium I’m quite sniffy about as I like the immediacy of pen and ink. However I did enjoy the process of drawing it and I’m quite pleased with the result.