So there I was sitting in the park whilst the students walked to and from University.  I’ve never really under stood that – 10am in the morning and students are walking away from University?   Anyway, another pop at this urban sketching idea and boy was it difficult.  Firstly, the weather has changed, whereas yesterday a warm stiff breeze was blowing today the wind was no longer warm and has picked up force.  The result of this was that the pages of my sketchbook were blowing all over the place and very quickly I started to feel the cold.  In the end there was nothing for it but to beat a retreat to a local coffee shop to finish what I had started in the back end of a hurricane that had blown across the Atlantic.

As I sipped my coffee I started to wonder about the thorny problem of truth in an image.  In the sketch I made I deliberately moved the buildings closer together for dramatic reasons – does that matter?  On one level of course it doesn’t as anyone who has looked at any landscape painting or drawing – the artist always moves things around for effect.  Yet if you examine some of the Urban Skechers drawings and paintings it is impossible to think that they deliberately try and make as accurate a drawing as possible.  So which is the way forward?   Well for me it is the former than the latter – it’s my drawing and I’ll do what the hell I like with the content – I’ve spent too many years trying to conform to anally retentive photographic rules to let these things creep into my art.

Just to demonstrate that there is no real image here are two variations on a theme from yesterdays more clement weather – which is the real image?