Five books to inspire you to draw
James Hobbs
by
2y ago
I was happy to be invited to select five inspirational books about drawing for Shepherd, the website that's like roaming around your favourite bookshop. Follow this link to the Shepherd site to find the reasons why I chose each one. It's a rich field to choose from and it was hard to select just five: these are the ones that rang my bell the loudest as I chose. In no particular order: Ways of Drawing: Artists’ Perspectives and Practices, edited by Julian Bell, Julia Balchin and Claudia Tobin (Thames & Hudson) Je Suis le Cahier: The Sketchbooks of Picasso, edited by Arnold Glimcher an ..read more
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Coming soon...
James Hobbs
by
2y ago
 ...a new website. Fine more of my work on Instagram for now ..read more
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Numbering the sketchbooks
James Hobbs
by
2y ago
  All of my sketchbooks – and there are hundreds of them now – have remained unlabelled until very recently. They were, mostly anyway, dated and their contents were listed on the opening pages, but there was nothing on their covers to identify them. Some of those from the 1980s to the 2000s have no dates in them and very little written in them, but there may still be enough to date them, such as a drawn infant daughter, or a specific location that can be pinpointed to a particular time. Date and location, date and location, I say to myself now: easily done at the time, less so later on ..read more
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Adjaye's Sunken House and an almond tree
James Hobbs
by
2y ago
We recently followed a street tree walk around our local streets from Paul Wood's enlightening book London's Street Trees. It was a bit of an epiphany to realise what an urban arboretum we have been walking under all these years: the route took in strawberry trees, tulip trees, dawn redwoods, Persian ironwoods, juneberries, wild service and Japanese pagoda trees, among others. The borough of Hackney alone has alone planted more than 1,000 street trees since 2018. This almond tree (you won't recognise it from my drawing) grows on the pavement outside David Adjaye's Sunken House. Adjaye's desi ..read more
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Interviewed in Drawing Attention
James Hobbs
by
3y ago
  There's a short interview with me in the April 2021 edition of Drawing Attention. This is the link to it.  ..read more
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Zoom sessions with ENO Breathe
James Hobbs
by
3y ago
  This is the view of the final Zoom session of the ENO Breathe programme I've been attending; it's a six-week course for people recovering from the effects of post-Covid breathlessness lead by singing experts from the English National Opera and Imperial College Healthcare Trust. It may not have turned me into an opera singer – it will take longer than six weeks to do that – but it has been great for the breathing and relaxation. Those opera singers certainly know how to breathe.  ..read more
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Landscapes in lockdown
James Hobbs
by
3y ago
Most of my drawings are about where I’ve been, what's caught my attention, what’s been going on. In these grim days of the UK’s third lockdown, things inevitably change and opportunities shrink, which needn’t be a bad thing. As well as the view out of the front windows and the view out the back, there are also the places where the imagination leads.  Here are a few of the ink drawings - all postcard sized - that I have been working on over the recent months. Some refer to sketchbook drawings done on a trip to our farming family in Cornwall, and perhaps others have echoes of the Devon cou ..read more
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Caught in the rain on Dartmoor
James Hobbs
by
3y ago
This is the latest in a series of posts about my journey around England in a camper van in 1990. Read an introduction to this drawing journey around England here. [Bracketed sections like this have been added in 2020.]  At Tavistock, having loaded the van with food from Gateways and filled it with petrol, climbing the roads towards the moors became ever slower, and it was no surprise to find myself (and the ever present cortege) crawling into dense clouds. Once past the cattle grids it is a relief to be driving along hedgeless roads, except for the tendency of sheep and ponies to wander ..read more
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Rock bottom at Land's End
James Hobbs
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3y ago
This is the latest in a series of posts about my journey around England in a camper van in 1990. Read an introduction to this drawing journey around England here. [Bracketed sections like this have been added in 2020.]  There is no mistaking that England does come to a conclusion at Land's End. I pull in at a lay-by on the top of a hill and, in the breeze, look around me. There is a 270-degree view of the sea from here, from St Michael's Mount around to Cape Cornwall. Tonight it is deceptively soft and gentle, belying the enduring strength of the last bleak stretch of granite pointing i ..read more
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Donating plasma at Westfield shopping centre
James Hobbs
by
3y ago
  I recently donated convalescent plasma at the Westfield shopping centre at Stratford, east London, which was a surprisingly uplifting experience. The space used to be a Mothercare store but is now an amazing, busy, cheerful place of mostly men attached to machines that circulate the blood back into the donor once the plasma is removed. Plasma can be frozen in readiness to help those in intensive care during the next surge in Covid cases.  If you've had the virus and are eligible to donate, I'd urge you to consider it. It's not the greatest drawing: I was perhaps a bit lig ..read more
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