The Yorkshire Landscape colourway is derived from drawings I made in the summer of 2024. My parents live in Sheffield, very close to the rolling and colourful hills of Yorkshire, and now that my son is a little older, I am starting to find time to explore this landscape and draw. Please see the Works page of my website and click on Drawings to see the sketches, from where this collection began.
Blue. So much of what we see is set against a backdrop of blue, whether that be town, city or countryside. In my previous life as an art teacher, I so often found that mounting a piece of students works on blue, would lift the work, whatever the colour, to a startling degree. Blue is the worlds favourite colour and is full of fascinating paradoxes: it recedes yet can at times advance, it can be cool and also seem warm, it is a sad colour but can also invigorate, and there are so many different kinds of blue. Within the Yorkshire Landscape, I collected colours from the hills, but witnessed these same colours against different blue skies. Initially, in my ceramics, I set the colours against a very pale blue, so as not to disrupt the order of things too much. The pale blue is gentle and allows the colours to gently sing. It is also so pale it almost disappears, so that the highly coloured areas seem to float above it. In this collection, on 2 pieces specifically, I have tried increasing the tone, depth and saturation of the blue. This has the effect of brightening the whole colourway, so much so that those same colours make a much louder noise than before.