Lunch Dates

On many occasions I find my sketchbook keeps me really good company. This can be when I have cause to wait in places where everyone around me appears to be involved in some kind of communal activity. These drawings represent occasions where I have been the invisible guest at the lunch date of people I don't know . The more deeply the lunching strangers are involved in their private moment the more detail I feel able to draw into my own record of their experience. These drawings represent my shared experiences with complete strangers.

Chlorine Scented

Over a period of seven years I spent at least one hour every week at the Latchmere Leisure Centre initially ensuring that my children learned to swim and subsequently watching my son gain his distance awards. Eventually after swimming over one mile he decided that swimming was no longer fun and my pool attendance also ceased.
During the hours I waited and watched, I sat in the steamy, chlorine heavy atmosphere of Paco's cafe surrounded by yellow plastic chairs strewn around ketchup stained plastic tables populated by fractious families feasting on chicken dinosaurs. In order to mentally separate myself from this mayhem I would use any paper and materials I could find in my bag to draw, this is a particularly enthusiastic attendant who I recall made generous use of his whistle.These drawings are on the back of an old invoice for some animation work.

Lemon Scented

These drawings carry a really strong association with the the scent of lemons. Pearl was sitting under the shade of a huge lemon tree in the garden of a villa in a tiny hamlet called Horto on the Pilion peninsula of mainland Greece. The tree was our source of shade from the blistering sun and the children were happy to amuse themselves with an ancient hand operated water pump. A near perfect experience of a family holiday punctuated by minor incidents such as the small smoking piles by the adjacent river which on further investigation turned out to be the local method for eliminating snakes. We met a local olive producers son who had hopes of reviving his almost extinct (Trabant?) vehicle with some help from Andrew. This proved fruitless but he still rewarded us with supper on his beautiful terrace overlooking the sea cooked by his elderly mother, who never actually appeared in person.