Phone box, Lidgett Park Road LS8
There are about 10,500 red telephone boxes like this one left in the UK.
It’s the K6 model – over 60,000 were installed since it’s design in 1935 by Giles Gilbert Scott. The same year my mum was born and Alcoholics Anonymous started.
The red phone box was recently voted the best British design of all time – beating Spitfire, London taxis and the miniskirt. Of course, that’s debatable. This phone box is by St Edmund’s Church in Roundhay, Leeds 8.
As I went out one morning… I spied graffiti on graffiti. Someone had written NO on a yellow spot that was spray-painted on a beech tree.
Unless you had an interest in yellow spots, you might not have noticed it.
The yellow spots appeared on about 120 trees a few months ago to mark them for felling.
Gledhow Valley Woods, Leeds 8.
I was commissioned to make a portrait of this former lodge house, built in 1888 by Sir Charles Ryder, one of the original partners of Tetley’s Brewery. I drew the house a few times before I painted it. In the middle of one drawing about 300 or 400 geese flew overhead, very high up. They flew and honked their way west in a giant V-formation that changed shape as they went – but they didn’t make it into the painting.
Thorn Lodge, Roundhay
View from the Chevin IV
View from the Chevin III
I painted the view a few times.
View from the Chevin, eyes shut
View from the Chevin I
I’m losing sleep tonight. The clocks go forward and in the lost hour it feels like time to stop painting the trees and look for a different horizon.
Here’s a drawing with my eyes shut. It still looks like trees:
Jo Dunn 