Studio
While the city around it has been steadily if stealthily transforming, my studio and working life have hardly changed since 1970, when we moved across the crescent in Camden Town to a terrace house with a well-lit and undisturbed top floor. Each morning after breakfast my commute is simply up four flights of stairs, to a studio where I can draw from the windows or finish work begun elsewhere, think, work ideas out, reflect, and decide what to do next. When we’re away from home, this is the room I most miss.
From my desk I look out on trees – the leaves of the silver birch waving wildly in the wind and the birds that feed and perch there; our neighbours’ slate roofs, the creepers on their walls and the magpies and pigeons on their aerials; wood-pigeons and collared doves, jays and magpies and noisy parakeets; blue-tits and goldfinches that feed in the upper foliage and wrens that nest in our wooden nesting box, even an occasional heron. Peering to the right, beyond the aerials and the remaining chimney-pots of Camden, lie the tall buildings of the City and the spidery cranes rising above them. Apart from these, not much has changed in the distance from the studio, though new structures now hide the Caledonian Market tower, the trees on the Heath and Primrose Hill, and the Dutch-gabled roof of our children’s first school.
The view from my desk in November. The branches of the silver birch were drawn first with the tip of a candle, sharpened as if it were a crayon, so that it would repel watercolour when afterwards it was painted as a wash over the trees.
In the studio itself are a big working desk that can tilt if necessary, surrounded by the things I need most often: paints, a lifetime’s accumulation of watercolour brushes plus a few really new ones, watercolour boxes and pens and pencils and an old-fashioned pencil sharpener, the phone, a pocket camera and a computer on which I can look at photos and arrange page layouts and write (but not yet draw). At the other side of the room are more pinboards, plan chests and filing cabinets, a sink, two more windows, a whole-wall bookcase full of books and old sketchbooks and solander boxes for archives, and our cat’s Ikea chair.
The garden at the back, visited now and then by foxes, has a tall silver birch tree which we planted as a sapling nearly fifty years ago, plus many plants in pots and a garden bench that in summer gets three hours’ sun during which we can sit with our cat and have a mid-morning cup of tea.
