Woolworths Ladies

I visited a Woolworths store in Leeds last week.
I didn't even know that we had a Woolworths store in Leeds anymore, but we have.

It was pleasing to note that it still sells crap and that it hasn't lost any of its reputation for cramming as much crap with as much variation of crap into its floorspace as possible, aisles are only twelve inches wide and the crap falls off the shelves on top of you as you walk past, its a retail phenomenon that could not work anywhere else but Woolworths.

It was also pleasing to note that FW Woolworth have not lost sight of their original mission statement, that is to employ the ugliest, most miserable women in the city and clad them in tabards so that they look like school dinner ladies causing us to revert to the worst of our primitive childhood phobias and fear them deeply.

Its almost as if all of the Job Centres in the city gather together their chubbiest, ugliest, and most miserable of women seeking retail employment, garner together the ones who will not (for obvious reasons) ever find themselves seeking an honest days pay behind the makeup counter in Harvey Nichols or Debenhams (for no makeup is that good) and when they have a brace or two then phone up FW Woolworth and ask the Personnel Director to make an offer for them,

"Two ugly miserable ones willing to work for minimum wage, make us a bid"
"How ugly are they ?"
"Really ugly, we've had to keep them in a separate room from the rest of the jobseekers"
"How miserable ?"
"They haven't stopped complaining since childhood"
"We'll take them, minimum wage, let me know when you get some more"


The above quick sketch that I did of the Woolworths women that served me last week is not a cartoon stylee, its almost photographic in its representation, they really do look like that and they really were as miserable as their pictorial countenances appear to be.

The Woolworths Ladies, captured by my pen on 13th December 2007, all rights reserved, FW Woolworth.

Random pub paintings

Two ways to handle my favourite painting/drawing subjects - British Pubs.

The top one is the Three Horse Shoes in Headingley, done in coloured pencil, easy to work with, easy to correct when things go wrong, fascinating to overlay several times and watch the colours interact with each other - is a very precise format and can end up looking like an architects plan if not careful.

The bottom one is The Adelphi, one of Tetleys central Leeds major public houses, done in watercolour worked mainly wet-in-wet, that is the paint is painted onto a wet sheet of watercolour paper making it very unpredictable. Some correction can be done by lifting out some of the paint while still wet with a tissue or dry brush, or by waiting for the paint and paper to dry and painting over it - neither is very succesful as watercolour is by its nature transparent and what you have underneath will always show through, you get one, maybe two chances to get things right with watercolour and can often ruin a painting right at the end after ten or twelve hours work on it.

Guess which one I prefer to work with ?
Yup - the difficult one :)