Roots

In the three months since we moved into this new house I have been unable to paint, that is I have been able to paint in watercolour, acrylic and pastel - but its all come out crap.

So I'm starting over again, I've only been doing this for 40 years and I'm having to start from the beginning again.

And what better place to start than your roots ?

When we were very young we lived in the Lumleys, streets and streets of back-to-back terraced houses, a style of house that was almost, but not quite, unique to Leeds where tens of thousands of dwellings were built literaly back-to-back so that your house only had a frontage, the back wall of your house was the back wall of the house on the street behind yours, your house shared all of its walls with another house except its frontage.

Lumley Walk is where my cousins lived and was just around the corner from us on Lumley Road, this watercolour was copied from a photo that I found on the excellent Leeds City archive online at Leodis.net but I'm going to have to wander down there sometime soon with my own camera and take some photos of our actualy house for a larger painting - this one is only nine inches by six and shows just what a parlous state my painting is in since we moved, still its the best I've done in three months so we'll build from here.