Amsterdam 1983

Amsterdam 1983 (A4 ink and watercolour pencils 2016)

For the past few weeks I’ve been following an online Sketchbook Skool course called  Polishing. It’s a useful way to pull yourself out of your comfort zone.

The exercise for the second week was an urban sketching project with Dutch illustrator, Koosje Koene. At the time I was in Germany where it was raining steadily and I didn’t really feel like venturing out. In an old album I found an image of a house on an Amsterdam canal that was actually four small photographs pasted together to produce a strangely disorienting perspective.

I took the original photographs one Saturday afternoon in winter on the Keizersgracht in Amsterdam. I’d always intended to draw the building and retain the stretched perspective so, more than thirty years later, here it is. It captures a moment when my then girlfriend – later my wife, later still my ex-wife – put her foot in something rather unwelcome. In those days it was risky not looking where you were putting your feet in Amsterdam.