WW1 Aerial photos in colour: Messines

WW1 Aerial photos in colour: Messines

You start to doubt your sanity slightly when you spend an hour colouring in a photo brown that was, erm, brown, well sepia, but I’ve also tried to pull the detail out a bit as well. This is Messines Just to the South East of Ypres, This was taken on the 2nd of...
WW1: Trench Ghosts Part 2

WW1: Trench Ghosts Part 2

Part 2 in a series of an uncertain number of these things. There’s no project like an open ended one… St Eloi 1915 St Eloi is just to the South East of Ypres on the Salient, not that far from Hellfire Corner, or Hellfire Roundabout as it is now. There are...
Colourising: The Great War

Colourising: The Great War

A couple of years ago I did a series of these, mainly individual soldiers from my private collection of postcards, I also did a few of these, now ubiquitously crayoned in, see ’em everywhere type images, so I thought I might as well add my favourites to the...
Vanishing point: Berlin Sap

Vanishing point: Berlin Sap

It looks like a field, because it is a field, one that slopes gently up to a low ridge, 60 metres at its highest point, best appreciated either from a mile or so back in the open areas behind the old line. It looks like nothing much, close up it is just a slope and...
Vanishing Point: Essex Farm, The Eve brothers

Vanishing Point: Essex Farm, The Eve brothers

I’m fortunate, I get to go to Ypres and the Somme and indeed various other bits of the Western Front fairly often, I do it mostly for my own vicarious pleasure/misery or whatever you find you want to call it. If I face facts it is I suppose a strange thing to...
Vanishing Point: Rosebeke

Vanishing Point: Rosebeke

A strange day. I’ve been working very loosely on an ongoing project called ‘Vanishing Points’ for a while. I’m a bit of a fan of VPs, lots of artists are as a way of leading the eye into compositions, focussing the viewers mind. Kubrick for...
Here are the young men

Here are the young men

I’ve been rescuing these boys from Junk shops for years, those 50p unknowns, the Great Uncles who maybe died and had no children, they become orphaned from their families, so I’ve ended up with an old biscuit tin full of these lads. Mostly Brits, but a few...
Vanishing Point: The Ridge

Vanishing Point: The Ridge

It’s quite an apposite moment, the ridge being what it is, a symbol of so much thrashing about in the earth trying to gain a foothold, somewhere that looms large in Canada’s psyche and it’s nearly Canada Day, a day that symbolises so much about the...
Vanishing Point: The Redoubt

Vanishing Point: The Redoubt

There are areas of the Somme where you can really feel the past; where the landscape whilst modified hasn’t been essentially changed. This is one of those places. What remains isn’t difficult to spot and is easy to get too a walk down a grass clotted, tyre...
Vanishing point: The Leaning Madonna

Vanishing point: The Leaning Madonna

She’s not leaning anymore obviously, originally designed by sculptor Albert Roze and dubbed the ‘Golden Virgin’ – she stands holding aloft a golden baby Jesus on the very top of the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Brebières in the middle of Albert....