Summer Vacation: UK Edition

        It’s time for another armchair trip with block prints, and today we’re heading for the UK.  I actually don’t have many proper British scenes of my own to share, but we’ll begin in the small Lancashire town of Yealand Conyers.  I visited here in 1987, where I made a sketch of the wonderfully “quaint” buildings visible from my hostel window.  (You can see the sketch here, in the first picture.)  I didn’t then use it as the basis of a block print until 11 years later, when it was one of my earlier rubber block prints, made only a year or two after I really started working with rubber block prints as my medium of choice.

        We skip up to Scotland next, for another of my faux woodcuts from The Extraordinary Book of Doors.  This door is in St Salvator’s Chapel in the University of St Andrews.  It dates to the fifteenth century.  I’ve also posted some other artists' block printed views of Scotland, which you can revisit:

Waverly train station in Edinburgh

Highland landscapes

Plus a post that serves as our transition, with coastal views in both Scotland and all the way down in the East of England.

        From here we will visit another church door, this one from St Bartholomew-the-Great in London.  The design in the upper corners is supposed to represent William Bolton, who was prior from 1505-1532.  It’s a crossbow bolt through a cask or tun.

While we’re in London, here are a couple more landmarks by E. White

And two views of nearby Ely Cathedral to round out our string of churches.

        That’s all I have from the UK, but I may as well throw in an English-speaking bonus from the antipodes.  This fern actually represents the fiddlehead of a tree fern in New Zealand.  The original is about life size, the size of a curled fist.  I love ferns of all sorts and am pretty much completely nuts about tree ferns.  I took about a thousand photographs of them while in New Zealand, and based this print on one.

        I have also previously shared some of A. Laurence’s views of Australia, which you can revisit,

plus a kangaroo.

        And after that it’s time to come on home, our block-printed travel completed for the summer.  I hope you enjoyed some of my views of different parts of the world that I’ve been fortunate enough to visit in the past.  I hope we’ll be able to  travel again safely before too much longer.  In the meantime, don’t forget the interconnectedness of the whole Earth, both nature and we people who are inextricably intertwined, in relationship with each other and everything else around the world.

[Pictures: Window at Yealand Conyers, rubber block print by AEGN, 1998;

Plate X; Plate XXII, illustrations from The Extraordinary Book of Doors by AEGN, 2014;

New Zealand Fern, rubber block print by AEGN, 2000.]