David Addison : Collapsed dry-stone wall : soft pencil : Yorkshire : 1969

I have recently been browsing through innumerable sketches, studies, and unfinished work amassed over the years ? a salutary experience!? During that nostalgic trip through my past I came across this small drawing which reminded me of the basis of my work over the years ? observation, abstracting the essence, and a fascination with ?tension?.? The context was a camping holiday with a young family ? not on a camp site but in a farmer?s field on a limestone moorland hillside in Wharfedale. The weather had not been good ? in fact it rained most of the time ? necessitating remaining in the tent for many hours. This scene, of a collapsed wall, was right in front of us and in an attempt to cope with the dismal conditions I began to idly sketch ? then began to get really interested in the relationships of irregular shapes which had formed a new dynamic relationship when the wall had fallen. The vertical axis of the tree was in stark contrast to the horizontal fallen stones ? providing a powerful tension.??? I made various attempts in subsequent months to transfer that image into a painting ? but without success. Yet looking at it now, some fifty years later, I see that I did use those tensions and contrasts in my developing abstract works.

David Addison : Landscape with Tree : gouache on paper : 2007