Illustrations for Exquisite Terror - 19 Cadogan Place and 23 Yeoman's Row

Pencil
January 2015

Another pair of pieces for the excellent Exquisite Terror. This time, Naila requested pencil illustrations of two London properties that were hitherto unknown to me - 19 Cadogan Place and 23 Yeoman's Row.

19 Cadogan Place is located between Knightsbridge and Belgravia, just a few houses down from the former residence of noted politician/philanthropist/slave emancipator William Wilberforce. Online property listings (in this case, Zoopla) gush that no.19 is "an exceptional Penthouse apartment with a most impressive 690 sq/ft roof garden, overlooking the extensive gardens of Cadogan Place" and mention that it was last on the market in October 2014 with a guide price of £4,750,000. 23 Yeoman's Row, meanwhile, is also in southwest London and is described as "a quaint three storey cottage on a quiet little cul-de-sac off the busy Brompton Road, just a short walk from Sloane Square". Property magnates would be pleased to note that it is certainly cheaper than the previous property, with an estimated value of just £4,680,000. So that's good news for everyone, at least...

But I digress. So what is it that connects these properties? What possibly makes them of interest to a periodical that concerns itself primarily with academic analyses and scholarly articles related to horror literature and cinema?

Each served as home for a period of time (and in the case of Cadogan Place, as site of death as well) to screenwriter and director Michael Reeves. In his short life, he worked with horror greats like Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee, and notably directed and co-wrote The Witchfinder General before his death in 1969, aged just 25. As accompaniment for a piece in Exquisite Terror issue 5, Naila sent me images of each property and asked that I set about translating them into pencilwork.

I have no doubt that there are some people who very much enjoy drawing buildings, but I feared I was not one of them. The accuracy involved in creating straight lines and realistic angles and detailing the flat expanse of substance that makes up walls or windows... it just seemed like the opposite of what I have been trying to do in making my drawing and painting better, which is to create impressions of what is seen, not what is exactly there. It seemed sort of mathematical to me at first, rather than "artistic"; to someone who favours portraits over landscapes and often just skims in backgrounds without much interest, buildings seemed a lot more trouble than they were worth, frankly.

But of course I was wrong about this, and I'm glad I was. As ever, when you look at something properly and with care, you realise it isn't a box made of dull straight lines, but a shape composed entirely of light and shade. The brickwork, something I'd been dreading, turned out to be one of the most fun sections to do, and while it may have taken a while to get the proportions set, the fact I was drawing more straight planes than are found in the average human face transcended a chore and actually became fun. So there! Taught me a thing or two (as ever)...