The Backs of Houses.

My LRB cover for last month, depicting a chair perched on a fence on the outskirts of Newport (seen from the window of a train). This began as a tiny watercolour sketch, and it took numerous attempts to turn into a full size artwork. 

I ended up using a black chinagraph crayon for all the mark-making, to keep some of the softness of the initial watercolour, I wanted the image to feel like a fleeting glimpse from the window, and somehow using solid black ink had too much finality, and made the image far too static.