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Don Breckon's Country Railway Paintings by Don Breckon Soft Cover
Don Breckon's Country Railway Paintings by Don Breckon
Soft cover
96 pages
Copyright 1991, 2003
CONTENTS
The Plates 6
Acknowledgements 7
Foreword Kevin Crooks 9
Introduction Don Breckon 11
Working the Country Connections Tony Barfield 17
The Country Branch Line Tony Kingdom 43
A Branch Line Remembered Guy Pannell 53
Changing Times: Lostwithiel Station Don Breckon 71
Working Drawings 88
INTRODUCTION
Don Breckon
Sometimes in conversation we might say, 'that reminds me of the time when . . .', and some memory of long ago will be taken out, inspected, and put away again. But now and then there is the sudden realisation that the moment being recounted was an important turning point, or the awakening of an interest which helped to shape the person we are today.
I suspect that the most important little things are completely forgotten and yet they have moulded our attitudes ever since they occured. If I dig back into my childhood to discover what 'nudged' me towards the road of Art - or 'drawing' as I would have called it then - I begin to find many lost moments which must have played their part in shaping my future career.
My first drawing lesson is a very clear memory. It was from my father. Home on leave from the army during the war, he said he would show me how to draw ships. To my knowledge he had never drawn anything before, so I was most intrigued. On a scrap of paper he drew the upright bow of a ship, then off to one side made a dot with his pencil. He then joined the top and bottom of the bow to the dot. The superstructure and funnels followed, all flowing down and away to the dot. It was amazing! The ship seemed to be about five miles long but it was sailing towards us, seeming to come out of the paper. It was my introduction to perspective and, armed with this 'secret weapon', I went off to school to be the 'envy of all my friends', as the adverts say.
In those early years the only art which meant anything to us was the dramatic kind. On the way home from school we would hang around the front of the Odeon cinema, admiring the film posters and ready for the really good ones which got the accolade `Cor - look at that!' The cinema was the main source of entertainment for adults and children alike in the 1940s, and although it was certainly not regarded by us as an 'art form', it fired our imaginations and would lead to hours of games inspired by what we had seen 'at the pictures'. Our surroundings were comparatively drab at that time and the colour and excitement on the screen compensated for this to a great extent. I can still remember the suppressed excitement when the curtains rolled back and the dramatic theme music swept through the cinema as the screen lit up in glorious technicolor. If a Western was showing that week there would be the strange sight of the local lads trotting along the pavement making clopping sounds whilst whacking themselves on the rear!
At home in the evenings, in the pre-TV era, it was time for the Boys' Golden Wonder Book or some such, filled with exciting line drawings illustrating the stories. Even better were the occasions when we could get hold of American comic books in full colour. Later in the 1950s, the Eagle comic arrived on the scene, featuring the artwork of Frank Hampson with 'Dan Dare'. The centre spread cutaway illustrations of L. Ashwell Wood were a visual treat, heralding a new approach to comic-book art in Britain.
Cartoon drawings always interested me. I can remember trying to copy Giles and Illingworth from newspapers, becoming aware that art could be funny or dramatic in cartoon or poster form respectively, in both cases conveying a clear message to everyone at a glance.
There was also the form of magazine art which merited a rather longer look. The covers of Ronald Lampitt for John Bull and Norman Rockwell for Saturday Evening Post could be appreciated for the detail which often emerged only after studying them for some time. Lampitt's views of country villages, usually from a high viewpoint, may have prompted my own drawings of country churches. Cycling around the Welland Valley near Corby and sketching churches was my first experience of drawing from life. Every Christmas a drawing book was amongst my presents and I would draw for hours, listening to the radio at the same time. My parents liked the 'country church' phase, preferring silent subjects to the drawings of trains or aerial dogfights when I could not resist making the sound effects while I worked!
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