Full Circle

Here I am working at connecting the different facets of my digital creative life together, with a new Facebook page for James Keniston Illustration (@jkillustrates) and returning to my blog to offer you the chance to delve a bit deeper into my work and some of my other creative pursuits. In the last few years I have returned to the slightly geeky pursuit of building model airplanes as a break from drawing. This is an activity that I can first recall doing with my Dad, on holidays to Broadstairs in Kent - in the south-east of England. I can clearly recall sitting together in the garden of Mr. Whitehorn's hotel and assembling the red plastic of a Red Arrows display team Hawk jet. But further than that my early engagement with the history of this part of the UK, which saw a huge amount of aviation activity during World War 2, and a lot of the wartime struggle, has really stayed with me. Trips to see old airfields and tiny museums, paying homage to the sacrifices made by servicemen and women, and civilians alike, being fascinated by objects from that era, seems to have had a profound effect. I now find myself building small aircraft kits and thinking back to a time that I never lived through, but wondering how people did. It's a tribute. An activity to keep an aspect of our collective history alive. I have also really enjoyed applying some of the technical and material knowledge from my art life to the process of constructing these models, to create something that you are proud to display or talk to people about, often times sparking a much larger discussion about history. I've had some very kind comments from friends, telling me that they are beautiful, and I appreciate that very much. My wife will go to the local model store with me and even shop for me there alone for gifts. 

I returned to Broadstairs for a visit in July of 2017, and we stopped along the way at RAF Manston, a small airfield just outside Broadstairs.

Manston was actually the launch site for the first test flights of Barnes Wallis' bouncing bomb that was used by the Royal Air Force in Operation Chastise against the German damns. Back in Broadstairs, I revisited the old lifeboat house by the harbor and decided that this would be a subject for a future drawing - having various elements that were aligned with some of my criteria for a building of character: historic, quirky, has a flag, miscellaneous objects out front - to name a few.

As it turns out, there is a lovely man at our local Trader Joe's who has an English wife who is from Broadstairs. That's where the full circle part comes in. We got to talking about it and I told him I was working on a drawing of the lifeboat house from there. In the end I made a print for him and also printed a panoramic photograph I had taken of the seafront, overlooking Viking Bay. We took those in one evening for him when we did our grocery shopping.