The Sons of Thunder

This series of drawings and prints is so called from a quotation by T.E. Lawrence, more famously known as "Lawrence of Arabia". He was renowned for his love and habit of riding large, heavy motorbikes, each one of which he named 'Boanerges', meaning, in Aramaic, The Sons of Thunder. Having crossed deserts and having had some experience with these machines myself, I felt a small but certain resonance, but I could not better the succinct accuracy of his description.​

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His rifle can still be seen in the Imperial War Museum and this partly formed my inspiration for the centenary commemoration of the First World War drawings. I felt also that a strong educational thread should be woven into the fabric of the drawings, hence the written stories, background maps and descriptive text, so that each drawing had a tale to tell that my students, and others, might find interesting. But, as with all my drawings, the foremost inspiration comes from the melding of the austere aesthetics of engineering draughtsmanship with the vibrancy of fine art colour work and three-dimensional detail, so the one complements the other, thus giving a striking, multi-layered image. It is the intricacies of the internal components that give a machine its shape, it's style and character, so that the external forms become the very art of the engineer. In order to retain some of this, their art, I work my drawings very large, no smaller than A0, some sixteen times larger than the standard page size, using the simplest of materials: graphite pencil and coloured-pencils on traditional draughtsmans' vellum paper; no paint, airbrush or photoshop is used.

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In between the initial sketches and final colour artwork, I will make an intermediary drawing in graphite pencil. These are particularly fine in their detailed line and tone work, are extremely time consuming to draw but when completed, are personally highly gratifying as hours well spent.

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And these are proud Marques, worthy of the attention, with long histories, steeped in legend and achievements, their owners proud too of their machines' unique characteristics, their insignia and logos, their factory stamps and badges, all of which give their Marques its recognizable spirit, and so it is that I incorporate these symbols into my drawings.

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Over the years of drawing these machines, I had often considered the idea of having prints made but dismissed it on the grounds that the artwork was too large and that all the fine detail would be lost in reproduction. But through the efforts of my son, a little more tech-savvy than I am, scans were taken and proofs made, colour and tone balances adjusted individually, paper and sizes selected, a long and complex process before the final prints could be approved.

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The results were highly impressive, far beyond any quality that was previously imaginable by me. The smooth, matt surface of the archival paper had taken the ink-jet printing almost down to a molecular level, thereby retaining all the finest detail, colour changes and the "mood" of the original, all faithfully reproduced, even down to postcard sizes. And, as a reverse of this process, could make huge enlargements, yet still staying true to the original artwork.

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This digital technology has made it possible to reproduce my work to the very highest of standards and as a result, this series of prints has been created. The Collectors' Edition is limited to 20 by size, A3, A2, A1, A0. Each print is signed and numbered, and on the reverse side I affix a certificate of authenticity, signed and stamped with my personal seals. In addition to the Collectors' Edition fine-art prints on smooth-matt archival paper and custom-sized prints are available to order.