I love a good memento mori, and this is the most striking one I’ve sketched so far. It’s a decommissioned crematorium oven (!) in the museum at Arnos Vale Cemetery in Bristol, found while on a sketchcrawl there with the Bristol/South West Urban Sketchers group last weekend. I also sketched a couple of graveyard statues (below), but the oven was the grimly fascinating highlight. It’s large, rusty, very old, and has obviously seen a lot of use; I started to see it as a gateway to the void, or a final destination, and some other visitors saw it as a face with an open mouth… I’d like to sketch it again, taking more time to do justice to the pipework and rusty textures; maybe I could enter it into James Gurney’s current painting challenge?
Lexington grey in fountain pen and ink brush, watercolour, A5 – 15 mins each for the statues, 30 mins on site for the oven’s line-work and main shading, with another 30 mins at home for the extra shading and colour
Mostly drawing 
I see a lot of urban sketches every day, but I must say, I have never seen a sketched crematorium! 😉
Tina
Thanks Tina, I might add it to my ‘extreme sketching’ collection. I think a pathology lab is the next logical step… Ed
British churchyards are the most gothic, uncanny places, and only when I´d seen one did I understand Halloween. If a gravestone goes over in Sweden, it´s in the newspaper, considered a danger to children and small dogs, and a violation of “griftefrid” (can´t find an English translation, but it means respect for “dem bones”…). I am envious of your crematorium drawing, I love it!
Thanks Viktoria, Arnos Vale is huge (43 acres!) and still largely overgrown, with a lovely air of carefully managed neglect, great for wildlife and ruin lovers!
Ed
Wow! You can give me more of this any day, Ed! Loving the angel with toothache, too 🙂
Many thanks Stuart, I thought he was on the phone… Ed
Ah, ok, then they must be breaking up — Stu
Terrific stuff Ed! Looking forward to our October sketch crawl!
Thanks Jules. The Abbey are happy for us to sketch up in the tower, but it’ll have to be as a booked tour, which involves….money! I think this’ll be fine, as long as enough of us are there to spread the cost! Ed
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