No wonder J scores 8 in Scrabble, there are only a handful of English towns and villages beginning with J and I’ve never sketched or painted in any of them. I’ve painted a lot of JUNK, some of which even appears in my gallery pages but for this blog I’ve chosen Jackson’s Brickworks, near my home. Jackson’s Brickworks is a re-wilded industrial site in Middlewood, between Higher Poynton and High Lane, now designated and managed as a Local Nature Reserve. Its wildlife includes great crested newts and the site is close to the Macclesfield Canal and the Middlewood Way, so is visited by walkers on those routes. The painting is from nearly 20 years ago and is in gouache. At that time, I had just started painting outdoors but couldn’t make watercolour behave in the elements. I needed to be able to correct mistakes by painting over them and gouache did the job until I learned how to control watercolour better, or stopped making mistakes. I’m not sure which of those I’ve achieved in the years since painting this. Regrettably, I've never painted there since, must do better.