Oxford cranes – at the Observatory

On a quiet Easter Sunday afternoon I made my way into Oxford and settled on doing a drawing from outside the Radcliffe Observatory. The most striking thing from this viewpoint is the new site between the Observatory and the Blavatnik Building (links below). Here they are constructing a big new Humanities building which will hopefully also have a (small?) art gallery. At the moment the site is mostly flattened, with some fancy new building office buildings and a really large crane.

There always seems to be building work going on somewhere in Oxford and the various cranes are something that draws your attention. Sitting there drawing this particular crane on a windy day, I gradually noticed that although the site was closed and the crane empty, it was still slowly moving around in the wind – tricky if you are trying to draw it.