Pools have formed in the lower corners of fields, one of these temporary lagoons has a small muddy island with just enough room for the three mallards that are standing on it.
Trees were slow to turn colour this autumn but now there’s an ochre harmony to the foliage and increasingly they’ve lost there leaves. These poplars in a shelter belt at Dobbies Pennine Garden Centre, Shelley, on the 210 metre (656 feet) contour, overlooking the valley of Sheply Dike, are just clinging on to their topmost leaves, which is the opposite to maples and ash that I’ve seen that have been losing their top leaves first.
Garden designer Jack Wallington and Wakefield artist Helen Thomas launched the ‘Dandelion and Double Yellows – Your Gallery’ online gallery at Wakefield’s Festival of the Earth yesterday.
Last year was an exceptional one for acorns, at the top end of the wood in places it was like walking on a gravel path. This year it looks as if they’ll be in short supply. That shouldn’t be much of a problem for the grey squirrels at Nostell, who are making the most of what appears to be a good crop of sweet chestnuts this year.
This morning I drew what remains of the old laburnum behind the aviaries at the top end of the Fish Pond (now more likely to be referred to as the Duck Pond) at Thornes Park.
There was more of the tree left when I drew it for my ‘Thornes Park’ booklet over twenty years ago, and it was still hanging onto a few living branches. The aviary has had a major revamp since then.
This sweet chestnut stump by the Lower Lake in the Pleasure Grounds at Nostell had been cut so that it created a Tolkeinesque throne.
Starting at the top of the drawing, I drew in pen then inked in the dark crevices using a Chinese brush but as I got onto the main trunk, I brushed in the darker areas first, then added the line.
With summer temperatures and autumn colour, there’s a feeling of being in a continental city today in Harrogate. There are the now-redundant grand gates of Harlow Carr, which remind me of the walk from the top of the Spanish Steps to the Villa Medici in Rome and some solid stone-built arches near the station which reminded me of the ruins around the Forum but, as you can see from my photograph of the street guide with his tour group by the Pump Room, it was mainly Paris that came to mind. To add to the resemblance, there are several Paris-style Morris Column advertising pillars dotted around the town centre.
The giant rhubarb leaves of gunnera add a tropical feel to the Valley Gardens.
A male blackbird bathes enthusiastically in a small puddle in The Pinewoods as we walk down from Harlow Carr. On our return walk a black spaniel pauses to lap up water from the puddle.
‘Always draw with movement from the elbow or shoulder, never from the wrist’ was the advice that I read in a book on illustrating graphic novels recently. So that’s where I’ve been going wrong all these years. I’ve always had shaky hands so drawing from the wrist rather than the fingers is usually about as free as I get. For this geranium I made a point of moving my whole arm, so it helped that we were sitting in a cafe table and I could steady my arm by resting it on the table.
I didn’t find it so easy when I was kneeling, clutching my little A6 Hahnemuhle Watercolour Book, beside one of the beds in the walled garden at Sewerby Hall, drawing a red admiral on what I think was Hylotelephium telephium, a relative of the sedums. I find it impossible to sit in a crosslegged yoga pose, so kneeling is the best I can do.
Hoverflies were also attracted to the flowers and basked in the sun on the surrounding box edging.
Apostle Spoon
Reading up on comic strips and graphic novels makes me more aware of the stylisation that we’re familiar with in everyday life. Looking closely at this apostle teaspoon, part of the mismatched cutlery and crockery at Hilary’s in Cawthorne, I could see that someone had designed him with the sort of stylish simplification that you’d put into designing a character in a manga or comic strip story. He could appear as the ‘wise old man’ mentor for some hero, like Alec Guinness’s Obi-Wan Canobi in Star Wars.
‘You have much to learn, Grasshopper!’ would be a suitable aphorism for the Apostle-spoon character if he was admonishing me for my inability to adopt the lotus position, but it was actually Master Po’s line to David Carridine’s trainee monk in the 1970s television series, Kung Fu.
My mum had some teaspoons with Egyptian characters on them and I hope that I managed to keep one when we cleared her house. Now I’m thinking could they have come back with my dad from Egypt after the war. I don’t ever remember asking my mum about the story behind them.
