Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
THE LAST NUMBER that Drighillton Band play at the Flock to Ossett carnival is Singing in the Rain. Fortunately it stays fine until the grand parade that rounds up the proceedings when papiere mache sheep are paraded around the market square. At Halifax at the Diamond Jubilee celebrations a few weeks ago, heavy rain turned a papiere mache spit roast ox soggy and it fell into the flames and caught fire. No such disasters today.
THE NAME of Cluntergate is thought to come from the Viking klunter meaning logs or blocks and gata meaning a path or road.
The dialect word clunter is either a big lump or a clattering noise. I can picture Cluntergate being a muddy thoroughfare up the slope into Horbury with logs laid down along the boggier parts. Any cart approaching this way would clatter as it negotiated the logs.
This little Jack Russel terrier was tethered outside a shoe shop on Horbury High Street. It gave such a friendly greeting to each passer by that I wondered if one of them was going to prove to be its owner, but as we went off to our next port of call it was still there, patiently waiting.
THIS SUMMER we’ve had so much cool rainy weather and few mornings like this; warm but not sultry; clear, bright sunlight and intensely blue skies with fair weather cumulus. With trees in full leaf and verges frothing with Cow Parsley the countryside now has the fullness of summer but grasses, flowers and foliage still have the un-nibbled freshness of spring.
We’ve missed out on this, a favourite spring walk through Wharfedale, in the last two or three years and when we arrive at Skipton we discover that we can’t get to our starting point at Bolton Abbey by bus because the county council has been cutting back on rural services (except at weekends), so we opt for a taxi. But we start our walk from the bus stop and just over the wall, down in a culverted water course, the first bird that we see is a Dipper flying low just above the water under a old stone bridge, which I guess is where it has its nest.
‘Have you seen any Kingfishers?’ a couple ask us later on the walk. No Kingfishers but we’re pleased that despite the recent heavy rains there’s a lot of activity around a Sand Martins colony in the riverbank at Gibson’s Mill, where a pair of Oystercatchers are standing on the sand below and a Grey Heron stalking in the pasture beyond.
Whenever I see Bolton Abbey, whether its on television or on a calendar, I always think that it’s about time we visited it again and at last here we are. Some day I’ll buy the guide book and study the ruins but today we’re here for a riverside walk, so we backtrack along the Dales Way to its official starting point in Ilkley.
Addingham is perfectly placed for a coffee stop and when we reach Ilkley we take a break on a bench in the shade of riverside trees overlooking the Old Bridge where the sign ‘Bowness 82 miles’ marks the start of the Dales Way.
A QUICK update on the patch of wildflower meadow that I replanted on the 6 April; it looks even smaller now that the hedge is in full leaf and the surrounding Cow Parsley, nettle and Chicory have grown but you can see how effective our weeding out of Chicory and docks in the central area has been. At this time of year this would normally be wall to wall Chicory and dock.
The strip of turf at the back has established itself successfully and the grass seed in the meadow mix has greened the bare soil but I can see that there are also a lot of seedlings of Opium Poppy coming up, a species that wasn’t in the meadow mix but whose seeds are scattered all over our garden. It’s a plant that I like to see and to draw but I’ll have to weed them out to prevent their lush foliage shading out the wild flower seeds that I’ve sown.
Buttercups and Red Clover are already in flower on the strip of turf so I’ve got some idea of the final effect.
Next job; to mow down the Chicory to create a path around the edges. I don’t want it to spread into the central area again so it’s going to mean some more weeding and then I’ll sow the edges with suitable grass seed.
Charlotte’s Ice Cream Parlour, Whitley, 11.30 a.m. THE PENNINES are fading into the mist and the mist grades into the low cloud above. A Skylark rises high over a pasture in which donkeys and cattle are grazing.
Besides the small stocky black cattle, which I think are Dexters, there are two young Jersey cows. One takes a break from grazing to rub her chin on the fence.
I GIVE the lawn a rake with the springbok rake at this time of year to get some of the moss out of it but my new Scarifier, one of this week’s bargains at Lidl supermarket, does a much better job. The lawn is no more than 25 square metres, but I raked up this pile which is almost entirely moss. It amounted to 7 or 8 trug-loads to take to the compost bins.
I’ve got nothing against moss but it has obliterated the grass in places so I’ll need to put some seed down. It should soon germinate and grow at this time of year. Meanwhile the Blackbird is making the most of the newly exposed bare ground, picking up worms or insects.
This scarifier is basically a long-handled rake on wheels with 11 stainless steel blades. The eccentrically attached wheels give an up and down motion to the blades which makes the action a lot easier than it was with springbok. The instructions recommend that you scarify your lawn at this time of year, after you’ve cut it short and in dry weather.
I don’t think that I’ll bother adding any fertiliser but I might sieve some garden compost over the lawn when I scatter the grass seed.
I DREW this with my 08 nib Pilot Drawing Pen and made a start adding the colour as I waited in the queue for advice from a government helpline. After all the waiting, it turned out it was a problem of my own making but at least the hands free phone gave me an interval to sketch. I keep thinking that all the work that I put into mundane tasks like accounts and tax returns will eventually give me some freedom but at this rate by the time I get all the loose ends tied up it will be time to start all over again.
In this view of the woods there’s a Sycamore in full leaf on the far right with an oak just coming into leaf behind it. There’s dark green ivy on the boughs of the big Ash tree on the left, the branches of which are dotted with the Ash flowers, now going to seed, and its fresh green leaves. At the bottom left by the little store house there’s a Blackthorn bush, which was in blossom a few weeks ago.
In my efforts to catch the subtlety of the greens which are actually made up of a stipple of different colours I’ve ended up with an autumnal cast to my watercolour. When I compare the finished result with the actual view from my studio window the real foliage is a fresh light green. I’ve added too much ochre and the odd touch of crimson. There might be traces of both those colours in the barely perceptible flowers, twigs and buds but the foliage is the predominant colour.
You’d have to go for a pointillist technique of lots of tiny dots of pure colour to reproduce the experience of all the colour that you can see but in washes of watercolour you’ve got to average it out and any attempt to introduce those flecks of red and brown will simply dull down the dominant pure greens of the spring foliage.
I WANTED to draw something in the garden but nothing too fussy so at this time of year an obvious subject is the newly unfurled leaves of Rhubarb. Some are still looking crinkly from recently unpacking themselves from the folded-up form that emerged from the bud.
The glossy elephant’s ears leaves bring a touch of the luxuriantly exotic to the vegetable garden, flouncing around by the hedge with the kind of grand, swaggering gestures that you’d find in Baroque theatre or Elizabethan costume.
The pattern of veins with sections of puckered leaf surface between reminded me of the river valleys and hills of Europe that I’d been sketching from the plane a couple of weeks ago.
I was intending to stick purely to line and I didn’t want to add watercolour but by the time I’d finished a few leaves my drawing was looking like a map so I added cross hatching in the gaps between the leaf margins and indicated some of the shadows from the afternoon sun to give some clues to the way the leaves are arranged relative to each other in space.
Being right-handed I started in the top left corner and worked my way across. Theoretically I could have continued in this fashion, piecing my subject together from interlocking shapes like a jigsaw but my attention soon wavered and by the time I got to the large leaf in the centre of the top row I went drastically wrong in scale. I’ve left my mistake in the drawing so that you can see that at my first attempt I drew the main leaf vein about two thirds of the size it should be and 2 centimetres to the left of where it should have been on the page.
I realised that however relaxing this drawing was supposed to be I needed a strategy to tackle such a convoluted subject so I started by indicating the main veins before getting involved in the subsidiary details.
It sounds like a controlled process but the outlines and veins make what might appear to be a still life feel as if it’s animated. I felt as I imagine a novice skier must feel if they attempt to go straight from the nursery slopes onto the red routes. A feeling of controlled chaos.
The lighting was consistent and there was little breeze and little to distract me other than a sparrow chirping in the hedge above the rhubarb.
Thinking about the need for a degree of determination even when you’re doing something that is supposedly relaxing, after I drew this I was listening to a short talk on Radio 3 by choral music conductor Gareth Malone who said that when he had a big performance to conduct on the way to the concert hall he would read the ‘Once more unto the breach dear friends!’ speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V on his mobile phone. Not that singing is like fighting but he feels that he needs to instill in his choir some spirit and determination.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon . . .
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’
I know what he means because you need something of that sense of attack when tackling a drawing. You’ve somehow got to keep that ‘stillness and humility’ but also harness the controlled energy suggested in the line about ‘greyhounds in the slips, straining upon the start’. Relaxed concentration is what I usually call it, but that’s what the ‘action of the tiger’ appears to be when you see one hunting in a wildlife documentary; fluid movement and observant determination.
I used a Pilot Drawing Pen with an 08 nib for the rhubarb drawing which contains waterproof, light resistant brown DR pigment ink. When drawing botanical details I’d normally go for the finer 01 size nib but I wanted a more expressive and relaxed line here.
For me this 08 nib might be the nearest that I’ll get to the feel of a fountain pen when using a fibre tip. I tend to wear down the fibre tips before the ink in the pen runs out, perhaps because I’m using too much pressure or because I’m drawing on slightly toothed acid free cartridge paper. I soon find that I have to hold the pen vertically to get a consistent line out of it. I’m hoping that the larger tip size will enable me to draw at an angle for longer. Perhaps a proportionally larger tip in relation to the size of the ink reservoir helps give a smoother flow.
Links Gareth Malone, Pilot Drawing Pen
Trees drawn on our travels yesterday.
FEMALE CATKINS of the Pussy Willow – also known as the Goat Willow or Sallow, Salix caprea, are starting to release their fluffy thistledown-like seeds.
This willow is dioecious, meaning unisexual. An individual Pussy Willow will have either all male or all female catkins. Pollen is distributed on the wind so pollination and seed-dispersal has mainly taken place before the leaves unfurl, obstructing windblown pollen or seeds.
The shape and size of this beetle is a good match for the leaf buds.
