SPARROWS are chirping monotonously in the Hawthorn hedge. A Smooth Newt swims up for a breath of air at the edge of the pond. A couple of wolf spiders scamper around in the pop-up shelter that I’m using as a sunshade. It’s warm in here; climbing to a sticky 34°C in the sun, according to the keyfob thermometer on my artbag.
After several months mainly taken up with business, I’m finding it difficult to get back to drawing from nature. I can’t yet slow down enough to see things in anything but a blur. Drawing these Kingcups – also known as Marsh Marigolds – by the pond is an easy step towards focusing on the everyday and getting into the drawing habit again.
Varifocals
Talking of seeing things as a blur, yesterday afternoon I did this drawing (left) of limes and a holly from a shady bench by the war memorial in Horbury Memorial Park, locally known as ‘Sparra’ Park’. It’s the first drawing I’ve done with my new varifocal glasses – I’ve only ever used reading glasses until my latest eye-test. With a band of long-distance vision across the top of the lense and a smaller patch for close-focus across the bottom, they work well for drawing.
Putting them on as I walked back from the opticians was a revelation. The light was perfect anyway; a sunny spring morning with fresh green leaves and blossom in the gardens, all of which now appeared to me in crisp high definition. I felt that I could see each stamen as I passed a branch of blossom.
It reminded me of Frederick Franck’s memories, recalled in his book The Awakened Eye, of looking at Victorian 3D photographs – of cows in a meadow, for example – in his grandfather’s elaborate stereopticon. As a child wandering in the meadows around his home town, Franck came to realise that he could recapture that sense of heightened reality by ‘turning on’ his own stereopticon. He credits his grandfather’s steropticon with setting him out on his lifetime journey exploring seeing and drawing.
From Monet to Millais
When I compare a view of trees with and without my new glasses I realise how much my long-sight has deteriorated, something which I hasn’t really troubled me as my brain has been compensating for it, filling in 
the gaps as it were. Wearing these new glasses is rather like suddenly switching from the broad brushstrokes of a late Monet to the luminous glazes of colour and sharp detail of the early Pre-Raphaelites. Artistically, you might not consider this to be progress but for me as a naturalist the wealth of extra detail and information about the natural world that is now available to me is very welcome.
IT’S SO GOOD to be drawing in my sketchbook again even if, for th
e time being, that has to be in the dentist’s, the doctor’s, the pharmacy and the optician’s, drawing goldfish, a pile of magazines, a semi-detached house and the beacon by the zebra crossing respectively.
stocktaking, satisfying as they are to do, gradually ebbing away giving me time for even more satisfying activity of going out and drawing from nature.
Rowan, which is now coming into blossom, in our front garden, then it flew up to the top of the telegraph pole, as if it was considering excavating a nest hole there.
We’re making progress in the garden too with our basic crops of onions, broad beans and potatoes already in the ground. As the soil continues to warm up, we’ll sow courgettes and start our tomatoes off in the greenhouse.
As a change in my watercolour of the cliffs, I started directly with my brush, with no preliminary drawing, painting the shapes of sky, cliff-top and sea separately, as if they were individual pieces of a jigsaw. A contrast to my habitual pen plus wash, which I used in my quick sketch of Howden Minster on our coffee break on the way here this morning.
I’VE DRAWN these Desirée red maincrop potatoes with a size no. 111 Tower Pen nib that I used when I drew my new art-bag the other day in non-waterproof ink; a sepia calligraphy writing ink from the Manuscript Pen company of Highley, Shrophshire. This flows more smoothly than Indian ink but the disadvantage is that I don’t now have the option of adding a watercolour wash to my drawing – not unless I’m prepared to see my line-work run unpredictably into the watercolour, which in this case is not the effect that I’m after.
THE REAR WINDOW of our apartment on Glassford Street, Glasgow, where we stayed last weekend, looked out over a yard. The wall of the adjoining building was constructed of rough-hewn stone and I noticed these fossil ripple-marks in two of the blocks.
Dales, although you can see that one of the blocks (lower right) has a warmer, sandy colour.
WHEN CHECKING out my Middleton Park route for Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle, I was intrigued by the sign for a cycle-path route to the centre of Leeds.
It’s the first day of spring but it seems more like summer this afternoon. Woodland flowers are showing; the odd clump of delicate Wood Sorrel holds its clover-like leaves folded back. The the banking beside the path is dotted with Lesser Celandine and green swathes of Dogs Mercury. The leaves of Bluebells are already showing. As we approach Leeds the rough ground beside the path is dotted with Coltsfoot.
THE TROUBLE with having a big cut-back in the garden is that you end up with a big pile of trimmings, but it isn’t quite as bad as it looks; two thirds of that pile is material from the old compost bins (right) which I now need to put back in the new, much-improved version which we’ve constructed behind the greenhouse.
Now would be a good time to start a crop of mixed salad leaves in the greenhouse, which we’d take out in about two months time when the tomato plants will go in.
I should also be able to whittle down the quantity of black plastic water-tanks that are lying around at the end of the garden; the existing water-butts connected to downpipes from the roofs of the house, the greenhouse and the shed should provide enough rainwater for all but the driest summers.
IT SEEMED rather drastic when, a few years ago, spiked fences went up around the old colliery railway embankment that crosses the valley floor between the canal and the river at Addingford. It blocked off an unofficial walk that I had enjoyed since the tracks were taken up in the late 1960s and, alarmingly, a number of Silver Birches were chainsawed and left lying where they fell, but from the official public footpath, which runs along the foot of the embankent, I can now see this from the birds’ point of view.
does keep them out but whoever put up the fence has gone to a great deal of trouble to ensure that the four-legged friends of humans can’t get in there to enjoy snuffling around in the undergrowth. Bad news for dogs but good news for ground-nesting birds.
Even the felling of a dozen birch trees isn’t necessarily a disaster for wildlife; it has opened up sunny spaces on the banking which should encourage the growth of wild flowers, which in turn should attract butterflies. Ants should also be active on this sunny slope which provide food for a bird that I’ve seen for years near the old railway; the Green Woodpecker.
Leaving the birch trunks where they fell also makes good sense; dead wood is so often cleared away from public spaces and forestery plantations, removing a potential habitat for all sorts of wildlife.
I noticed that several of of the birch trunks, sawn off at chest-height, which is not the approved way to coppice them, have been adopted as bird feeding stations by having planks nailed to them. The resident Robins seemed happy with this arrangement.
The fenced-off embankement wouldn’t walk away with the gold medal for a wildlife garden at Chelsea but as far as habitat goes it’s shaping up to be an improvement for birds, butterflies, wild flowers and fungi.
The pigeons coming down for scraps of sandwiches were a better warm-up than those tricky parallel curves of the sandwich booth.
As we came back into Yorkshire, the North Yorks Moors loomed above the farmland. They’d been almost imperceptable in the mist on our outward journey, their tops hidden by a long low cloud.
