I've just realised that I have neglected my blog for five months! I am promising now that I will try to do better, and write more often. So let's start with the major distraction that has been taking my time.
In January I started to use graphite (simply a range of pencils) to draw some of the trees that we meet as we walk, travel abroad, and visit places here in England.
In January and February we spend days walking on the soggy paths and fields of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, sometimes arriving when few others were around and we could enjoy the low, misty sunrise through the trees. These walks encouraged me to add to my vast collection of photos by concentrating on trees, and at the same time, reducing the range of art materials to the graphite leads of pencils from 4H through HB to 8B.
We continued to go for our walks in the Derbyshire and Staffordshire countryside, and some of the trees we met were also recorded in further pencil drawings, particularly where the tree roots were exposed in fascinating shapes and patterns providing a challenge in monochrome, with dark, shadowy caves and pale twisted roots.
Returning to the photos taken during our decade of living above the beech woods of the Calder Valley, I rediscovered the great grey trunks and dark branches of those woods, Here the great beeches thrust their roots into the rocky hillsides like giant hands and toes, clinging on to the small pockets of soil, resisting the constant pull of gravity and the endless of flooding rains and stormy winds.
Particularly in Winter, when short days and long, dark nights can let in the demons of Winter blues and depressive thoughts,
In these dark months I find the activity of drawing is a great comfort. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the term “flow” to describe the sense of creativity that emerges from an intense absorption in a challenging activity, whether in the arts, sports, business or a hobby, and this is exactly what happens to me when I embark on a new drawing, a new character in my growing collection of graphite portraits. This one is of the hillside woods of Chatsworth, where you can walk throughout the winter, for the cost of a car park ticket. when ther house and gardens are closed and often on our weekday walks here we met very few others.
In March, we continued to visit the countryside at least once every week, fortified against the endless wet weather by bacon sandwiches from the country cafes, evidently regular haunts of motorcyclists, escaping from the cities.
In spite of the weather, Spring began to appear. Buds broke on trees, wood anemones and celandines brightened the banks of footpaths, and we began to hope that warmer and drier weather was coming. And at last a few pale primroses under a hazel clump became a focus for my work.
April began, and we visited Barcelona for an injection of art, architecture, sunshine and music. A busy week was filled with slopes and steps, Gaudi and gardens, meeting up with the Chicago branch of the family to experience the energy of a Dua Lipa concert.
I would like to have time to draw in detail as I travel, but I am either too slow, or too inexperienced to do justice to a sketchbook, so I use my phone to capture likely subjects for drawing, and in Barcelona, the streets and squares are full of treees, particularly the twisted, white-trunked London Planes lining the Ramblas ouside our hotel and in the avenue near the museum.
In May, Almost as soon as we got back from Barcelona, we made our first visit to explore the ancient rain foroests of Snowdonia, where I expanded my collection of tree photos, and made subsequent attempts to represent their mossy green lives in monochrome.
This place, that we revisited in June and have now booked again for September has become a significant feature of the year for us both.
Spending time in the company of these great trees, with their trunks often far down in deep valleys, or standing on mossy banks in protected woodlands with their heads high above us, they hold whole communities of wildlife, from moss covered trunks and fern and lichen draped branches to hosts of creatures from soaring raptors to Springtime chirping woodland birds, to myriads of tiny insects.
We explored quiet, winding, footpaths in woodlands covered with springtime bluebells and bright beech leaves, or climbed down the endless steps of steep valley tracks where the trees towered above our heads, their smooth green trunks disappearing beside our feet to reach for the water torrent below. We marvelled at these giants of the small remaining patches of ancient woodlands, now preserved by The Woodland Trust and Snowdonia National Parks, and vowed to return again and again to this quiet slice of our country's history,
During the Spring, in my drawings, I began to address the representation of millions and millions of new green leaves, bursting from every twig on every tree, and every small cushion of moss on branch, trunk or root, growing in these hillls where the constant rain keeps everything green.
So May ended and we left the riverside hotel, the quiet streets of Dolgelau, the hills and woodlands of Snowdonia, and tame robin who visited our hotel balcony for crumbs, to return to the endless wet of Sheffield, where every day the rain came at some time, and often came all day.
The continuing wet weather, left our garden soaked, but with impressive green and lush growth of every plant in our garden and the small, un-mowed wildflower meadow that we are cultivating at the side of the house.
In June, this meadow, encouraged by seeds collected on our country walks, became a sea of white ox-eye daisies, studded with occasional cornflowers and 'Jack go to bed at noon' with its stunning crown of seed-heads, all underpinned by self-heal, vetch, fox and cubs, and hundreds of plants of yellow rattle, harvested by us in the Staffordshire countryside, and sowed here to hold back the grasses and encourage the wild flowers to establish themselves.
And now it's July, and we continue to focus our country walks and great house visits or places with historic and even ancient trees - these included a visit to The Harley Gallery to see an exhibiton of drawings of Ancient Oaks by Mark Frith, and a drive to Leicestershire to meet The Old Man of Calke, a thousand year old oak in the grounds of Calke Abbey. This house, 'frozen in time' in the 1950's, when the owner retreated to a small part of the huge mansion, leaving the rest to gently sink into dust and disrepair until the National Trust took over, dedicated to keeping the house as it was when left to them in lieu of death duties, while maintaining and gently restoring some of the contents.
The Old Man of Calke is a massive entity, not a tree as we might know it, but a huge mass of bubbling bark, surrounding a hollow centre, and with a crown of green leaves above, like a bunch of green flowers in an ancient wooden vase.
Like many of the ancient trees we are meeting, this old man has survived for more than a thousand years, and was 200 years old when William the Conqueror arrived in Britain.
I am in the process of recreating his unique character in graphite, and finding it a real challenge!
In the woods and grounds of the Abbey there are other unusual trees, including some 'walking trees' - trees whose lower branches have bent low to the ground and taken root there, making new trees some distance from the old one. As the old tree dies, these walking trees take over, and the tree 'moves' slowly across the lanscape.
This 'walking tree' at Calke is by the lake and has grown out several yards from the parent beech tree, along a huge branch that has re-rooted near to the water.
(left) 'Walking' new tree, rooted some distance away. Parent beech tree (right).
So now we are in summer - one of the wettest summers on record, and we hope that we MAY have a warm, sunny spell soon.
I will return to report!!
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