I’m working on some ideas at the moment for my exhibition in July 2013  about the Yorkshire Dales and I’m doing a lot of reading. Apart from collections of Dales stories I’m reading an excellent book on Yorkshire geology.

The special character of the Dales is closely associated with the limestone beneath. When you’re walking in the hills the evidence that this was once the floor of a sea is evident in every fossil-studded rock. For an artist, however, it is the more recent legacy of the ice ages which lends the skyline its character.

Four hills in particular: Penyghent, Ingleborough, Penhill and Addleborough owe their distinctive profiles to a combination of smoothing ice flows and hard layers of underlying rock giving the flat-topped, step-sided horizon which typify the Dales and make them such a pleasure to paint.

Of these four, Penhill holds a special place in my heart. It’s in view most of the time when you’re travelling in Wensleydale, where I live. It is a lovely climb, with fantastic views from the top and it’s a hill of stories:

• the legend of the Penhill Giant – a maiden snatching, cow-munching psychopath whose grave caps the summit.
  
• the tumbled down beacon thought to date from the threat of the Spanish Armada 500 years ago. 
  
• the strange tracks cut into and around the hill made by drovers, traders, monks and possibly by the Brigantes tribe who once ruled the Dales before it was England. (They made Tor Dyke – a big ditch cut across the top of neighbouring Coverdale).
  

Here are some paintings done over the years of my favourite hill along with an excerpt from a recent poem, written for the forthcoming exhibition.

On Penhill

Always on the skyline of my life for two score years now,
Seen from a train, a distant castle, a motorway,
From a road rolling in the belly of the dale,
From ship shaped village green,
From beyond the torn walls of a ruined chapter house
The hill, prow lifted to the east,
Sails against the sky.

Rising from the sculpted ordered Georgian bridge
By hand hewn hedges smooth as hounds
And lifting to the racehorse rumbling high moor
The symphonic heft of Wensleydale behind, beneath,
And suddenly the sky is close above us.

Art course coming up ...


There are a few places left on Top Techniques in Watercolour 
- a course for everyone interested in painting in watercolour - 
at Artison (near Masham, North Yorkshire) Thursday, 5th April. 

The course, which will focus on a variety of very effective techniques, costs £65.00 (which includes an excellent lunch). 

CLICK HERE to book.

I've been going through a few acrylic ink paintings recently because I'm teaching a one-day course on this medium at the studios of Artison, just outside Masham, in Wensleydale, North Yorkshire.

The course is on February 24th and what I hope to do is show a whole range of techniques which exploit the potential of this terrific medium.

Acrylic inks are a perfect crossover medium. They create inpervious surfaces in rich colour, like acylic paint, but can diluted and applied like watercolour. They can create intricate textures and will happily combine with other watersoluble media, like gouache.

Here are a few of the pictures I've created with acrylic inks over the last few years.

As you can see the colours are amazing and the textures varying from the subtle to the visually dissonnant.
 
If you'd like to book a place on the course click HERE

If you'd like to see more of my work featuring acrylic ink go to The Gallery, Masham, North Yorkshire, or visit their website by clicking HERE

And if you can't make the course but would like to try acrylic inks my recommendation would be for the wonderful range made by Rorher & Klinger of Leipzig. You can visit their site by clicking HERE

Its a beautiful, cold day in Masham, North Yorkshire. The frost- caked cars haven't shown a sign of thawing since dawn and now the light is fading. Last night the moon was enormous in a cloudless sky but tonight the clouds are over the Dales and maybe the temperature light creep above zero by morning.

I've been playing around with a few images over the last weeks which have resulted in the above screenprints. One of the great things about cold weather, and particularly the snow, is that it paints the world in a simpler palette. Somehow a one-colour landscape like the one of Masham, above right, seems perfectly fine in this weather. Similarly the one of Ladyhill, above left, reminds me perfectly of the way Wensleydale looked a few weeks ago when the first snow came.

Looking at them now reminded me of a poem* I wrote a few years ago as the weather began closing down the high road from Masham to Nidderdale, which it does nearly every winter around December:

Last Journey Of The Year

It is winter
And the thread of road over Pott Moor
Is dusted white
With the threat of January.

The wind has muscles here
That can tread life into a shallow grave
Without even trying.

Perhaps we won’t pass this way again
Until April relaxes the madman’s grip
On his axe of ice.

And standing in St. Chad’s tiny church
On its hill at the dalehead
It seems that we inhabit islands
In the archipelago of the Pennines
Whenever the snow falls.

Happy New Year!


To read more poetry CLICK HERE