The Yorkshire Dales in Spring

Spring, Wensleydale

Over the last couple of weeks Wensleydale has been changing daily as winter moves into spring. I drove to Carperby to teach a painting group a few days ago. Carperby is on the North side of the Dale where the views across the valley are dominated by Penhill and, a little further up the Dale, to where Ladyhill stands, topped with pine trees. 

Ladyhill was planted  with Scots pines for Queen Victoria's jubilee. Its a glacial moraine - a pile of stones dropped when a glacier slowed down - and it had another name before being called Ladyhill but no-one seems to know what it was (including the farmer whose sheep now crop the hill).


This is a great time to be painting - the spring light bleaching the greys of the stone walls, the chill morning mists still hazing the vision in the valley bottoms, the sky punctuated by curlews and peewits.

I'm working on an exhibition called The High Country at the moment which is mostly about the landscape around the Dale head - the Three Peaks, Ribblehead, Cam and Dodd Fells - and its a wonderful thing to fill your eyes with these iconic places and then try to capture them in paint on paper. Here are a few I've done so far for the exhibition. I hope you like them.

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Addleborough

Ingleborough

Ribblehead Viaduct

The High Country 

is at Herriot's Gallery, Hawes 
from 21st May to June 18th. 

For more details CLICK HERE.

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Ladyhill, Wensleydale

If you'd like to try your hand at watercolour landscape painting I'm running a four week course at Artison studios, just outside Masham. I'll be covering basic watercolour techniques and then showing how to use them to capture the character of the landscape.
To book a place CLICK HERE.

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