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It's easy enough when you're standing on the platform waiting
for the train, you can spend your time drawing - and here on Wakefield
station the tower of the town hall is an obvious subject - but what
do you draw on the train?
Deciding against drawing my fellow passengers I turn my attention,
as I always do, to the view from the window:
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| Wakefield town hall, Walton Colliery
country park, a pipe at Doncaster station, buddleia and Potteric
Carr nature reserve. |
Poplar with white leaves has a
spectral look to it, square-towered church south of Retford |
I try to take a mental 'snapshot'
of any farm animals or birds as we rush by on the train. |
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Station lamp, Grantham 10.35 a.m., the Jurassic
ridge; creamy exposure of rock south of Grantham. A mosque at Peterborough. |
Peterborough 10.19 a.m. |
Coming down through the Chilterns. A passing pigeon. |
 Mix
and Match Landscapes
Last autumn on railway journeys to York and Scarborough I developed the
idea of drawing composite trees. I'd see an old oak in a hedgerow, start
drawing the twisting upper branches, look up again and draw the trunk
of a second similar oak and then finish off the drawing with the branches
of a third perhaps a mile further on from the first.
Sometimes the oaks got mixed up with sycamores, but at least I was looking.
You can see a birch (centre, left) that didn't get far on this
page and a poplar that got a little further.
 Why
not put a 'mix-and-match' landscape together in the same way? The train
goes through bands of countryside which share a theme: fens, wooded hills,
scarps and so on.
Cows, farm houses and straw bales get incorporated into landscapes a
mile or more from their true locations when I'm using this method of constructing
landscapes. 
Richard Bell, richard@willowisland.co.uk |
