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Clare Walker Leslie's new book, Drawn to Nature
has a fresh, spontaneous feel to it and is full of the spirit of
the outdoors. Even just riffling through its pages, I find myself
wanting to get out there and start drawing.
Clare tells me that she has aimed to encourage the complete beginner
to take up nature journalling but I'm sure her latest book is also
going to be an inspiration for people like myself, who are well
into their nature journals but enjoy being reminded  how
much fun it is and just how simple it can be.
I love, as I did yesterday, spending all day beneath an
umbrella just drawing a country scene but Clare makes the point
that even if you can manage only half an hour, a few minutes even,
you can make real contact with the natural world by stopping, seeing
and sketching.
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Using Clare Walker Leslie's previous book, Nature Journal
- 'A Guided Journal for Illustrating and Recording Your Observations
of the Natural World'. |
Time and Place
Clare's habit of adding time, date, place, weather conditions is
not only good practice for naturalists, it's also a great way to
get over the sometimes overwhelming experience of finding yourself
faced with the natural world and wondering what to write next. Just
recording those bare facts, which anyone can do, without a great
deal of thought, is a way of starting to react to the complexity
that lies before you.
In the 30 seconds it takes you to write those basics down, you've
engaged with the environment; you've started to centre yourself.
It's a way of getting over any sense of 'writers block' you might
have in nature journalling. It's as if you've written the opening
paragraph of a short story; you've set the scene.
In Rough Patch I deliberately didn't insert specific
dates and, as the entire book was drawn in our back garden, I didn't
need to give the location. The drawings were done over a total of
about 15 years, though the bulk of them are from the last 3 or 4
years. I didn't want to go for an overtly a seasonal format, although
that does run along in the background, nor did I want to go for
a strict habitat by habitat approach, like a conventional 'back
garden nature reserve' guide.
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It's a more personal book than that, for all the wildlife observations
in it, and I wanted to try and evoke that sense of timelessness that comes
over you when you just step out of the back door into the garden. I wanted
a sense of aimlessness and serendipity running through the structure of
my sketchbook. I wanted some sense of losing your identity as an observer
and becoming, imaginatively (and in reality if you think it through far
enough), a part of the natural world around you. 
Richard Bell, richard@willowisland.co.uk
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