NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

The rain and miserable weather have kept me indoors (so no soaking wet search for a Wryneck for me!) This is good reason to get on with another painting. I started this particular work months ago and it lay abandoned in a portfolio until just the other day. I have posted previous efforts here and here . My approach to all of this is very loose. Take a few pictures, use them as reference, embrace a lurid palette of colour and use graphic shapes to build up the composition. I paint over a lot of what I have done, so at times the finished article may have half a dozen layers of gouache in any given area. My source image for this painting was taken in Banstead Woods one late autumn afternoon (below). True representation, scale and perspective is largely ignored to accommodate for a free-flowing style (Psued's Corner this way, please). The owl is going to end up as an ornate, graphic take on a Tawny... at the moment. Progress is slow, so the finished article might still ...

A family ramble across the wooded commons in the Friday Street/Leith Hill area this morning underlined just how quiet it all still is - in previous years, same time, same place, we would have seen or heard Cuckoo, Woodlark and Tree Pipit. Instead, we had to make do with a couple of Willow Warblers and brief flyover Siskins. The scene above is of a stand of trees at the edge of a clearing close to Broadmoor. When we looked closer we were amazed to find that they are all using the same fallen giant to grow out from. It's as if, once fallen, the old boughs just straightened up and reached for the sky. There are two details below: I don't know how common such an arrangement is. I've certainly seen suckers and whip-thin growth forming around stumps, but not such sizeable trees as these in such number (six) along the length of the fallen trunk. There was little leaf on them, and what I could see at the tree tops looked like Ash, although the ground all around was ful...

The St. Judes storm gave us Southern Softies a bit of a shake-up earlier in the week. North of Watford they most probably wondered what all the fuss was about, but we mustn't lose sight of those whose lives were affected, and for a few it was truly tragic. In all honesty there was little to show for it in my neighbourhood - a few fence panels down, the odd branch splayed across the pavement and one fallen beech tree that closed a side road for an hour or two. In the copses and woods signs of the violent weather were more apparent, as the images above show. At least in these places the trees will be left alone, opening the canopy and giving home to dead-wood loving invertebrates. As I sit here typing this, the wind is up again. No doubt a few trees were weakened last Monday and will take only a little persuasion to fall...

I spent quite a bit of time birding on Epsom Common in my youth (although the word 'birding' wasn't in use in the UK back then). I would get a bus to the Wells Estate (on the Ashtead side) and walk across the railway line and onto open scrub, populated by Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers and, in summer, Grasshopper Warblers. My walk would continue through mature woodland along magnificent wide rides until meeting the boundary with open farmland. After a loop round the stew pond (there was just the one at the time) I would wander through an open woodland scene, then further scrub, to the Cricketer's Green. About five years ago I revisited this place after a gap of twenty years. I was stunned. I couldn't find my way around as it had all changed. Where once had been scrub there was now woodland. I stood looking about me like a lost soul. It had changed to the point that there was no familiarity at all. I tried to find the stew ponds (another had been created in the early 1...

Back in the first week of December, standing in snow, I scanned the horizon and something didn't quite seem right. After several minutes (it was cold, my brain was going-slow) I realised what was troubling me. I was looking at a wall of green - a line of oak trees, some two hundred metres in length, still in full leaf. Most of this leaf was still green in colour, with little bronze and sickly ochre on show. Since then I've paid attention to what trees are still in leaf. Oaks are still hanging on, as are Silver Birch and Sycamore. I cannot remember this from previous winters, although I may have overlooked it in the past. The skeletal tree branches on a winter horizon are still being muffled by leaf, and that, to me, is puzzling. This week in North Downs and beyond land : I've dipped on the Belmont Waxwings four times; it is snowing again; I have high hopes of a good flyover this weekend.