Category: Trees

Walkham Woods (charcoal/watercolour) #art

Since I started drawing and painting back in April 2024 I have primarily worked with ink and watercolour paints, with my ‘go-to’ format being small, usually ~5cm square, pictures on some particular theme that I have chosen to explore for a few days. Producing pictures of that type has become my staple art activity, to the extent that I describe this as my ‘art practice’. However, I am constantly thinking about how I would like to explore different formats and work with different media. This especially happens when I visit an art exhibition, see works by other artists,and wonder what I could produce if I branched out a bit. The funny thing is that prior to my big shift into art in April 2024 I had actually begun to dabble with creating pictures with pastels (e.g. see my post Rediscovering The Artist Within) but I have not returned to pastels once since then.

Sometime back in May I must have been somewhere that brought me into contact with some charcoal drawings. I had a set of charcoal pencils sitting unopened in my art supplies box, and so I thought I would branch out a little and see what happened when I completed the drawing phase of a picture with charcoal, rather than adopting my usual approach of starting off with some faint pencil lines and then going all in with my black ink pen. I think I hoped that the different drawing texture might lead to me producing a more abstract picture. Then, after scribbling away with the charcoal pencil for a bit, I returned to the familiar territory of my watercolour paints to give my drawing some colour.

The result of my efforts is shown in the picture above – a charcoal -cribbles-with-watercolour painting of a row of what I refer to a ‘wall trees’, somewhere in the valley of the River Walkham, from a photo that I had taken on a walk there.

I’m not sure exactly what I think of this picture. It seems quite basic and simple – the trees sitting very much on top of the leafy backdrop and lacking much detail in their trunks and branches – and that simplicity pushes me towards thinking that the picture doesn’t quite work. But I also quite like the more impressionistic look – the rough lines suggesting the texture and structure of the stone wall, and the bright greens and particularly the yellows of the leaf canopy shouting out for attention. The picture has a naivety which I think gives it a certain charm. As I look at the picture, my eyes seem to be drawn in to explore what little detail there is, perhaps more so than happens when viewing one of my more detailed ink and watercolour pictures. Overall, I think that perhaps the switch in drawing medium was successful in helping me to present the view in a more abstract, suggestive manner than my normal ink-and-watercolour approach.

I’ve not had another go with charcoal pencils since I created this picture just over two months ago, but revisiting it now and writing this post has fired me up to spend some more time over the coming period to play around with different approaches and media a bit more. I wonder what will emerge!

A Walk Around Peek Hill #other

We are blessed by the fact that although we live towards the centre of a fairly large and busy city (Plymouth), we are just 10-15 miles drive from the open moorland and wonderful walking landscapes of Dartmoor National Park. I know that some people love the really bleak, wilderness sections of Dartmoor, but my own preference is for what I think of as the ‘edgelands’, where the rougher terrain gives way to wooded valleys and the surrounding farmland. I have always liked landscapes that mix wildness with areas where humans have worked with the land over a long period of time in a relatively unchanging manner. The edgelands of Dartmoor certainly fit this description.

A couple of months ago we drove up towards Princetown and parked a little way from the rocky mass of Sharpitor (above and immediately below). It was a fine day, but one with plenty of interesting cloud formations that arguably made our view of the sky as interesting as the views of the hills and valleys around us…

Our walk took us just north of Sharpitor, from where we were welcomed with expansive views to the northeast of classic Dartmoor moorland:

After rounding Sharpitor, the prominent, rather pointed, conical peak of Leather Tor came into view…

… and we were greeted by a typical group of Dartmoor’s sheep, grazing on the rough hillside…

Having passed midway between Sharpitor and Leather Tor, we turned southwest towards Peek Hill, and from here the view opened out to reveal the waters of Burrator Reservoir, with Plymouth visible towards the horizon…

Our route took took us northwest, down the slope from Peek Hill towards the Plymouth-to-Princetown road, and along the way we passed one of my favourite sights, a lone tree of a type that I like to refer to as a symmetree…

Then, just across the road stood this wonderful row of Beech(?) trees, planted into the old stone wall, their dark, essentially leafless, forms making beautiful patterns when viewed against the bright colours of the fields, sky and clouds beyond…

This row of trees – in fact any row of trees like these – are really one of my favourite sights of all, and although there was still a little more walking to do, down towards an ancient stone row that we then followed back towards the car, I think that they are a fitting place for me to end this little photo-tour of our April walk around Peek Hill. I often think that I ought to have a go at painting this row of trees one day… but there are so many branches, so many, many branches… I am not sure that I have the patience for that!

Out and About Again At Last #other

Four months ago, at the end of August 2024 I managed to do some damage to my left Medial Collateral Ligament while completing long runs. I think I did the injury earlier that month while running the second half of the West Devon Way from Peter Tavy to Okehampton but then I compounded things by attempting to complete my leg of the King Charles III Coastal Challenge, or at least a good chunk of it from Par Beach to Looe, a couple of weeks later. By the end of that run, over typically up-and-down Cornish coastal path terrain I could hardly walk and ever since then I have been trying to nurse it back to strength with the help of some visits to a Sports Therapist and, more recently, a Physiotherapist. But although the area where the MCL itself attaches to the top of my calf muscle has gradually become less sore, I have not been able to get my leg back to normal and pain-free – it now has a tendency to feel somewhat unstable and ‘clicky’ and is very sore most of the time and especially after I have spent any time sitting down. It has been very frustrating, not only preventing me from doing any running (apart from an 0.6 mile test run in mid-December) but it has also meant that I have cut back on walking and certainly not gone for any proper walks our and about on Dartmoor or at the coast.

Consequently, it was with a lot of joy that we took ourselves up onto the edge of Dartmoor yesterday morning for a short loop walk from the village of Meavy over to Burrator Reservoir and then back along the line of the old railway before dropping back to our starting point. The walk, 2.6 miles in total, is one that we have done multiple times before and gives a nice mix of terrain and some good views across the valley and the reservoir.

I particularly like the first section of the walk across some fields into a wooded area…

… after which the path climbs up towards the road at Burrator Reservoir …

After joining the road, we proceeded along it, above the reservoir, until reaching a small waterfall at which point we turned back to join the old railway line back towards Dousland …

The return section is more open with views south across the valley …

I always like views that have a mix of farmland and wilder moorland. Towards the end of the walk I also got to see another favourite sight, a fairly symmetrically-shaped tree, or what I now refer to as a symmetree!

Although the weather was not great, with cloudy and grey skies, there was no rain and it was just so good to get out and about, to be breathing fresh air, to be unconstrained by walls and to be immersed in nature again.

One day on, I am pleased to report that although my leg does feel somewhat sore, it does not feel any worse than on any other day and so hopefully it will now be possible to start to introduce a bit more proper walking back into life.

Life and Death


I think it is hard to beat an interesting tree – sometimes it is the shape that speaks to me, sometimes the colours and sometimes it’s the the signs of a hard life lived. So, you can perhaps imagine my excitement when I spotted this particular tree with its strong, thick trunk and its beautifully rounded and perfectly balanced shape all thickly enveloped by deep green leaves, so full of life… and yet, running upwards through its core, emerging to thrust like inverted lightning flashes from its top (and less visible in the photograph, a withered tendril reaching downwards on the left side), the sharp, angular, stripped-bare branches, absolutely dead to the world. This is a tree that is both dead at the core and alive at heart and I have never seen its like before.

Symmetree

I love trees. I love the way that they seem to produce all of their substance out of nothing; the way that they can hang around for ages while the world changes around them; they way that they are all so different whilst still obviously being trees; the way that they change on all kinds of timescales.

I like taking photographs of trees, particularly ones with a high degree of symmetry where the shape of one side of the tree is the same as the shape of the other side and where the trunk is nice a straight and down the middle. I don’t only like symmetrical trees but I do think I like those ones the best.

A couple of days ago I was up on Roborough Common (on the south-western edge of Dartmoor). It was my first time properly outside of Plymouth for at least 8 weeks. It was a beautiful sunny and still evening – aren’t they all at the moment? We parked up the car, set out for a stroll and there it was, was one of my favourite symmetrical trees; one that is always hard to walk past without taking a photograph. And so, of course, I did, resulting in a picture that I am particularly proud of.

This isn’t just a symmetrical tree; it’s a Symmetree…