Colour is all around for those with the eyes to see
ART is all about shape and colour, but when I found the colours for this painting on the doorstep of Bleak House, at Crowden, 25 years ago, some people asked where I had discovered such vibrant tones in the Dark Peak of all places.
The simple answer has always been that they are there for those with the eyes to see.
A clue can be found in the title of the work, ‘The Cuckoo Set Fair For Africa’, because, just like the cuckoo which only arrives for the spring and summer before flying off to the equator, some of the colours are transient.
Delicate harebells on the side of the A628, the brightest of bright orange fungi amongst the pines and the golden plumage of a hightop plover.
To complete the picture, add the sound, smells and year-round big skies filled with peregrines, ravens and green woodpeckers, not to mention the peat-soured but abundant reservoirs, crystal-clear brooklets and hillside groughs, with their iridescent brown trout, complete with red and bronze medals, and the ever present chocolate brown dipper.
Ironically the dipper, although it looks black from a distance, is a perfect match for the summer-dried peat hags of Bleaklow, unlike the blue hare wearing its white winter pelage; the worst camouflage ever, sore thumbs and all that.
Even in the darkest and coldest days at Woodhead, and believe me there were many bone-wrenching days on the hill and bankings, there was always something to warm the soul. Redpolls across a snowscape like drops of blood and the irresistible, and cryptic, fawn and browns of a short-eared owl across the same white-out.
I was once so close to this daytime owl, that I could see the piercing black of his pupils, like a dark yolk in a daffodil egg, and see the steam plume from his beak as he ‘boo, booed’ in my direction.
This painting and many others, which didn’t sell, or most likely I couldn’t part with, from my first exhibitions have been stacked away for years, unseen, until recently, when the sun caught a sliver of metallic acrylic paint,on ‘Crowden Great Brook’, lighting the way for a retrospective show.
Readers are invited to the Laughing Badger Gallery between 12pm and 4pm, Saturday, August 13, LB scones and Red from Puglia, and of course the chance to bathe in the colour-fest of my Bleak House Icons. Email sean.wood@talk21.com for further details.