Literary Types - Fields, Flowers and James Herriot
Spring is heartily welcomed this year. I don’t know if it’s due to being still rather sequestered, or because we had an unusually cold and rainy winter (with only one dusting of snow to show for it), but I have been more ready for new life and color than ever. It feels as if all of creation is crawling out of some long, dark hole, toward the warm light of spring. Daffodils have bloomed, the redbud and tulip magnolia are dressed and ready for a party, and the cherry blossoms are in their full regalia. I’m ready to touch nature again. The overflow of these stirrings has spilled into new paintings - plowed fields, green fields, and flowers. Yellow flowers, pink flowers, rosy flowers. And probably more to come.
I’ve been bringing this collection to you in bits and pieces on Instagram. If you don’t already, feel free to follow along there.
At the same time, I’ve been re-reading an old favorite - James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small, to coincide with the airing of the new PBS series. Have you seen it? It is excellent, and I’m happy to hear that a second season has been approved.
The title takes its name from this old hymn-
All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.
Herriot writes with a fun sort of self-deprecating wit, a cheeky insight into human foibles, a love for animals (great and small) and a soaring delight in the surrounding countryside of the Yorkshire Dales. His descriptions of joy in the natural beauty around him resonate with me in my itch to be outdoors, soaking in the warm sunshine, driving to some new places, pausing to observe the life around me.
Some excerpts:
I realised, quite suddenly, that spring had come. It was late March and I had been examining some sheep in a hillside fold. On my way down, in the lee of a small pine wood I leaned my back against a tree and was aware, all at once, of the sunshine, warm on my closed eyelids, the clamour of the larks, the muted sea-sound of the wind in the high branches...
That quotation about not having time to stand and stare has never applied to me. I seem to have spent a good part of my life - probably too much - in just standing and staring and I was at it again this morning...I must have stood here scores of times and the view across the plain always looked different; sometimes in the winter the low country was a dark trough between the snow-covered Pennines and the distant white gleam of the Hambletons, and in April the rain squalls drifted in slow, heavy veils across the great green and brown dappled expanse. There was a day, too, when I stood in brilliant sunshine looking down over miles of thick fog like a rippling layer of cotton wool with dark tufts of trees and hilltops pushing through here and there.
I turned and looked across the valley to the soaring green heights, smooth, enormous, hazy in the noon heat. Beneath my feet the grassy slopes fell away steeply to where the river glimmered among the trees.
We sat down on the warm grass of the hillside, a soft breeze pulled at the heads of the moorland flowers, somewhere a curlew cried.
Spring fever, James Herriot, paintings of flowers, fields, trees, and water - these have been my mental journal of the early days of 2021. The new collection of oil paintings, Field and Flower, will launch on April 21st. Here is a sneak peek.
