Yorkshire Dales

Forster’s impression of the Yorkshire Dales depicts the unique relationship between man and the landscape.   The natural valley is perhaps enhanced by a long and historic agricultural heritage in Yorkshire.  The barns and the walls divide the composition and signify the harnessing of the landscape.  The eye is led through the composition by a clearly defined road that meanders peacefully in a kind of simpatico with the countryside.

Forster enthuses on the subject of The Dales, ‘the landscape offers the perfect Uber subject matter.  This is a fascinating part of our island. The Dales have this very unusual combination of a very rugged yet obviously farmed landscape. In a similar way to the Lake District, these two seemingly incompatible combinations fuse to enhance what is already a thing of beauty.

The tight little valleys of the Dales, sculpted by ice wind and rain, offer a plethora of shapes and shadows for the painter. They are reasonably small in scale so it is possible to encompass the entire sweep of a valley into one composition.  Unusually, I have included a road in this painting; the parallel is drawn here with the river as they both blindly meander down to the valley floor.

The dry stone walls are another and barns are another feature of the Dales that is impossible to ignore. The way the walls follow the natural sympathy of the contours and the barns settle on to the small flood plain, show to me the unique blend and relationship that have cultivated this most unusual landscape over the centuries. As with many areas of upland particularly in Northern Britain there are the sheep in addition to the trees.  They offer a great subject matter, and provide the viewer with a sense of scale and distance to which we can place our position within the landscape.

The Yorkshire Dales, are an upland area of Northern England lying roughly in the traditional boundary of Yorkshire, but span the counties of Cumbria, North and West Yorkshire.  The area has been designated a national park since 1953.  The artist David Hockney has recently set about capturing the landscape around his Bradford home to critical acclaim, adding a Californian light and colour to his Yorkshire landscapes.