Yorkshire Dales 2009

The Yorkshire Dales painting depicts the unique relationship between man and the landscape. The natural valley is perhaps enhanced by a long and historic agricultural heritage. The barns and dry stone 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 sympathy with valley.

The Yorkshire Dales painting offers the perfect Uber subject matter. This is a fascinating part of our island. The Yorkshire Dales National Park has this very unusual combination of a very rugged yet obviously agricultural landscape. In a similar way to the Lake District National Park, 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. With Valleys such as Swale dale and Wensleydale, they are reasonably small in scale so it is possible to encompass the entire sweep of each Dale into one composition. Unusually, I have included a road in the Yorkshire Dales 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 Yorkshires Dales painting 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 the Yorkshire Dales are highly populated with sheep. They offer a great subject matter for the watercolour painter, and provide the viewer with a sense of scale and distance to which we can place our position within the landscape.