Bodmin Moor Snow

C1172

“Bodmin Moor ... Snow”

(Cornwall, England)

Drawing in Sepia & Black Chalk heightened with White

on 90-lb., Not, Turners Blue-grey Watercolour Paper

from Ruscombe Mill

6” x 9-1/4”

Click here to make this your Own

Still in Poldark Country, as we have been since the end of July, and with this work we are now on Bodmin Moor. This is also Jamaica Inn territory, which has been made into a film a number of times, my favorite being the one with Jane Seymour. Here we are looking north from the Logan Stone on Loudon Hill to the southern prow of Roughtor (pronounced Row, as in argument, -tore), the Second highest of the two Cornish mountains, the other being Brown Willey, out of view to the right (a mountain in England is a hill over a thousand feet). A logan stone is a balanced rock like that in the foreground; usually, if you can get on the thing, you can rock it with your weight alone. Between here and Roughtor, which is about a mile or so away, are to be found many bronze age hut circles, and remains of small field walls, like those to be found on Dartmoor to the east.

Thinking of Claude Lorrain again not only of his Liber Veritatis, but of the whole of his work, I give the following quote from CLAUDE LORRAIN: PAINTER AND ETCHER by George Grahame, writing at the end of the 19th century (this biography of Claude is found in the Delphi Classics series volumes on Artists):

“The eye gradually accustomed to the Claudian world, bewitched by its sunlight and its atmosphere, begins to dwell with pleasure on the ruins and the marble palaces, the wooded hillsides crowned with convenient towers, the meanderings of impossible rivers. You have but to surrender yourself to the charm of this unreal world to lose sight of its unreality and live in it as one lives in a dream. The artist gives us the “great key, To golden palaces, strange minstrelsy, Fountains grotesque, new trees, bespangled caves, Echoing grottos, full of tumbling waves And moonlight; ay, to all the mazy world Of silvery enchantment!” We are carried far away from this workaday world of ours into an ethereal domain whence all toil, distress, and terror have purposely been banished by the painter. The inhabitants of this ideal world are as gods. Its skies are all but cloudless. All the rough places in it are made smooth. Such is the Claudian landscape, the quintessence of reality distilled in the alembic of a poet’s soul. Surely only the sternest moralist will condemn its charm. When at last you close the book and turn from this world of Claude’s to nature, you feel for a moment like a man who steps from a concert-room, where he has been listening to the music of Beethoven and Mozart, into the din and glare of the street.”

Looking through the Liber Veritatis or a series of his paintings, we are entering a world that never was ... but I for one would like it to have been. Consider strolling about in a pastoral & mythical Arcadia á la Claude, happening upon, nymphs & dryads, the odd satyr, joining in with a dance of villagers and mythical demi-gods, hoisting a flagon of wine, or three, with Bacchus and his merry retinue, having a chat with the local river god on a golden afternoon, as he lugubriously takes his ease beside his cooling stream on a golden glowing afternoon. My preferred mythology, of course, is the dark and wild mythologies of my Norse forebears, and the Ring Cycle, but there is something to be said for taking a break, now and then, from Brynhilda's Hel-ride, the slaying of Grendel, or raiding the tomb of Angantyr the Berserker for the cursed sword Tyrfing, and repairing to the sunnier climes of the Arcadian southlands to kick back for awhile.

*****

Nature story ... A Golden Mantled Ground Squirrel was nibbling on a strawberry remnant, when a chipmunk came up behind him and nipped the base of his tail, and ran off, chased by the ground squirrel; the ploy didn't work, however, as the ground squirrel got back to the strawberry first. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”, as a little known Bard once said.

Blue Seas ... White Surf.

C1092

“Blue Seas ... White Surf”

(Cornwall, England)

Watercolour on 140-lb., Not,

Saunders Waterford Watercolour Paper

8-1/2” x 12-3/4”

Click here to make this your Own

[Note: “Not”, in the Media description above, means “cold pressed” ... that term is used in Britain, cold pressed over here.]

Still in Poldark Country, as we have been since the end of July, and with this work we are now down near Lands End. Here we are at Cape Cornwall looking out to The Brisons, islands just off shore. Out of view, to our left a couple of miles, is Sennon Cove, and there the shore turns 90° to the right, and a mile or two along the coastal footpath will bring us to Lands End, the westernmost tip of Cornwall, and England for that matter. From there, once past the Scilly Isles, twenty something miles offshore, it's next stop America.

The Sea around Cornwall is unlike any other I have experienced in the rest of Britain. This in fact may, or may not, be true; perhaps if I had experienced other coasts year around, they might have proved to be as interesting and variable. But I do think those Seas around Cornwall are special. In Summer they can be downright tropical in colour, with greens and turquoises to rival any found in lower latitudes; and then the grey and greens of Winter, when a lowering sun breaks through the cloud and illuminates the thin turn of a cresting wave from behind, turning it into a stained glass of grey-green-gold, just before it breaks; and the next day the grey green has metamorphosed into a blue so deep, it brings tears to your eyes. In the Watercolour above it is late September, and somewhere far out to sea, some hundreds of miles away, a storm has sent big swells rolling onto Cornish shores. There is an offshore breeze, but not enough to change the blue to green or grey; and being protected by the cliffs behind, the breeze only begins to really affect the breaking waves out by the Brisons, and beyond them, blowing the spume seawards. I've only witnessed this effect a few times, where the colours are predominately ... Blue Seas & White Surf.

*****

The birdlife around camp has slackened off compared to what it was a few weeks ago ... another sign of Autumn? The Western Tanagers seem to have moved on about three weeks ago. I did see a Bald Eagle yesterday, and that was a nice surprise. The Hummingbird is still about, Northern Flickers, the Nuthatch, and Woodpecker, are still residents. Oh, there are still birds about, but not a many, and a lot of them are LBJs (little brown jobs), that I haven't been able, nor had the time, to identify.

The eighth day of San Francisco smoke, was last Saturday, the 29th, but by late morning the wind had shifted around to the northwest, and pretty much cleared it away. There were occasional drifts coming through until the next evening when it got really smokey  about 5 pm. The wind was then from the northeast so I reckon this was smoke from thirty to forty miles away, up in the Ochoco National Forest. The moon was a deep red orange, low in the east when I spotted it in the late twilight. The wind shifted again overnight and since then has been generally good. This morning there is a slight smokey haze across the flat to the east ... the respites have been welcomed (the day did turn out to be pretty smokeless, and an enormous full Moon rose as twilight deepened).

*****

And just when I said the birds have thinned out (which they actually have), the morning of 2nd September has been quite entertaining with birdlife. The Chickadees were out in force, loads of LBJs, mostly warblers of various types, were flitting about the truck, looking in the wing mirrors, and taking special interest in my water filtering bags hung in a tree filtering my melted ice water, and generally doing birdy things.

There is a Douglas Squirrel, that I've seen hardly at all, that today was up in the small tree eight feet to the left of my vehicle. It cut off a cluster of pine needles, letting it fall to the ground, and then climbed down and ignored it. Later one of the Golden Mantled Ground Squirrels came along and nibbled on it ... wonder what that was all about?

More Poldark Country.

C1178

“Evening Light Carnewas Cove …

Bedruthan Steps on Mid-Summer’s Day”

(Bedruthan Steps, Cornwall, England)

A Watercolour

on Saunders Waterford, 140#,

cold pressed Watercolour Paper

3⅛” x 7⅜”

Click here to make this your Own

Carnewas Cove is the next cove to the south of Pendarves Cove, the cove you descend into down the narrow stairway in the crack in the cliffs. It is accessible only at extreme low tides, or through a cave to the left of the bottom of the stairway. This cave would be just to the left of the view in the painting of Pendarves Cove in the last post. Much of the time you would have to wade through pools to get through the cave, but occasionally the sand washed into the cave, at certain times of the year, is just the right amount to allow a dry-shod perambulation through. This Mid-summer's Day was just such an occasion. Once through, the view is better, with the Sea filling the cove, rather than the expanse of sand that would be there when low tide might allow you to proceed around the sea-stack in the Pendarves Cove painting.

The distant coastline, with the white houses and ending with the headland and island, I cannot recall now exactly where and how far down the, coast towards St. Ives, we are looking. I would need to refer to my maps of Cornwall, which are not to hand. It could be that we are looking at Godrevey Island, forty miles or more, as the raven flies, in which case St. Ives, and the heights behind it, would be off the right of the painting. They were all in view during the 1999 Summer eclipse of the Sun; sadly, what was not in view was the Sun itself!. A first class day, it had started out to be, and I had chosen my observation spot on top of a broze age tumulus, a half mile north of Bedruthan Steps. Then a couple of hours before totality, a band of cloud appeared down the middle of the sky, obscuring the Sun during the eclipse. Both St. Ives, way to the southwest, and Boscastle area, to the north-northeast, were out of the cloud shadow, but both were just out of the line of totality as well; and this was proved as when totality occurred, and we were in darkness, they were both in wan sunlight. The eclipse was still interesting, but not what it should have been, had we been able to see the Sun. It was not until 2017 when I was able to see an eclipse from the Wind River Range in Wyoming. But I digress. Up on the clifftops hereabouts, St. Ives may be easily seen on a clear enough day, but down here at the water's edge, not so much. So that distant headland and Island may not be as far as Godrevey Island ... wish I had my maps.

This Watercolour of Carnewas Cove falls within the strictures of “the Miniature,” being under 25 square inches. But it was not intended as such, and it was never framed within those strictures, being originally placed within an 8” x 12” frame.

*****

Time only for a couple of observations:

After a couple weeks of temperatures in the 90s, the grasses here have lost most of their green blades even within the clumps, except for those that are mostly in the shade. Their seed heads are being nibbled at by the ground squirrels and chipmunks. The transition from green to yellow ochre was interrupted by a couple of good heavy showers, one day last week. Thunder and lightning and an hour long shower from 1:30 - 2:30 PM, and another shower in the evening. They kept the dust, and the flies, down for a couple of days afterwards. The afternoon thunderstorm was a slow moving affair. You could hear a rumbling in the distance for a couple of hours before it arrived. It also did not look like it would actually come over my camp, as the clouds did not look at all threatening, and there was still a lot of blue sky around, even after the rain began. It kept that day from getting into the 90s, but the next two were mid-90s. My SUV is in the shade most of the day, and even on the hottest days there have been breezes, so generally it has been bearable. One or two days has had humidity enough to sap your energy. The past two days have benn in the mid-80s, and it is amazing what a few degrees can make ... 85° can feel absolutely cool, after 95° days!

Obviously I'm talking Fahrenheit degrees here, Folks. I reserve Centigrade and Kelvin degrees for scientific discourse, and rightly so. Fahrenheit degrees, I feel, are much more human. You older British will remember Fahrenheit degrees. But the rest of the World, really has no experience with the human scale of the Fahrenheit degree. There is 1.8 Fahrenheit degrees to 1 Centigrade degree, so there is a subtlety to the Fahrenheit scale lost in the Centigrade scale; temperatures jump too fast in Centigrade. For example: 10°C is 50°F, and when you jump 10°C to 20°C it is already 68°F, whereas if you jump 10°F to 60 °F, it is a less jarring increase in temperature ... a more subtle temperature rise ... and psychologically (dare I say it? Why, yes I do!), a more human increase ... 35 degrees does not sound hot at all, but 95 degrees ... well, that sounds like a sweltering day ... and, of course, it is. “It's below zero outside.” is damn cold, if your Fahrenheit degrees man as I am, but if you go by Centigrade degrees, below zero is not particularly cold, especially if it's a dry cold. Give me Fahrenheit degrees for everyday living, all day every day, but for Scientific Discussion I'll take Centigrade or Kelvin degrees. Perhaps now that the British have ruined their lives with Brexit (and mine, since my pension is British, and the £ fell like a stone, with Brexit ... most ex-pats), perhaps they'll go back to Fahrenheit degrees ... hell, I would.

Poldark Country.

C1242

“Evening Light in Pendarves Cove”

(Bedruthan Steps, Cornwall, England)

A Watercolour

on Saunders Waterford, 140#,

cold pressed Watercolour Paper

4”  x  9-1/4”

Click here to make this your Own

I lived in Cornwall, England for 23 years ... Poldark country. Sadly I have only seen a couple of episodes of that story. The first series, back in the 70s, I had no television, and this latest series ... I have no television. But many of the scenes I have painted over the years, you might say most of them whilst living in Cornwall, were of Poldark country, since all of Cornwall is really Poldark country.

Four years ago, I stopped for the night in Moscow, Idaho, at an old friend from Cornwall's house. Tim (and his first wife), was my downstairs neighbor, when I lived at Treyarnon Bay. Not having arrived until after eight in the evening, after eleven hours of driving and crossing seven Oregon mountain ranges, we repaired straight to the kitchen, ate and drank and laughed for the next seven hours. The television in the sitting room had been on low, in that room, the whole time we were regalling each other with stories in the kitchen. When at 3:30 or so, we entered the sitting room and found it still on, we both stopped and stared at the screen, for it seemed familiar ... and it was, for we both realized we were looking at the end of show credits of a Poldark episode, scrolling down over a view of Bedruthan Steps, not a mile and a half from our former residence ... Surreal!

[Note: After that, I slept in a chair for a couple of hours, then hit the road, going over the Lolo Pass to Missoula, Montana,  and subsequently driving 634 miles, spending the next night at the first rest stop past the junction of the Little Bighorn with the Yellowstone River. I was headed for Minneapolis and then the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for a class reunion.]

For sixteen years, I had lived a mile and a half from Bedruthan Steps. The first several years I rarely got down there, as the bottom of the stairway down to the beach had washed away in a storm, and, subsequently, the National Trust had blocked off the top of the stairs for safety purposes. The only other way to the coves below, was from the north end of the beach at extreme low tide, and with the water's edge then so far out, it was not so interesting. Once the stairs had been repaired,  Bedruthan Steps became one of my favorite bits of coast to go to and to paint. For four months during the Winters, the top of the stairs were also blocked, but by this time I had discovered how to scramble over the blockade, and so have the place all to myself, rarely seeing anyone else who might also know how to get down there.

Pendarves Cove, in the painting above is the first cove you descend to, down the narrow stairway in a crack in the cliffs. That would be to the left off the painting. Another of my paintings with the shadows of early morning, from this viewpoint, was in the “Artist's and Illustrator’s Magazine,” back in the early 2000s ... Issue #19 rings a bell. On a Summer morning, with an ebbing tide, from this point you can scramble around into the next cove, Redcove, and if you watch the waves and are quick enough, you can get into it twenty minutes or so before any of the Summer visitors find their way into that cove. Then skirting around to the other side, there is a cave that you can scramble through, and be in the third cove (which name escapes me at present), and be there for an hour and a half, before any one else makes it around the headland ... few people were aware that the cave went all the way through, I discovered, and besides, it was a bit of a scramble as well. Bedruthan Steps became one of my favorite painting subjects, during my final years in Cornwall.

Incidentally, Bedruthan was a Cornish giant who fled across the coves here, using the sea stacks as stepping stones, when fleeing the devil one night ... at least according to local folklore; and who would dispute such a venerable source?!!

*****

More  campsite observations:

During the last half of June and the first ten days or so of July, whenever I walked up into the Ponderosas, there were big caterpillars marching along every few yards. These were not of the hairy kind. They were about four inches long and about half an inch thick, dark grey-green in colour with some brown and black in the design. They reminded me of the white ones I have found under the bark of some sort of dead pines, in the past, and which I roasted and added to a rice dish (I followed the directions found on a survival site). I did not try these, as I am yet unsure as to whether all un-hairy caterpillars are edible or not. Hopefully I will find information on these, at some point, as they could be a survival food source at some future time. Incidentally, the white ones depended on the condiments added to the meal for palatability; I understand that Witchity grubs, down in Australia, are flavourful in their own right.

A few days ago, the wind blew many little catkin-like objects out of the trees. They are about an inch to an inch and a half long, about a quarter inch wide, and rusty brown in colour. I think that these are what are called male pinecones. These, I believe, are the source of all the pollen, I talked about back in the first couple of weeks in June; the greenish-yellow smoke, that I thought was coming out of my car when driving out of La Pine on the 4th of June; the same colour dust that Kicked up on my trouser bottoms when walking through the woods; the same stuff settling on my car and any horizontal surface, for that matter; and the same stuff left as a scum ring around the puddles in the road after the rain ... that stuff. I have vague memories of reading and/or seeing documentaries about it. Since my connectivity is so sparse out in the various places I camp at, I cannot research this. So I will go with what I just said.

In the evenings, before pitch dark, I have noticed smallish butterfly-like moths working over the old blossoms on the bitterbrush. There are fewer bees working them in the daylight, as they seem to have lost interest in them since the flowers are so long past their prime. I wonder if these moths were working them all along?

The Spring, before I turned nine, was when I began to make discoveries in the woods where we lived in Northern Wisconsin. We lived three miles from the small village of Lake Nebagamon, and our nearest neighbors were a quarter mile away. Everyday, after school, I was out in the woods, and the fields and down at the extremely small and seasonal pond. Before that Spring, it was mostly play, and my observations were incidental. But that Spring, things began to have more meaning, I began to see more relationships, and had more understandings of my observations ... they also built upon the earlier “incidental” observations. It was a time of discovery ... with meaning. These days, out here, I am feeling that same sense of awe and discovery of my childhood.

As adults too many of us have lost that sense of discovery ... of wonder. I pity those poor fools who purport to love the great outdoors, but then come out here and treat it as a shooting gallery, and an ATV race track, and, too often, a trash can. The World would be a better place if these folk would get off their vehicles, lay down their arms for awhile, and stop to smell the roses during their time out here; perhaps then they might gain an actual respect for these Great Outdoors, and take their trash back home.