Baton Restored

Little did I think when I wrote ‘Making A Clean Breast Of It’, for Caught By The River in late 2015 that within the course of a year my life would become so powerfully linked to the scene of the ‘action’ -  Norton Conyers House, and to the paintings that dangle from its ancient walls.

A chance conversation between my wife. and Lady Graham (yes, we do a bit of hob-nobbing the Mrs and I) led to moving studio from above my gallery where I’ve worked for fifteen years, four miles out of town to the grandly titled ’North Pavilion’ in the late 18thC stable block of Norton Conyers. I think it was actually a grain store in former times and was pretty run down, but after a bit of a sweep out, the installation of electricity and water, a woodburner and secondary glazing, it has turned into the perfect studio with plenty of space for painting and teaching. It has meant too, a change in lifestyle from predominantly city based to a more bucolic way of living, the studio being surrounded by woodland and open countryside and the much painted (by me), river Ure flows but a dog’s flob from its door. Stout, rubber wellington boots now form an essential part of my wardrobe and I’ve even had a bash at chewing bits of straw; though I do prefer the tapas bar in town.

As resident artist, my inexpert opinion is inexplicably sought when matters pertaining to decorative design or art arise and so, on a balmy, bee-buzzy, bird-songy afternoon in late summer, I was summoned to the darkly shuttered and eerie house to witness and record a homecoming: in a strange reversal of accepted practice, one of Norton Conyers illustrious residents was carried in rather than out of the house in a wooden box.

The resident in question, a certain Humphrey Morice Bt, who in life was described as ‘sickly, high and a little touchy’, had died some 230 years previously in Naples and so far as I can tell, had never even visited Norton Conyers, much less lived here. His handsome portrait by the well regarded Italian painter Pompeo Batoni however, had been resident in the dining room for many years and would probably have remained there had it not been for the incessant noise - not, as you might imagine, the raucous shenanigans of carousing aristocracy, but rather the clamorous sexual exploits of those uninvited, and rarely welcome guests - the death watch beetle.

The arrival of Xestobium rufovillosum meant the removal of most of the house’s fixtures and fittings including the portrait of Sir Humphrey, who’s exile was to last seven years; time spent in the tender care of the National Gallery. But this was the day of his homecoming: the box, (Sir Humph) is wheeled in. As caskets go this one is impressive - 6’ high, 8’ long and 2’ wide and it is borne or rather pushed as it’s on casters, by four porters, men who spend their lives moving incredibly valuable (or as in this case, not quite so valuable) works of art around the world. Their work is carried out with a kind of deft reverence laced with darkish humour such as one might witness at an undertakers convention or at a below stairs meeting of Blandings butlers.

Once de-boxed the painting is laid on the dining table for inspection. Sir Humphrey’s stockinged and silken clad form lounges somewhat incongruously in a classical landscape, by his side an innocent gun and evidence of a jovial morning’s wildlife extermination in the form of a dead hare and a brace or two of wild partridge. At the same time and possibly hoping to avoid the same fate, a trio of nervous looking hounds fawn at his feet. I feel I should say of Sir Humphrey: he doesn’t look like a man who’s spent the past few hours crashing through the undergrowth in pursuit of his lunch; he looks more like he’d been wandering the streets of Napoli in search of silken fripperies or penning poetry to an Italian peasant boy, but whatever the case, the scene is adroitly painted and will look magnificent above the splendid marble fireplace.

The portrait had hung for many years, dirty and all but forgotten in a dark, library corridor and it was only after cleaning that its quality was recognised; it has also undergone a certain amount of restoration whilst at the National and this is examined in minute detail by Sir James, Lady Halina and indeed myself. Spotting the restoration without expert help may have taken some time as they’ve made a cracking job of it. Once scrutinised, Lady Graham indulges in a little light house work which takes the form of dusting the gilt frame with a paint brush and then all that’s left to do is the re-hanging.

I say ‘all’ but I’m glad I’m not in charge - this is a substantial painting and I’m happy to leave its elevation to others and as it turns out ‘elevation’ seems fitting as there is a Rubensian beauty to the unfolding scene which reminds me of his ‘Elevation Of The Cross’ only mercifully with more clothing. Step-ladders are erected either side of the fireplace and a good deal of time is spent measuring and marking before the drill is brought into play (screws replacing the traditional crucifixion nails) and the brackets go up. Two of the National Gallery’s finest position themselves atop the ladders, one foot on the ladder, the other balletically tip-toe’d on the mantle whilst the others gather up Sir Humph and his attendant fauna. Together they hoist the painted peer into place, forming as they do the neo-baroque (or perhaps more Stanley Spencer) tableaux. We all stand back and adopt the tics that help decide whether it’s straight or not: stroking our chins, cocking our heads on one side and puffing out our cheeks; is it straight? Of course it is - these lads know what they’re about.

Before long we’re stretching out on the lawn in the walled garden, or more properly: ‘lounging in a classical landscape’, only that’s where the comparison ends as we have a beer in our hands and the wildlife is still vigorously sentient around us. It’s tempting to make a drawing of the scene but Batoni has rather cornered the market in lounging baronets so I let it go. 

Making A Clean Breast Of It.

I don't know about you but I can get more bored, more quickly in a 'stately home' than almost anywhere else on earth - rows of marble busts of the nameless and noseless - 18th century copies of a haul 'found' in a brothel in Herculaneum, landscaped gardens - primped, straightjacketed and proudly asserted to be an exact copy of the original layout by Moulton and (Capability) Browne, and perhaps worst of all: the paintings - row upon row of second and third rate family portraits and the inevitable 'Landscape with Levitating Cows'. If you're lucky, there might be a Reynolds of the 6th Earl dressed as a Hussar (huzzah!) but since the £15 guidebook (foreword by the present Earl) doesn't come with a free stepladder and torch, it could just as easily be the picture of 'The Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies' of Allo, Allo fame.

And the attendants! Solidly M&S class, Pringle jumpered, pressed chino'd and steeped in the family history of the current 'temporary guardian' - "I was telling young sir Harry only yesterday". They can be relied upon to tell you just what you don't want to know exactly when you don't want to know it. I was accosted by one last summer when we visited one of the more celebrated 'attractions':

'Magnificent isn't it', he said. 'One of a pair painted for this room it shows the Lagoon and to the right is the Doge's palace'. 

'I was looking at the Stubbs', I said.

'Of course the family were frequent visitors to Italia and this exquisite pair from Canaletto's later period were commissioned from the artist by the 7th Earl on his Grande Tour of 1742'.

'Yes but I was looking at the…..oh never mind'.

So yesterday we ended up visiting friends who's family happen to have lived at Norton Conyers House since 1642! It's a grade II listed late medieval manor house with Stuart and Georgian additions in the Ure valley just outside Ripon. Last time I visited, all of the paintings were in storage and dust sheets covered the furniture as some major restoration work was under way. This time the dust sheets are off but Lady Graham is in a bit of a tizz as she's spent the past three hours trying to eject a couple of Swallows who'd managed to get into the great hall without paying and were reluctant to leave. By the time we arrive she has somehow ejected them but they have been kind enough to sign the visitors book - well in the sense that they have guano'd down a couple of paintings. it seems that the Grahams don't have an immediate solution to this problem and time is of the essence given the acid nature of their deposit.

In no time at all I find myself precariously teetering on tip toe atop a rickety step ladder, a little plastic cup of distilled water in one hand, a cotton bud in the other, gently swabbing away at the comely breast of a 17th century Lady Jane Graham; she gazes provocatively into my eyes. She's a bit of a 'looker' is Lady J. and I can't help feeling a little impertinent as I fiddle about with her hooters. The step ladder isn't really tall enough and I'm trying to work by the fitful beam of an ancient angle poise lamp, whilst my wife and Lady G discuss flower arrangements at ground level and offer helpful comments. But an hour or more later and half a box of cotton buds (now christened 'poo sticks') down, I take my leave of the rose lipped lovely and turn my attention to the second guano'd Graham; this time it's the somewhat less alluring Sir Guy Graham, 9th Baronet and grandfather to Sir James, the present holder. He (Sir Guy) studiously ignores me as I swab away at his tunic and another arm aching, eye squinting hour passes but in the end, both illustrious ancestors are rendered dropping free and I can climb down from my lofty and perilous perch.
Later we are taken on a guided tour of the house and delightful walled gardens by Lady G. It is a lived-in house on a human scale with imperfections and anomalies and it is this, I realise that charms me about the place - that and my own interaction with it - can you imagine being asked to clean bird shit off a Bruegel in Blenheim or a Chardin at Chatsworth?
We come away with a pleasing sense of having contributed in a small way to the ongoing life of this ancient house, and with several large tupperware boxes full of soft fruits from Lady G's copious 17C freezers. 

Hackfall

'Footbridge by the Ure'

The river Ure snakes through a 350ft gorge cloaked with Oak, beech, sycamore and ash; a dramatic and beautiful foreground to a view that stretches across the vale of York to the blue, distant Hambleton hills. The woodland, dotted with follies, grottos, pathways and ponds testifies to the hand of man in what otherwise might appear to be a natural landscape. It was John Aislabie, famous for his landscaping work at nearby Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal, and his son William who laid out the most dramatic section as a woodland garden in the mid 18th century. Hackfall was to become one of the most important and famous managed landscapes of its kind in Britain. 

My own first venture into Hackfall was one early spring morning, hideously clad in shorts and pumps trying to keep up with my pal Alastair on a Sunday morning run. It was I remember, bitterly cold, misty, muddy and mildly humiliating given that Al is a robust 17 stone ex rugby player and I am built on considerably more svelte, and theoretically swift lines. Yet, even as I blundered along after Al, lungs bursting from my chest,  I couldn't help noticing what an extraordinarily beautiful place it is and I promised myself a return visit, this time equipped with paints and brushes. It's not as if I'd be breaking new ground though, since some 200 odd years before me, the no doubt more decorously clad Joseph Mallord William Turner found his way here and set the bar for painting it in watercolour; so once again I find myself lumbering along in the wake of a superior being!  He was on the second of two tours of Yorkshire and the north, putting together a series of studies for a book by Thomas Dunham Whitaker entitled 'A General History of the County of York'. Sadly Whitaker died before his book was completed, but on the up side the young Turner produced some cracking pictures of Hackfall that otherwise might never have been made.

I'd had a book about Turner as a kid but I'd only looked at the pictures. He turned up in art history lectures at art college but, and I hate to admit this: he'd seemed anachronistic in a world of performance art, the 'Shock of the New', Punk and my new haircut. It was only later as I worked my way through Bomberg, Auerbach and Freud that he elbowed his way into my leaden consciousness and I began to learn a little about the art and the man. Great artists of the past can seem remote and shadowy figures even to those who study them, but put a fishing rod in their hands and they take a great stride forward into the light to meet us: put Turner near a river and if he wasn't painting it, he was fishing it, he is even reputed to have had a walking stick that turned into a fishing rod! According to William Russell in his 'Eccentric Personages':

'The sole relaxation which this remarkable man (Turner) permitted himself, besides certain potations—but it was not till late in life that he at times over-indulged—was fishing. He might be seen wending his way to the river-side, dressed in the oddest fashion—a flabby hat, ill fitting green Monmouth-street coat, nankeen trousers much too short, and highlow boots, with a dilapidated cotton umbrella, and a fishing rod. From early morning till nightfall would he sit upon the river’s bank, under pelting rain, patiently, shielded by his capacious umbrella, even though he did not obtain a single nibble. He was not, however, an unskillful angler, and was very proud of a good day’s sport.'

And the Rev' S.A. Swaine averred: 

'Turner was as merciful an angler as even the pious and humane farther of the craft could have desired. He would impale the devoted worm 'as tenderly as he loved him'….. and according to a regular fishing companion, " His success as an angler was great, although with the worst of tackle in the world. Every fish he caught he showed to me, and appealed to me to decide whether the size justified him to keep it for the table, or return it to the river; his hesitation was often most touching, and he always gave the prisoner at the bar the benefit of the doubt."

so as I headed river-wards to paint I began to feel, well what? Perhaps not a presence, or an aura, but rather, a sense of time collapsing around me and that strange sensation that the past might be running parallel with the present.

Deep in the gorge and quite close to the river there is a bench marking one of the places where Turner sat to paint, but as I search for a place from which to make my own picture I find myself drawn closer and closer to the river itself and in it, about a yard from the bank, lapped by the river's ceaseless passage bulges a rock, a round, flat topped rock like a pub table. It stands a good three feet clear of the water so that when you perch on it, your feet are clear of the stream; there is room to sit and spread out watercolours and palette; it is an artist's stone and it has been warmed by the sun or possibly Turner's bum. Of course, I can't be sure that he ever painted from this rock but from here you can look straight down into the water and watch the wild Brown Trout hanging in the current, you can track the kingfisher as he kinks past at eye level, dippers bob and  the river gurgles, rushes, dazzles and glints in the sunlight. It is an artist's stone and an angler's stone and you can look downstream and get a wonderfully framed view of Mowbray Castle, the folly Turner so carefully recorded in his finished watercolour.

I work away for an your or two with pencil, watercolour and acrylic and then wander further up river where the current slows and the steep sided gorge flattens out to meadowland. In the drowsy afternoon heat, I sit watching lazy trout sipping flies from the water's surface and here I make the best picture of the day; free I suspect, of the weight of greater expectations. 

Turner may have produced the best painting of Hackfall woods but running? I'd have him, no problem!

Spurn Point

When I started the River Ure Project I had intended to work my way down river only as far as the point where it changes its name to the Ouse but this inconsequential and indeterminate dissolution had always rankled - rivers after all, flow into the sea don't they? they become part of that great cycle of sea, sky, cloud, rain and river that sustains life and here in Yorkshire anyway, gives us a regular soaking, so on a bright, breezy and thankfully dry day in April I set off to witness the transformation.

It's easy to forget just how big this county really is but if you do need reminding, take a drive to Spurn Point from ……… well, almost anywhere else in Yorkshire - it's a long way!  Once past Beverley, you soon begin to get the feeling you are approaching the edge - the landscape is prairie flat, the roads straight and the sky, huge and indefinably coloured by the sea. The fields are tramlined into yet more straight lines and turbines harvest the wind. At Easington a huge gas terminal straddles the road; double fenced and dog patrolled it lends an air of secrecy, even menace to the otherwise wide-eyed innocence of the place. 

The road narrows into single track, becomes sandier and the sun shafts onto the Humber estuary (the Ure estuary) to my right. I pull in to the small car park and as the engine dies the north-westerly rocks the car gently. Spurn Point is a narrow, three mile long blunted spike of land that curls out between the estuary and the sea carrying a road which has been so battered by the winter storms that it is now closed to vehicles and it seems unlikely that the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust who run and administer the area will reinstate it. For many years there have been attempts to stabilise this shifting landscape with concrete and steel but in the face of the sea's power they have, over time, largely failed and now it is time to allow nature to take charge once again.

Marram grass dances and sings on the dunes adding to the voices of Curlews and other wading birds on the mud flats to the west; it's what you might call 'bracing'. The delicacy of this place is immediately apparent as the sea washes over the remaining blocks of roadway and eats away at the dunes, and the groynes that once arrested longshore drift loll drunkenly in churning sea-foam. The sea is not re-claiming, but re-sculpting like a potter with a ball of clay - what once was land is becoming sea and what was sea, land. Through this process of erosion and deposition Spurn is gradually moving westwards and will soon become an island; it is one of the most dynamic and fastest moving landscapes in the country. This is a compelling place to work - it feels like painting history, such is its transience.

After a couple of hundred metres the sand dusted road is protected by dunes and I follow it along the long, curving spit; a line of telegraph poles punctuates the way and washes out to the horizon. A beached lobster pot nestles in the sand and, mouth agape, waits in vain. I make some quick drawings and colour notes and continue along the road, crossing and re-crossing old, half buried railway tracks - the remains of a line built to transport men and materials to a gun battery built during the Great War (contemporary photographs show that some of the rail vehicles were wind powered and had large sails!) After an hour or so of walking, stopping, wandering, looking, scribbling, the land that curved away ahead of me, now arcs back to the 'mainland'.  I am standing beneath the now disused, Spurn Lighthouse; its once black and white livery now flaked with a patina of mellowing age, the light itself, doused in 1985. it is locked, of course, so I wander round the outside staring dizzyingly upwards at its blank windows and a Kestrel lifts easily from the telegraph wires and perches on one of the upper window ledges and waits for my departure.

In this predominantly horizontal scape it is the verticals that clamour for attention: the lighthouse itself, the telegraph poles and most surprisingly, a bus stop, surely now redundant, informs of past outings, of wrapped sandwiches and pop and 'can we go now?'. Rust coats every metal surface, prematurely ageing so that a tractor and boat trailer have all the appearance of having been abandoned for years, though they may well have been used yesterday and the lifeboatmen's bicycles are enough to make Bradley Wiggins weep.

As I near the end of the point, marine debris litters the beach - bottles, plastic in all its hideous forms and a blue nike trainer. Brutalist concrete bunkers and gun emplacements remind me once again of the other lives once lived here and I can't help feeling there might have been a touch of the 'Dad's Army' about it - "Make us a cup 'a' Rosie Lee Charlie; we ain't gonna see the perishin' Jerry tonight'.

I watch the stately progress of enormous container ships silently entering the estuary and as I do so a large log, washed up on the beach, opens an unexpected eye and starts belly flopping towards the surf with a backward glance of heartfelt reproach: it's actually a Common Seal, one of the many marine mammals to be found in these waters but for me, a wonderful surprise and I rebuke myself for having almost blundered into the poor creature.

Time and tide as they say…….having reached the end, I turn and retrace my steps the three miles or so towards the car, and none too soon because the tide is coming in fast and the landward end of the causeway is almost under water. The air is a mist of salt water and the ground, unstable but soon I'm safely back in the deserted car park.

The car door clunks shut and suddenly all is quiet - the roar of wind and sea that have battered my senses for the past three hours are shut out; it's like stepping out of a nightclub into the early dawn. I have loved it and I'm a little drunk.

Spurn Light, Oil on canvas, 100cm x 100cm