City Snow...

Little did I know that the blue skies at the beginning of February would give no indication to how the weather would change over the weeks. Snow came and went, cloaking everything in a fleeting layer of calm, momentarily muffling the usual humdrum sounds of city life, yet leading to chaos on the roads, rails and runways. With a little imagination, you could almost imagine yourself to be somewhere else, in some other time…

This reminded me of a beautiful card that I have kept over the years – Riders and Dogs in Snow – by the British watercolourist, Leslie Worth (1923-2009). The simplicity of this peaceful scene offsets the precision of the details so that you can feel the cold, with all the associated sensations in the tranquility of the landscape. The ruffled feathers of the blackbird, puffed-up against this harsh environment, stand out against the simple, stark bramble branches. The static gaze of the riders towards us, is contrasted by the excitement of the dogs, whose energy you can feel in their eager tails as they wait for the masters’ command.

This, in turn, reminded me of the painting Hunters in the Snow (1565) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Strange how animal traits change little over the centuries, and how well artists capture these, when their portrayals of key human features often fail, or remain caught in a specific moment of time, that are poorly 'translated' in the present...

It seems that much of Leslie Worth’s art captures a similar mood, centred around the changing English weather– hazy views over landscape transformed by rain, mist, sunlight and storm. Although his early work was largely carried out in oil, after having submitted two watercolours to the Royal Academy summer exhibition in 1951, he then turned towards this lighter medium. He had not studied the use of watercolour, but his technique and choice of scenery seemed to be instinctive. Born in North Devon on Derby Day, Worth would say the winning horse ‘Papyrus’ was surely a sign of things to come. Indeed, much of his life was spent around Epsom and paper was his material of predilection, and the base of the watercolours for which he was mostly, yet not exclusively, acclaimed.

Here we are at the end of the month – again with radiant skies that belie the minus 10° outside…