I mentioned in my post Acquiring A Mr. Darcy that I have a few unique ways to make a place feel home. I must confess – I held back my favourite pastime from that post: sketching. Last night, Sam was sharing her wonderful magical experience romping around Charlotte Bronte’s hometown and told me she finally understood how this country could inspire so many incredible writers. I couldn’t agree more – being in London and travelling around England makes me wish I was a genius painter or a brilliant novelist to immortalize the beautiful hills dotted with sheep, the rolling fog pierced by the church spires and the golden fields.
To me, there is no more intimate way to get to know a place than to interpret it with a pencil and paper. Over the last few weeks, whenever it’s not raining (and that one time I put an umbrella over my sketchpad because I was determined to finish the darn drawing), I pull out my tiny sketch pad and sit. For example, I sketched both sides of Kensington Palace because the Palace really is so intricate you could only know it by staring for a few hours.
I don’t have any illusions of being any good at drawing anything, but it’s a wonderful way to own part of the city, to make a little piece of the city a place that I know intimately. All the gargoyles, the roof decorations, the tops of the fence – I don’t think I would have noticed them if I hadn’t struggled to recreate them.
Hyde Park is another lovely place to appreciate, with its romantic bridges and weeping willow trees. About four lines into sketching this bridge, some not-English-speaking-tourists came over and mistook me for one of those street artists who sell paintings in tourist traps. (With literally four lines on an otherwise blank piece of tiny paper, I wondered briefly if this is what those famous modern artists feel like when they sell a painting for $40 million that’s just a blue square on a blank canvas. But I digress.)
Poet John Clare in 1821 captured the essence of autumn in England best:
All nature has a feeling: woods, fields, brooks
Are life eternal: and in silence they
Speak happiness beyond the reach of books;
There’s nothing mortal in them; their decay
Is the green life of change; to pass away
And come again in blooms revivified.
Its birth was heaven, eternal it its stay,
And with the sun and moon shall still abide
Beneath their day and night and heaven wide.
-John Clare, 1821
He said about the English countryside: Whoever looks around sees eternity there.
Adventures in the UK! 