A curled and desiccated bracken frond lies on the table in front of me. My pen describes it, swooping and twisting across the paper, inexact but feeling for the spirit of the plant. I am on the final page of a leporello in a year of nature drawings that has catalogued the changing seasons. A leporello is a concertina book; mine has stiff white cartridge paper and hard covers, and slots into a black carrying case. There’s a magic to the reveal as the pages are opened out, light and shadow falling across its zigzag surface.
Here is 2018, its slow start of shivering snowdrops and fragile hazel catkins, lungworts nectar-full in a late spring, grasses seeding and flowers going over fast in the summer drought. Seeds are blown from a dandelion clock to float their way across several folds of paper. An explosion of pollen beetles in July cluster in scabious and sweet peas. Wasps feast on fallen plums, cotoneaster berries ripen, sweet chestnuts tumble from their spiky cases.
The act of drawing needs a clear focus of attention. The learning is in the looking and the calm that that brings. Finding things on a walk and taking them home to draw teaches observation about the natural world, a valuable practice, especially for children. In some years I have done a sketch a day, the time limited to five minutes so it is possible and spontaneous: a windblown hawthorn, muddy walking boots, a KitKat wrapper, a car park skyline; anything can be included.
A leporello lends itself to unfolding time. Mine has movement from the seed heads of lemon balm that run horizontally across three pages. Images are not restricted to a rectangle, and rosehips, rosemary and cranesbill go where they want. I get the most pleasure from the new shapes made by fallen leaves, from the baroque curlicues of shrivelled oak and the rolled edges of sycamore. Dandelion leaves become a map of fjords, sharply indented, easily overlooked or dismissed as weeds. These are all little incidents that might have been forgotten, but that I can now revisit and that I’ve learned from in the process of seeing and drawing.
