After a summer break from painting, spending a few days in Grasmere last week has got the ideas flowing again. I've stayed there many times, and always find new and interesting subjects. This was the first time I'd combined cycling with sketching. It worked well, covering a wider area than on foot, without the encumbrance of a car, and still have sketchbook, folding stool, pencils and watercolours to hand. The bike's water bottle was handy for the watercolours!
The slate farmhouses, miners' cottages and even hotel buildings sit so comfortably in the landscape. Interlaced with drystone walls, they grow out of the ground itself, their mossy walls and roofs merging seamlessly into the bedrock. I'm looking to express, in a contemporary, "un-picturesque" way, how the buildings share the geology and are subject to the same processes of weathering and erosion as the ground they stand on.