Waders and sketchbook

I’ve been thinking about making my own ink using oak galls and materials from the river for a while and then the other day I came across some oak galls and decided to get started. I couldn’t believe how easy – and miraculous – it was.

Ink made from oak trees has been used since the 12th Century. It is waterproof and gets darker with age. Oak galls occur when a gall wasp lays eggs in buds, acorns or roots and the tree protects itself by enclosing the developing larvae in abnormal growths. Around May, the lava eats its way out and the adult wasp emerges in June/July. The galls I collected had a small hole where the lava had escaped.

Oak gall ink recipe

2 oz crushed oak galls

1 oz ferrous sulphate (available from garden centres)*

1/2 oz gum arabic (available from art shops)

*An alternative to ferrous sulphate can be made by hand by soaking rusty old iron in white vinegar for a few days.

To make the ink, cover the oak galls with water in a pan and simmer for half an hour. The water goes a dark brown. Strain through a piece of muslin or thin cotton and leave to cool. Then add the ferrous sulphate and gum arabic (binding agent) and watch the water turn black! Pure alchemy!**

For my ink I took rusted metal from the river and soaked it in vinegar to get an iron rust solution, and I used river water to boil the oak galls in. The galls came from a tree near the A3 but I hope to find some from oaks beside the river. I want to make paper using river water too and will document my process.

I love the story that this creates and the sense of where everything comes from.

**I have to thank my friend and artist, Lizzie Brewer, who has been making her own ink and paper for her beautiful books for years and gave me the help and confidence to try!!

Brought over in 1839 for its exquisite flowers, Himalayan Balsam is now ravaging our river banks. It grows rapidly and spreads quickly, smothering other plants as it goes. As you walk along the River Crane, you see it standing in pockets of dense thickets on either side, despite hard efforts to keep it at bay.

I am in two minds about whether to draw it. It’s a beautiful plant, growing taller than head height, with large leaves and orchid-like flowers that attract the bees. But it is the bully of the river banks, depriving smaller native plants of light, nutrients and pollinators necessary for survival. When it dies back, it leaves the river banks bare and depleted, where normally plants that flower at other times of year would be able to grow. Insects and birds that feed on these other plants also lose out.

But I think “I’ll just try and pull one up and see“. They are not usually easy to just pull up and if I manage, large leafed weeds often wilt within minutes and don’t recover. That’s been my experience with other large weeds – so disappointing!

It has vicious looking red roots…

To my surprise it comes up easily, bringing a clump of earth with it. I wade back with it in a compost sack, aware I might be spreading its seeds further afield. One plant can produce 800 seeds which, often carried by the river, go on to germinate downstream.

By the time it is in back my studio it has wilted. But I plant it in a bucket, water it and go home, hoping for the best.

The next day it has recovered completely! It just has to be drawn!

Now I feel a sense of guilt. Like my forebears, I couldn’t resist this beautiful plant!

(Though perhaps if they had just drawn it, rather than bringing it back to England, our river banks would be in a much better state!)

Looking at the plants on the river bank and thinking about which to draw, I’m reminded of a painting that I keep going back to – The Great Piece of Turf  by Albrecht Dürer, 1503, painted in watercolour and body colour.

Each blade of grass and every leaf has been meticulously painted. It has a natural composition and I imagine the whole turf was dug up and taken back to the studio to draw. I like the fact that the dandelions have finished flowering – there are no beautiful flowers here and even some of the plant roots are revealed – it seems a very truthful drawing.

There’s a debate about whether or not Dürer made up the composition as it is thought to be too good to just occur naturally. I like to think he went out looking for and dug up exactly the right composition and took it back to his studio to paint, largely unaltered. I think the clod of earth in the paintings gives a sense of the rootedness and ordinariness of the plants. The Great Piece of Turf seems very contemporary in that it preferences the plants’ natural habitat and ecology over cultural appreciation.

Dürer made many plant studies and (along with da Vinci) was an early pioneer of botanical art. Though this is probably his most famous botanical painting, Dürer painted several ‘pieces of turf’…

Celandine, watercolour and body colour*, 28.7 x 14.9cm | Columbine, watercolour and body colour*, 35.5 x 28.7cm | The Small Piece of Turf, body colour*, 40.8 x 31.5cm

• * “Body colour is the use of opaque colours for highlights or dense, flat areas. It’s a technique that has been used in watercolour for centuries. Before Designers Gouache was introduced in 1937, the only method of achieving opacity was to use white on its own, or to use it to make tints of the watercolours.” (www.winsornewton.com)

The River Crane has some great ‘pieces of turf’, where plants have rooted into soil deposited along the margins. Some of these are easy to lift up and take back to the studio.

One piece, containing a ladies thumb, an unidentified plant and a (dead) common ragwort, I took back to draw. The plants look as though they are only just surviving – and yet they are probably thriving! I have drawn them on a piece of recycled plywood, in charcoal and acrylic paint.

(Dead) common ragwort and other plants, charcoal and acrylic on plywood, 122 x 88cm

On my visits so far, I have met a few of the local residents who’s gardens back onto the Crane. We have conversations about herons, ducks, kingfishers, high tides. One woman told me about the writer A G Linney who took a skiff up the River Crane at high tide 91 years ago. He paints an idyllic picture:

…During one summer I made a voyage up the River Crane of an evening about high water in a skiff. It was wearing to the close of a sweltering day, and the cool, green tunnel which the mouth of the little stream presented was captivating. Tall grass hung down over the rough camp-shedding on one side, and trees swept their branches on the other, right down to the water.
About a hundred yards from the river the road to Richmond passes over the Crane, and immediately beyond it one was astonished to come upon a flourishing boat-building yard, of which no hint appears until you are close up to it. Squeezing our way past the boats, we went forward up the next section of the stream, here, perhaps twelve or fifteen feet wide. The (Port of London) Authority’s jurisdiction ends, I believe, at the bridge where Talbot Road passes over the Crane River; and I suppose that the Middlesex County Council here takes over.
From here we were moving slowly along between ends of back gardens belonging to modest middle-class houses. The gardens, as we saw them in the golden light of a hot summer evening, were fully appreciated by their owners for whole families were sitting in arbours or on the turf enjoying the end-of-a-day rest… People came running down, calling, “Look, here’s a boat!” Family bathing was in full swing from every back garden; youngsters were splashing around, full of glee; City typist daughters had hustled back from the office to don their chic bathing suits and gay rubber caps, and were either swimming seriously, or posing for admiration on the banks; even respectable papas had got out their bathing suits and come in for a dip, so that grey heads or bald craniums showed above the little waves of the little stream.
Just before we had drifted down to Talbot Road Bridge a native was fishing. I asked him if he had ever caught anything; rather plaintively he replied, “Not yet.” He looked about twenty-one years of age.
Emerging into the Thames through the tunnel of green I vowed that I must never even cast an eye at the River Crane save near high water, or should see that Rivulet of Happy Families as a mere trickle in the middle of slimy mud.
– “Lure and Lore of London’s River” by A.G. Linney (pub 1932.)

 

I’m sure I’ll be looking out for grey heads and bald craniums next time I go – even if at low tide the river is “a mere trickle in the middle of slimy mud”!

There’s a slipway that I can access the river by, saving me the walk along the Thames. Once again I silently blessed my friend for her waders as, stepping off the side of the ramp (the submerged bit looked too slippy) into fast flowing water, I lost my footing and ended up sitting, waist-high, but completely dry, in the river!

The plants that grip onto the river walls and banks, surviving a twice daily submersion at high tide, have really caught my attention. Like Buddleia that grows in cities, in gutters, walls or concrete, any derelict space, it’s remarkable that these plants have been able to germinate and grow against all odds. They seem to represent the plant world at this time, struggling with their environment and everything it throws at them. I am drawn to their vulnerability and yet their tenacity and ability to survive.