The Wharfe, West Yorkshire (Division)''

Pencil and graphite on Arches watercolour paper.
76cms x 168cms.

Although the river Wharfe starts life in North Yorkshire, above Buckden, in the Dales, I knew it more as a West Yorkshire river; growing up as I did on the northern outskirts of Leeds, with Wharfedale and its namesake river only a twenty minute bicycle ride away.

The drawing emerged from an outing to Harewood and a wander down Fitts Lane, off Harewood Bank, one hot afternoon in July. The fairly wide gravel track soon becomes a footpath; and the footpath soon accompanies the river Wharfe, as it travels slowly east towards Collingham and Wetherby, to meet the Ouse near Cawood.

A river 'divided'; the surface sectioned. And unknown to me, at the time I made the drawing, the ashes of both my parents and my elder brother would pass this way; scattered above The Strid, near Bolton Abbey, and destined to join the distant North Sea eventually; a sea, and a coast, of family memory.

Another 'surface' of a river, on 'the surface' of some paper. Another landscape.