When the leaves fall is the fun time of year for artists
There are all kinds of reasons for objecting to Percy Bysshe Shelley. Selfish and often indifferent to the feelings of others (especially young women), while hypersensitive to his own, he was one of those intellectual monsters who think ideas matter more than people. But he was a great poet nonetheless. His ‘Ode to the West Wind’ is one of my favourite poems and I often think of it at this time of year when the trees are being stripped of their last leaves. ‘O wild West Wind,’ he writes,
Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes.
The tree is nature’s finest work of art, not on the topmost John Martin scale, of course, like the Grand Canyon, seen from above or, looking up, like a livid gash in the earth topped by blue sky, or the Himalayas of Kanchenjunga seen from Darjeeling — a colossal extended wedding-cake like Miss Havisham’s in its pristine form glittering in joy before decay set in. No: trees are not on that level, even the gigantic ones which loom on the pages of Thomas Pakenham’s magical book. But they are the right size to be our friends and allies and comforters. They are everywhere, hundreds of millions of them, varied to suit every mood, to give shade in summer, noble and sinister outlines in winter, freshness and promise of life in spring, and in autumn the special pyrotechnic display which God arranges every year to give delight and teach lessons of the transience of existence.
I call myself mighty fortunate to live in west London, where there are so many of these permanent works of art, and of such variety. As they shed their leaves, like a beautiful woman shaking off her finery, I walk the streets with eagle eyes to spot the finest specimens of these discarded garments — the best of shapes, the richest colours. ‘Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red’ — yes: and gamboge, and maroon, the lemon and orange of fruit trees, carmine and olive, both in its high-green and almostblack shades, and the yellow green of its finest oil. And then there are the marvellous East Asian shades of Confucian chromo-theology: cinnabar, vermilion, malachite, realgar, minium, orpiment and the various ochres. No blues, of course, for that is for the firmament alone: the shades of autumn leaves are at their best seen below an azure sky or over ultramarine water. Confucius, indeed, would not wear garments of dark purple or puce, either indoors or outdoors, for they were not in nature, in the fallen leaves. But the mixtures of the primary colours are infinite. Plotinus rightly called colour divine because the deity turned it off His palette of nature in countless careful mixtures which seem spontaneous but are of tremendous subtlety and grace, so as to seem completely new each November. The entire chromatic scale was there aeons before Turner, following Goethe, devised his circular spectrum mix, or Seurat and Signac developed chromoluminarism, or Rothko colour spiritualism or, for that matter, Da Vinci invented *anato. Indeed, in the commonest beech or plane tree leaf in decay there are stronger and subtler *anat� than was ever registered by an Old Master.
I regard autumn leaves as the finest subject matter in nature for a watercolourist to work upon. So I scan the Notting Hill pavements for fallen masterpieces before they are trodden into mush, and snatch at tiny wonders in the hedgerows and low trees before they fall, gratefully and carefully cramming them into my pockets. People sometimes look at me in puzzlement or contempt as I stoop down, examine and then extract and pocket my finds. What’s he up to then? They come in all sorts now, don’t they? But less so since the crunch and the creeping depression upset values and made people think about what, exactly, is an asset. I now sense them cogitating. Is he on to something? Is there a market in special leaves? Will that reformedScrooge Scotch duo, Brown and Darling, cheerfully doling out English taxpayers’ money, give us some for collecting them? We live in an age of wild economic superstitions.
Back in the studio, I gingerly take out my haul and spread it out on the large, flat architects’ table I use for watercolour work. James Agate’s butler, who insisted on buying all his suits, told him: ‘I dress my gentlemen according to age and shape.’ Those are also my criteria for picking prize leaves. The age determines hue according to the species, and the shape governs the way in which I arrange them on the page. Sometimes I do a large, brownish leaf on a small page by itself. More often I like an arrangement: two predominantly brown leaves, turning black, a yellow and a still-green one, just acquiring a jaundiced tip, and a multicoloured big one in the middle. The varieties of such compositions are infinite, but there is a kind of rectitude or canon in the devisings of pattern which must spring from nature. My favourites are the Virginia creeper, two of which grow in my street, and a certain kind of fig tree, which I have in my garden, which goes a spectacular gamut of colour, from olive green with crimson surging through to vermilion and lemon-yellow to a hell’s kitchen colour of gamboge-mauve with ever-increasing black edges, the final act in its autumnal drama.
A leaf is like the human body in some ways. The nourishment enters from the stem and progresses up the leaf through a central artery, then pushes out to the periphery through a series of veins. When the leaf begins to decay, the artery goes a different colour, sometimes lighter, sometimes darker, and the veins eventually follow suit. It is a matter of fine judgment whether to paint the artery and veins in first, and then put a wash of the general colour over them, or later to dig out the radiating system with a wooden brush-end, and allow the superimposed paints to flow into their channels slightly below the surface. My father, who was very strict in the do’s and don’ts of watercolour painting, and indeed of all art, would never have allowed this. But Turner did, his rule being: ‘If it works, do it.’ In any case, there are alternatives, as I have discovered in many years of autumnleaf painting. As the leaf deteriorates, or becomes more interesting depending on your point of view, the red spreads among the yellow, the gamboge progresses among the reds, and black patches begin to appear: at the very tip, which becomes brittle, at the joint to the stem, and on the periphery. Black plague-spots pop out too. A lot of my painting is arbitrary, as I follow my fancy in degrading the leaf with dark gamboge or black. But then so is nature, or appears to be; and the aim of leaf-painting art is not exactitude of reproduction, which in practice is impossible anyway, but verisimilitude, the true principle of realist art.
The great moral and aesthetic problem in doing leaves is whether to use pure watercolour to achieve linear definition, or not. The colour ought to do it perfectly, if the subject-leaf has a fine colour-composition of its own, and my hand is skilful enough. But sometimes this does not work. Then the temptation is to use a fine pen, and ink, to trace the progress of the nourishment through the stem and artery and veins, and also the progress of decay. There is a further temptation to trace the outline of the leaf, especially if it is minutely serrated, in ink. No matter how fine the nib, and the ink, and careful the hand, it is still against the rules. But then, rules are there to be broken by law-abiding persons, as the great G.M. Young used to say. And anyway it is fun to break rules. Art to me is essentially fun, as writing is work. The fun time of year is when leaves fall, and I paint them.
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