The annual Leeds foundation course trip to Buckden

Every year during the winter the Leeds foundation course would go to Wharfdale for 5 days. I started teaching during the mid 1970s and went on several of these trips until they were suspended at some point in the 1980s because the course had grown too big for the local hostel to accommodate us. We used to work in the valley between Buckden, Starbotton and Kettlewell, and students would be spread out along the valley and be made to work outside all day in response to an environment many, including myself found totally alien, however that was sort of the point.

Preparations for the trip would begin the week before, students being asked to think about the sort of equipment they might need when working outside in the freezing cold and far away from the comforts of public houses and other warm dry places. They were asked to think about how they would draw in the wind, snow and rain, how they would carry a full size A1 drawing board and paper as well as all their drawing materials both out and back to the hostel, a journey that for some of them would be several miles and over very rough terrain. They were also asked to think about survival, what would they need to take with them if they for instance broke a leg and had to spend hours on a snow covered hillside waiting for help?

However most of these students had grown up in the city and had no idea of what the reality would be like.

My first experience of this was back in the winter of 1975 as a young fresh course tutor and I had to share a small Buckden YHA hostel room, sleeping in a bunk bed directly above Gavin Stuart, the oldest member of staff and most experienced in terms of survival in hostile environments. 

Gavin had been in the 8th Army fighting in Africa during the Second World War and at one point had found himself separated from his comrades in a very hostile environment and had had to survive on his own in the desert for several days, an experience that had left him with PTSD. This was something I was unaware of until I was woken during our first night by screaming coming from the bunk bed below me, Gavin crying and ranting in his sleep, as his subconscious attempted to deal with the continuing effects of what he had experienced as a soldier. 

The next day he told me a little of what he had experienced, having to leave dead comrades to rot, as he found shelter in a cave, hoping the German army wouldn't find him before the English one. He saw the experience of taking the students into the wilds of Yorkshire as an essential one, not really in terms of preparation for making interesting art, but as a preparation for survival.

I thought these trips were wonderful and they also had a very personal connection with Patrick Oliver, as his father had a cottage in Starbotton village. Patrick's father W. T. Oliver was the Yorkshire Post art critic and as such he had connections with contemporary artists and used his cottage as a way to support them, if they wanted to spend time working within the Yorkshire Dales landscape. Terry Frost was one of the artists who had used the cottage and his example of using the Wharf river valley walk between Starbotton and Buckden as a subject for very abstracted images, was often used by Patrick as an example for students to aspire to. In particular as we went in winter it often used to snow, so that the valley was reduced to simple forms, that were described by drystone walls. 

Wharfdale, looking towards Kettlewell

Terry Frost: Red, Black and White

You can see the relationship between the snow abstracted fields and Frost's painting, nature's abstraction becoming his own.  

Patrick's father also allowed myself and my then wife and young daughter to stay in the cottage. This was in the early 1980s and our income at the time was from my teaching, and that was only for two days a week, so we couldn't afford a holiday. In payment all I had to do was to leave an example of work I had done during the week we were staying. I remember making some drawings from a hill above Starbotton using Quink ink and I left one of those, but what happened to it I don't know. 

All a very long time ago, but an important part of my own education about how a particular landscape could shape a artist's ideas.

We were always totally exhausted after these trips, as we spent all day walking the valley, students being spread out from Buckden to Kettlewell and often dug in to snow hollows that they were advised to make as shelters, drawing boards perched near the top as they tried to make sense of the valley below. Nature was raw, or it felt it and during the day airforce jets would occasionally swoop down the low over the valley, obviously on some sort of training exercise, but their presence gave moments of additional drama to a landscape that was defiantly not idyllic, shouting out its raw Yorkshire nature and a reminder to all that work done outside the studio could hold within it experiences that were impossible to recreate within the safe environment of the college.