Counting seasons

I have been visiting the Meadows to think about how I will approach the microseasons project. Trying to observe the changing environment of the Meadows over time, it has quickly become clear to me that the architecture of plants, trees and the landscape is only one aspect of the Meadows' own seasonal fluctuation. Changes in colour are increasingly catching my attention.

When entering that particular landscape (and it does feel like you enter it, coming off the main Aylestone Road from the city and up over the bridge to reach the Meadows), at first there is a sense of an overall colour change.  Is it something in the light, or the actual colour of the natural growth in the woodlands?  Often it is a combination of both, the natural objects themselves cannot be separated from the weather's effect on them.

One day just before Christmas I was suddenly struck by a flourescent yellow - as the cold but bright winter light hit lichen on the twigs, they seemed to glow like iridescent pencil sketches against the sky.

Then the snow fell, turning the light an eerie lilac-grey as it layered the trees' bare branches, making the trees appear more like black ink marks and losing their colour by contrast.

I began making watercolour swatches of the colours infront of me. I made drawings of lichen-covered twigs. But none of this quite captures what I'm looking for.

I've been looking at Japanese art of the Edo period.  I knew that Hokusai had made 36 woodcut blocks of different views of Mount Fuji, and I wondered how he had described the seasonal variation of the mountain. The microseasons project is, after all, inspired by Japanese tradition of observing the seasons.

And there was the effect of light again, in Hokusai's work "Clear Day with a Southern Breeze", 凱風快晴 Gaifū kaisei. As a print, Hokusai made different impressions of this work in a number of colours, perhaps each describing a different time of day or the differing lights of the time of year, and how it affects the mountain.  The best known version, known as Red Fuji, is described by a curator of the British Museum: "When conditions are right in late summer or early autumn, with a wind from the south and a clear sky, the slopes of Fuji can be dyed red by the rays of the rising sun... This is the most abstracted composition and yet the most meteorologically specific of all the 'Thirty-Six Views'"¹

It is one in the series "Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji" (you can see the full set here). There seems to be a cultural custom to have many numbers of things. Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views was followed by Hiroshige's "The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō". Our microseasons project, as I wrote in my last post, is inspired by the Japanese naming of 72 seasons.

What can I learn from this? How would I count the number of ways that seasonal light can be observed? Will this help me find a way to capture something of the Meadows?