Artistic link with the past

Wearing a self-made blue smock copied from one she bought in Japan, Katharine Holmes takes the measure of her garden. It has been a hard winter in Malhamdale and the shelves in her traditional stone-floored pantry are still stocked with emergency supplies.

In 1947 her grandmother, Constance Pearson, was beset in the same house with severe weather and food shortages. In that hard post-war winter, farmers could not get their precious eggs and milk and so forth to market. Instead, the produce circulated in the dale – trading which circumvented rationing which was a way of life elsewhere in austerity Britain.

On Monday night, February 18, 1947, Constance wrote to her daughter, Philippa in Wales. "It's an ill snow that doesn't cover a multitude of irregularities – such as churning and selling eggs & butter to neighbours. I have been baking homemade bread and my! how good it tastes with plenty of farmer's fat on it! The lb enclosed is part farm & part extra from young Mrs Vintner – she got so much fresh butter that she was glad to sell some of her caterer's allowance.

"All the village has been sneaking around with covered baskets collecting things – all hush-hush, but told to one another as a great secret & displayed with pride in the privacy of one's kitchen. Tom Yeadon collected 7lbs of butter. Of course we have a few discomforts to put up with. I was without coal for four days..."

The letters of Constance were left to her granddaughter Katharine who turned them into a fascinating book Letters From Malham – Wartime Life at High Barn Cottage, with many of her paintings as illustrations.

Katharine is the third in line to live at the cottage, a word which undersells its girth. Katharine, too, is an artist. She turned professional in the 1990s, following her grandmother and mother

at the easel.

Constance Pearson studied at Leeds College of Art and married Sidney, an artist and schoolteacher. They moved to the cottage, which had been rented by Helen Neatby, headmistress of the Quaker school at Ackworth, where Sidney was teaching.

Constance died in 1970. Katharine writes of her grandmother, "She was to be seen out and about with her painting equipment in all weathers in a tweed coat, her hat bound to her head with a scarf on windy days. She worked quickly and with great confidence in oils and watercolour. Capturing the look and feel of life in the 1940s and 50s in her paintings... It was a world of milk carried in back cans, horses and carts at haytime and snow bound winters." Katharine's mother, Philippa, was the third of Constance and Sidney's four children. She grew up in Thornton, Bradford, as a Quaker. She trained at art school in Bradford and, later, as a teacher at Bretton Hall, near Wakefield. She and

her husband, Ted Holmes, came to Malhamdale, where he helped to bring electricity and mechanisation to the farms. Their first house was a rented farm cottage near Airton. In the mid-1960s Ted and Philippa bought High Barn Cottage and moved in with their only child, Katharine, born in 1962.

After Skipton Girls' High School, Katharine studied fine art at Newcastle, where one tutor was Norman Adams, a noted artist who had a house over the hill from Malham. She later trained in paper conservation and worked in galleries. She returned to live in the Dales in 1990, and moved back to live at High Barn Cottage in 2007, after her father's death.

Although technically outsiders, the family had immersed itself in the community, with a love of nature which brought them into contact with the traditions, the Dalesfolk proper, the things that make a place whole. For Katharine, life as a professional artist beckoned. It was almost unavoidable.

An exhibition on the lives and work of the three women has just opened at the Folly in Settle. Katharine writes in the preface: "As a small girl I played in my elderly grandmother's studio and was allowed to squeeze out oil paint onto her large wooden palette and paint with her brushes onto canvases. I also would often paint and draw outside alongside my mother. Over the years my mother made many sketches of our home and included in the exhibition is her painting of the traditional Dales pantry with its stone shelves and baking bowls which

we have in turn all used and loved."

Katharine is giving a talk and offering a traditional Dales tea at the Folly on Monday April 12. She is using her mother's recipes and will be making Battenburg cake – the one children like because they can peel off the marzipan crust: well, I did anyway.

"My mother made it here for my father because he liked it," explains the artist-cook-gardener. There will be maids of honour (a pastry tart) and Victoria sponge and shouting bread. Which is? "My grandmother had this tea cake when she was growing up in Leeds. Fruit was scarce, so you shouted when you found some," explains Katharine.

This winter there were parts of Malhamdale when food was scarce again. Some folk on the top were snowed in for weeks. When I met her, Katharine was planning and preparing her vegetable, herb and fruit crops, augmenting hangers-on from her grandparents' time at High Barn Cottage.

This must be many people's idea of a perfect house, a five window front, detached, with stone outbuildings including a two-seater privy, paths of river cobbles, a flagged floor from a departed building, an attached croft where Katharine has resuscitated a pump over the well. There's a lifetime of pottering and bliss awaiting here.

"Gardens are slow things, which is lovely as they develop over the years," she reflects. Last year she planted Westmorland damsons and Worcester Pearmain and James Grieve apples.

Her parents bought the property following the death of the last owner of the estate. There is a reminder of those times: the rear windows were made opaque so as not to look over the big house. They are period pieces, not the modern glass found in bathroom modesty windows, and Katharine has left them in place.

The big house is now the bolt-hole for London lawyers. Their houses are in a self-contained cluster on the edge of the village, on the road to the limestone cove cliff face.

Nearby is Gordale Scar, a haunt of artists like James Ward and Turner and writers such as Wordsworth, who swept through the remote parts of 19th century Britain and brought it to audiences in the towns and cities.

I know a little about art and I know what I like and Katharine's work has an immediate appeal. A reference to Turner's abstraction is obvious, with glorious movement and bold colours. She is collectable and accessible, with finished works selling between 400 and towards 10,000.

The exhibition will include a patchwork or unframed original sketches (she does not sell prints) 25cm x 25cm at 150 a shot. They show the barns and becks and walls and in one, her good neighbour Neil Heseltine on his quad bike going to feed his renowned sheep. It is, as they say, a good body of work.

There are associated events and publications, including Letters From Malham which is full or marvellous observations and illustrations and lots of anecdotes from Constance's forays by bus to paint outdoors.

A Malham Family of Painters exhibition to July 27 at the Museum of North Craven Life, The Folly, Victoria Street, Settle, BD24 9EY. Tel: 01729 822361 and www.ncbpt.org.uk/folly