little birds

little birds...I am still baffled by the mystery of how man has an independent life from woman, whereas I die when separated from my lover. While all these threads of desire and tenderness stifled me, I climbed into a giant bird and swooped toward space. Up here I do not suffer. Distance is magically covered. It is a dream. It is an inhuman bird that carries me to a new destiny. I rise. [Anaïs Nin, December 1939][from Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1939-1947][...][Roman Standard, Tracey Emin, Snape, Suffolk]I started drawing birds because I liked them and because they’re pretty [...] They represent something to me which is heavenly, because they fly. It’s like ascension. That was a time in my life when I really needed to rise above the situation I was in, and birds seemed the perfect metaphor for me. [...] The Roman Standard came through that way of thinking. [...] What I’m saying through the piece is that strength isn’t always about being big. [Tracey Emin, May 2013][Vanity Fair: Artist Tracey Emin: Critics Are Harsher Because I’m a Woman][...][Paul Klee, Bird Garden [Vogelgarten], 1924, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich]This lovely, fantastic, absurdly comic garden scene is as much music as painting. We feel that on our pulses as we look at it. Its lovely incongruities provoke delight. Each of those brash, small birds, so perkily self-assured, sounds like a single brazen struck note, usually quite a high note because they are treading very delicately upon the tops of all the leaves and all the plants [...] Not one of them is flying. They have no such ambitions. They are perfectly, harmoniously at rest, picking their way back and forth, round and round, across the tops of equally fragile and delicate natural things. [Michael Glover][The Independent: Great Works: Bird Garden, 1924, Paul Klee]

birdsong in the garden

yesterday afternoon, while i was sat outside in the sunshine (after doing some gardening) i decided on impulse to make a short audio recording (on my mobile phone) of the myriad sounds of the birds and their twittering birdsong in the garden together with the sounds from the woods just over the fence...click the play button to listen [3m 30s, mp3 485k][audio mp3="http://www.jazzgreen.com/journal/swfs/birdsong-garden-lq.mp3"]…p.s. i have some of my work in a new art exhibition, 'on the map'…On the Map: Historic Maps & Contemporary Map Art10 March - 17 June 2012Hastings Museum and Art GalleryJohns Place, Bohemia Road, Hastings, TN34 1ET...

one for the birds

i was quietly sitting in the garden one sunny afternoon and very soon spied the covert movements of a wood pigeon making a nest. this particular garden bird rustled in the top of the spindly bamboo with a furious flapping of wings, with a slightly ungainly, shuffling side-step manoeuvre along a very slim-looking branch, finally hopping into the dense greenery of bamboo. after a short while the wood pigeon would reappear again, waddle its way back along the skinny branch to fly off again. it would then return a minute or so later with a long strand of grass or a thin twig clasped in its beak and once again make the awkward, gawky sideways shuffle back towards the location of the nest.a wood pigeon building a nest in the garden, seemingly unruffled when i went inside to get the camera, prepared to wait a moment for the close-up...there is another wood pigeon nesting high up in another tree, hidden among some rambling honeysuckle; she has been sitting on her eggs for four weeks or more. meanwhile, the grumplesome hen of henley house's own nesting quarters, for all the appearance of wanting to brood herself, has steadfastly refused to lay a single egg since late april... am i to be the brooding, quarrelsome hen or the hard-working wood pigeon?anyone with a garden will have been busy these last few weeks. i proudly potted up ten small courgette plants grown from seed (that's zucchini to any passing americans) in early may, five black and five yellow (plain green is just so last year) and placed them outside, only for them to be caught by the first morning frost in what seemed like months - all my green-fingered work instantly undone. one yellow courgette plant has since survived and three of the black courgette plants also appear to be slowly springing back to life from their shrivelled stems... so, ne'er cast a clout 'til may be out (or whatever; i'll get my coat...)now, we hope for more customary british weather to quench the arid earth, after what has been the driest (and probably the warmest) april on record. the months of april and may passing by without a good old-fashioned drenching undoubtedly signals that august will once again be characterised by many days of rain......dear reader, it seems like it has been a while since i last wrote, due to a certain ambivalence about the relentless task of blogging (too much of the introspective grouch)... much has happened which is relevant to the life of this contemporary artist, but there is no need to share it here... i had cause to think back five years, to how i assumed that writing a blog might invite some exchange and subsequently change... i realise now that the creative exchanges that i most draw upon tend to come from the small, real world that i actually inhabit... art is art, and everything else is everything else...