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...
hands that do dishes
another papier mache vessel, 2011
a small object of survival..
upturned, after the storm...
washed up, weathered and worn...
art or craft, handled with care...
one lonely relic, rescued from the past......view more papier mache wabi sabi bowls here..
nature studies
i went back to the local wildlife fen last week and completed these two quick nature studies plein air... as perceived/recorded, limited by time, size and materials... a good artist friend had given me a small sketch pad of watercolour paper; it seemed churlish not to use it... these two studies are in watercolour and watercolour pencil...
i thought it would be interesting to photograph the studies in situ, but in order to get both the drawing/painting and the 'real' landscape in the frame, the wide angle lens made the subject appear much further away than my own perception of it.. it seemed interesting too, in a phenomenological sense, to offer with one image, both the before and after, the past (as i first saw it), the present (as it appears now) and the future (in the objectiveness of such a material study)... and the apparent act of free will or intention in mark-making and gesture and yet controlled by the circumstances in which they are derived...
i guess that if i really pushed myself i could do more studies like this and perhaps get better at them, but this was not the day to pursue that, as it turned out...