The Avon River but not as we know it. The Avon River at Bantham is a regular swimming spot for us on the coast. But by accident, yesterday evening we got much closer to its source near Ryders Hill on the high South Moor of Dartmoor. Hugely swelled by the last two days of torrential rain it was a noisy, splashy , vivid river. Quite unlike our usual, gentle ideas of the Avon.
Boathouse at the mouth of the River AvonBurgh Island at the mouth of the River Avon
Normally when we have been paddling about in the River Avon the dogs smell salty with the fragrances of seaweed and rock pools. Yesterday there was no paddling in the river and they smelled of bog.
Our morning’s domestic admin and dog walk were done in terrible rainy conditions. Enlivened only by a trip to Jacka Bakery where we picked up Cardamom Buns and a bedraggled friend, he was as anxious as us to hide in a coffee shop and play parking space jeopardy. A game where you assess the risk of Parking Wardens patrolling the timed free spaces and catching you stretching two hours out of one.
The wet morning turned into a wetter afternoon so we turned the afternoon into a time warp. We are both former rowers and had somehow managed to miss the Oxford and Cambridge Boat race last week. Not only that we had both managed to avoid the race results. So two hours were happily spent watching a sports programme that was 6 days old from start to finish, interviews, statistics and of course the endeavour of rowers whose pain, win or lose, we understood.
Madness how easy it was to fill a rainy day in interesting, to us, ways.
The evening dog walk was as wet and greige as the morning. Not a scintilla of colour anywhere. The picture below has every speck of colour available . Mallard Ducks on the sea. When I was growing up a bad day of rainy weather was described as,
“A good day for ducks”
I’m not sure if even the ducks were having a ball yesterday.
Although a friend is in Egypt currently and things were not a lot better for her.
For many, Easter is a four day weekend. Thursday evening seems just a little more relaxed than normal in anticipation. But two days of great weather have given way to a deluge. Luckily I caught sight of a group of paddleboarders at high tide and sunset. When the weather was being kinder
I took one of my ‘bad’ photographs and, inspired by my puddle photograph of yesterday. I created an image with similar bold colours but enhanced the softness of colour reflected in water.
I decided to slightly change the location and relative size of the paddleboarders. I will tinker with them some more over the next few days.
I suspect that this will be my image of Easter 2025 as I tweak it into submission, in both senses of the word, ready for an exhibition in May.
As an aside to all this, my workspace is finally finished. It has taken us 6 months to find exactly the second hand furniture we needed to store regular life and art materials. We never intended bright pink to be an accent colour but an old sari is the perfect cover up for works in progress on the table, and my lovely old typewriter is just the perfect shade of beige.
Even as I write the words ‘perfect shade of beige’ I realise that this tidy work space is another piece of great procrastination. I need to set to and get on with the work for the Turner Exhibition at the end of May. But while it was in a tidy pristine state yesterday I sat and filled in the application form on line. When I was done, not a thing was out of place.
Describe a decision you made in the past that helped you learn or grow.
Sometimes the prompts from my blog hosts are interesting and can feed into an interesting ponder. Most of the time they are just of no interest to me, so are swiftly scrolled past. Occasionally one like this holds no interest but there is a glimmer of interest in the irritation I feel at the absurdity of the question.
Surely the result of every decision made,big or small, good or bad creates learning and growth. This is why we only tend to stub our baby toes once in a given location.
I took this picture yesterday not for the graffiti particularly but because of the softness of the vivid colours in the puddle.
Puddle pictures are one of my favourite things when they are beautiful. It is just that muddy/dirty puddles are the norm.
I wanted to get this vibrancy into one of my seascapes for the upcoming Turner exhibition. This puddle set me thinking, the results of that thinking might appear any time soon. Or perhaps they won’t.
What place in the world do you never want to visit? Why?
When this question popped up on my blog host site overnight, I was a little perplexed. There must be millions of places in the world that I wouldn’t want to visit but surely I would have to visit them or have very solid research first to realise that. Life is too short for such ponderings. I will never visit all the places in the world that I want to visit or revisit. I suspect this particular question is one of my ‘ Great imponderables’
Much better on a rainy day to think of somewhere in the world I would like to be. Sitting in the shade on a very warm day eating figs fresh from the tree. Again there must be millions of places around the world where I could achieve this. Hunting for the positive is so much more enriching than dwelling on the negative.
An article in Saturday’s Guardian gave me a great name for my Hybrid photographs + watercolours. My images do not set out to fool anyone , they are just part of my creative process. But this article gave me a rather fabulous name.
Some will become Hybrid Printmaking, but meddled or indeed meddling suits my style rather well.
I deliberately meddled with a picture of Tinside Lido because I was late to the party and my plan to picture it in its winter grubbiness was foiled by it being cleaned earlier in the week. It is also still clad in the bric a brac of builders who are rebuilding and refurbishing the Art Deco Lido. My before shot is meddled with. The after image will be whatever it will be once the builders move out.
Meddling, not in a bad way and certainly not to fool anyone.
Not exactly four seasons in one day but almost. A very chilly start in Plymouth. Followed by a couple of hours of basking below The Hoe, in bright sunlight with too much caffeine, the right amount of nattering and laughter. Watching boats near the Lido.
Before returning to our yard to work off the caffeine in a yard that has declared Spring very much here with buds and blooms and sharp shadows.
Before rain chased us indoors. Then off to the Tennis Club to enjoy the views and rehearsals for Sri Lankan New Year. Coats were definately needed. But worse was to come…
Woolly hats were needed for the evening dog walk. April. What are you doing to us
This may not be the kindest way to discuss my maternal grandmother, but pondering does not always go the way of acceptability or indeed kindness. On a positive note I cleared the algae off this photo before using it.
Rocks at Bigbury
For good pondering I also need to flip and tweak.
I have outlived my own mother for four years and in the last year we have bought a high magnification illuminated make-up mirror.
As I peered into the mirror one mornng I looked close up at my soft but craggy cheeks. Skipped a generation and thought how alike my face was to my Nana’s. This is no bad thing, I adored my grandmother and kissing her softly wrinkled cheek was always a pleasure. Her cheeks were velvety and yielding, and smelled of glamour. She ran two businesses,smoked elegantly and constantly and always looked like Lucille Ball.
Men couldn’t help themselves and neither could she. In her seventies she moved to Melbourne in Australia. Pastures new and different men to captivate. Welsh Valleys , the flatlands of Essex and finally an Australian city. All changes made when her allure required her to move on.
My cheeks have not lived the life of my Nana’s. My mother very much disapproved of her ‘antics’. I was directed, encouraged and obediently followed a different path.
But a small child knows nothing of such adult stuff . Kissing a soft cheek that smells faintly of smoke, good cosmetics and a gin and tonic was a safe and exotic harbour for me.
I was aghast when my own wrinkles were laid bare by the new mirror but also charmed that in some small way my grandmother had returned to me.
My mum and her mum ( in the doorway of her pub) and unknown woman.
Google is a funny old thing. The pub my grandparents ran is long gone and has changed from the robust name of the Red Cow to the rather generically cute Daisy Cottage.
Google found an old Christmas card sent by the publicans.
12 Days of Sunshine. Spring has not been this good since the first Covid lockdown of 2020. A lot of water has flowed since those days of uncertainty and impending sadness. If I could pick one good thing, one great thing actually, of the whole Covid debacle. It would be the formation of ‘Bobbers’ our cold water, sea swimming clan of interconnected humans. Not a week passes without a chilly dip in Firestone Bay.
The tide and the currents were not our friends yesterday, but the Royal Navy ship HMS Sutherland, the Navy’s fastest ship, cut through our bay in a way that we could not.
WIP H.M.S Surherland
The thing that keeps us safe from peril in this sea is the one thing that I have yet to add to these two pictures. And yet it is the marker of achievement for a ‘good’ bob.
Getting to the first buoy. One of three that string the boundary of our swimming zone. We do our thing on the coastal side of the buoys and the Navy, and all other nautical traffic, stay on the island side of the buoys.
The buoy needs painting in a way that it will be obvious in these two pictures. A tiny project for today. But for now I just stuck the two buoyless pictures together. It works for me
Yesterday I perfected the art of painting a bad watercolour, a skill that goes alongside taking a bad photograph for my hybrid print/image making project.
After I have digitally processed my 3 poor photographs and stuck them together I remove any ugly or unnecessary marks and features. Then I paint a water colour, badly, to add the texture back into the finished images. And Voila!
theoldmortuary.design 