theoldmortuary has been a blog for about five years. It has evolved into an almost daily event. Pondering on the things that are inspired by my daily life. Often mundane, sometimes repetitive I swerve from hyperlocal activity to big and small thoughts without blinking an eye. I am an artist and writer. My hometown is Plymouth in South West England, part of me will always be connected to London and another part loves to travel.
Today was Vernissage Day at Butchers Hall in Tavistock. It was a triumph of creativity over Covid – 19. The excited buzz of a well attended Private View with vividly dressed artists and guests it was not. No canapés, no music, no performance poetry, however in its own quiet, socially distanced way it was a celebration of hard work and achievement. What impressed me was the texture of the experience.
The Mayor of Tavistock opened the exhibition with words that by now, in 2020, we are all too familiar with, unusual, difficult, unpredictable. She noted that many of the 70+artists were experimenting with different styles because of the experiences and challenges of 2020. For this blog I thought I might just choose a few uncredited images to illustrate some of the textures and colours that I experienced today. A more formal blog of the exhibition can happen after it has opened to the public.
In sharp October sunshine even the building got into the texture category.
Butchers Hall – It’s Complicated.
Exhibition of Drawn to the Valley Artists. Wednesday 28th October – Sunday 2nd November 9-30-5-00 except Sunday when it closes at 2, Butchers Hall, Tavistock.
In Pandemic Pondering #265 I mentioned that dog walks often inspire blogs.
China Fleet Club
The afternoon walk at the China Fleet Club was planned just for dogs, no real blogging interest. Great for sniffing out squirrels and getting very muddy but beyond good company and nattering it was just an hour or so of soaking up nature. The morning walk was different, there is always something to think about . It was our regular walk around Sutton Harbour but today we discovered it is a Heritage Trail. The link below takes you to the official website.
We always start and finish the Sutton Heritage Trail at a different location to the one suggested on this website.
Despite walking this route numerous times we have never discovered the descriptively named Marrowbone Slip. That is a pretty specific piece of architecture. The point of mentioning this walk again in a blog is the lovely pictures we got of old chopped off wooden piles this morning.
Not perhaps everyone’s cup of tea but they were looking very fine this morning. It also gives me the chance to share my favourite picture of piles.
Piles at Statton Island NY
Just be grateful I am no longer creating medical imaging, that could have been a whole different picture!
Galleries and Exhibitions have had to rethink the traditional Private View Party that usually heralds the start of a new exhibition. Many, like my own group have returned to an older tradition of Vernissage, or Varnishing Day when a much smaller group of people can be invited to see a preview of the Exhibition within controlled time periods. Traditionally the day when final touches or indeed varnishing can take place.
Slightly tongue- in-cheek I’ve found a French term for handing-in day , the day when work is handed in prior to the exhibition being curated.
Emballage à Bulles Day
Or less exotically Bubblewrap Day. Anyone who has ever worked on the Take In desk of a mass participation exhibition will know the nightmare of an ever increasing quantity of bubble wrap being wrestled by arty types as they deliver their precious creations to the hand-in desk.
Yesterday was a catalogue and framing day at home , ready for my attendance at Emballage à Bulles Day in Tavistock, later today.
Against the odds my art group have arranged an Autumn Exhibition that has not been cancelled due to Covid-19 restrictions. All contributing artists are probably having a frantic last minute organise of their work before hand in tomorrow.
Framing
I’ve got a total of 12 pieces going to the exhibition 10 of which are easily affordable.
Devon Great Consul
The picture above is the biggest piece 92 cms square and £400. It is an abstract image taken from a series of photographs I took at an Industrial Heritage site near Gunnislake in Cornwall. Puddles of water coloured with minerals settled into man made imprints left by mineral mining in the early 20th Century
All 12 pieces ready to go
The exhibition runs from Wednesday 28th October until Sunday 1st November 9:30- 5:00 except Sunday when it closes at 2:00. It is being held at The Butchers Hall, Tavistock and social distancing and all Covid-19 precautions are being observed.
Blue Pollen
Blue Pollen 40cms square £90 Acrylic and Resin.
Emballage à Bulles, it could become a regular ‘thing’
There is a significance to the number of this blog. Come inside and I will explain.
In 100 blogs time I will have been pondering the pandemic for roughly a year. I say roughly because some days there was more than one blog and sometimes a subject took a few days to complete so the same number was used until I was done.
At the time of Pandemic Pondering #1, I had no idea of what was ahead of me, or indeed the rest of the world. #1 was ahead of the government imposed Lockdown in Britain because I was displaying symptoms of a virus and decided to self isolate. I had been unwell for much of March but believed it just to be a regular virus gifted by a toddler. As we have learned more about Covid 19 I do wonder if @theoldmortuary had actually grabbed ourselves an early version.
At the time I was practicing daily blogging, ready for a course with The Gentle Author.
Here I am just over 2/3 of the way through a year still waiting to attend the course and the Pandemic still giving me plenty to ponder about.
Some days write themselves and others need a little more effort to extrude. Dog walks are a great source of blogging material, beyond that the subjects or topics usually just reveal themselves during normal daily life, sometimes we seek things out because they might make a good blog. Meanwhile normal daily life goes on @theoldmortuary, 90% of it too humdrum for blogging.
I was always the sort of child that dreamed about keeping a daily diary. I never achieved it because I had always bored myself within a week. The same thing happened at various times in my life both with diaries and scrapbooks. I started blogging nearly three years ago because I wanted to regain my story telling skills; a career in the NHS prizes factual writing over whimsy. I also like to take photographs, sometimes they are quite random but most can be made useful in some way. In truth, blogging actually started when someone made a cutting and thoughtless remark to me about both writing and photography. Seething, I began blogging and the title could easily have been ‘ F**k You’
It has become a daily habit or ritual, blogging forces me to find something interesting in every day. Some days it has enabled me to concentrate on the positive when sadness and dismay were the actual truth of our lived experience. I am constantly learning and I should probably delete much of the last three years blogs on the grounds of badly written nonsense. Ponderings seem protected and will be excused any future cull because in my mind their mission statement to continue through the experience of this Pandemic makes them many pieces of a whole project.
I strongly suspect I will still be at this pondering malarkey in another 100 days, when @theoldmortuary hits 1 year of pondering. Thankyou for reading. Please close the doors on your way out.
This is the eye of a woman with a lot of responsibility on her Woolly head . Currently providing the Wow factor in the Mammoth Gallery at the Box. She is also a big part of the branding of merchandise for the museum.
Yesterday I spent my working time in the Mammoth Gallery . Mammoth certainly brings great happiness to the visitors of The Box. She is also the figurehead of the Natural History Gallery. The gallery has an abundance of specimens and information that is related to Plymouth and the surrounding area. There is so much to read, engage with and wonder at, that I’m sure one visit will not be enough for most people. It is not the purpose of these Box related blogs to describe in detail everything in the galleries but I can’t not tell you about the specimen jars which are displayed in something I think of as ‘Apothecary Chic’
Here they are reflected in some of the Audio Visual presentations.
Back to Mammoth. She has a strong presence in the gift shop.
Like many toys of this sort, these mammoths were made in China. Much as it grieves me to say this we bought one for our granddaughter and now it is further increasing its, already mammoth, air miles by flying to her in Hong Kong in time for her birthday later in the month.
The gift shop is always a vital part of any museum or art gallery. The Box shop has a range of products not available elsewhere in the city. It is a shame that Pandemic restrictions limit the footfall currently, I would shop there regularly for unusual gifts
Todays blog was all planned but then scuppered by Champagne in a shed. Fairly lame excuse but truthful. This morning’s dog walk was scenic without a trace of a hangover. Normal service will resume later.
A couple of days ago a Local History group on Facebook published some photographs of a mural that was discovered under layers of wallpaper in a Union Street bar. If you have any interest in Plymouth history this is a great page to follow.
Local History is one of the great strengths of Facebook. Local History Facebook pages are hubs of knowledge that become magnets for new information or insights into a local area. They are the modern version of the Local History shelf at Libraries.
I already had some photographs from the mural , taken during one of Plymouths Art Weekender Festivals. Gloria Dixon who is the administrator of the Facebook page Old Plymouth Society has a much better range of images.
She has written a very good account of the mural on the Old Plymouth Society FB Page, I urge you to visit the page.
The artist, who created the mural, Vincent Bennett took the well- worn path, familiar to many creative Plymothians and moved to London at the age of 20, where he not only painted commercially, but also boxed, to earn a living. It was the boxing that caused him to return to Plymouth just two years later. A head injury forced him to return to his home city in 1932 and he added teaching and drumming to his portfolio of money earning skills. Eighteen years later he painted the mural at what was then called the Sydenham Arms.
The story of Vincent Bennett seems so much more tangible and intriguing than the Plymouth to London story of Joshua Reynolds, another Plymouth man, nearly 200 years earlier. For me it is not only that much of the city he occupied still exists but that his subject matter is much closer to my own life experiences.
A drink in the Clipper, as the Sydenham Arms became, was always an experience, even if I was never as glamourous as the woman in the red dress. My grandfather, a sailor, far from his Essex home would almost certainly have known The Sydenham Arms and enjoyed all that Union Street had to offer.
The mural can be seen in its original location 63, Union Street, Plymouth. Currently the property is a Community Cafe.
The weather has been a little wetter this week than at any time during Ponderings. It means that daily dog walks require a little more planning, or in fact less, if the serendipity of a dry spell is to be utilised . Two dogs with a good proportion of poodle in them equates to eight little paws that act as sponges in wet and muddy conditions. Any walk is best finished with a bit of pavement walking to stamp off the worst of the weather before entering the house. Our walk yesterday produced these three lovely pictures of autumn leaves all within a few yards of each other.
I took these three pictures and then promptly forgot about looking for the beauty that was laying at my feet. I realised that I have already missed the glossy perfection that is conkers emerging from their velvety beds within spiky shells. Also cobnuts and hazelnuts have been and gone. Just a little research in the picture archive gave me this painting of cobnuts, figs and blackberries from two years ago.
I need to start paying a bit more attention to things before the colours of autumn are lost for another year.
You would be forgiven for thinking that my visit to The Garden House was all about hot reds and tangy yellow colours but there were also some subtle shades that were equally compelling.
These beautiful lichens were hiding in a damp outdoor stairwell. The colours are a bit similar to one of my ‘Aloneliness’ sketches.
Part of the reason for seeking some less vivid colours at The Garden House was to find some subtle colour pairings that appear in nature to incorporate into my current project.
The silver birches provide some lovely colour combinations that I’ve not yet used in watercolour sketch notes. They may make for a more gently forlorn image.
Just for completeness I’m including the steps to the original damp turret. All the colours here are softer, bathed in sunlight that has bounced off a few walls before landing on these lower steps.
These more subtle colours will be explored very soon in watercolour. I’m still working on my early sketches and really very unsure exactly where these androgynous characters and their colour fields are going. I wonder if I might call them Pandemic Ponderings…
Monday finds me pondering a word . Inspired by one of those internet vocabulary tests. Luckily I can illustrate my feelings on the word with some glorious Dahlias from The Garden House.
The word is loathe. Most dictionaries suggest that it is in many ways a stronger feeling than hate.
Loathe means to hate or detest something. Loathe is much stronger than hate. It implies deep-seated, simmering hatred. … If you loathe someone or something, you hate them very much.
I’ve talked it over with friends this weekend and opinion is divided. Full disclosure means that I must tell you that we discussed the word using various humans we knew in common to illustrate our thoughts. Thankfully glorious Dahlias help me to illustrate my opinion in a far kinder way.
I’ve always considered loathing to be a more nuanced dislike than hate. Hate can happen in an instant but loathing takes time and consideration. My problem with ranking loathing over hatred is that I think they can have equal value strength wise. They can also be used in the same sentence correctly , be of equal value and illustrate feelings beautifully. This is where the dahlias have their moment.
I hate what snails do to dahlias, I loathe them for ruining such beautiful blooms.
I’m not bitter about snails constantly, or their sluggy friends. I do have perspective, but if they put a slimy foot anywhere near my dahlias, or a mouth near my ‘ ray floret’ (petals) then loathing will simmer.
I’m done. Have a marvelous Monday.
P.S Just as I published this blog Facebook reminded me exactly why I feel snails are loathsome. In 2019 @theoldmortuary had a glorious year, our first, of cultivating Dahlias. 2020, a landmark year in so many ways produced dahlias that had been pre nibbled before they even bloomed, already identified as snacks they attracted snails from all over the place to feast and party on our blooms.