A blustery weekend and some cancelled plans gave me some more time to catch up with my art course homework. This was a colour note for a blustery walk on Sunday. Storm Franklin was an altogether more blustery affair than Eunice. Franklin had blustered into the local Primary school and set off the burglar alarm. Crashing waves and the cries of Oyster catchers with a side serving of persistent electronic noise was not quite the coastal idyll I was planning to record and paint, but it is the combination I was gifted. The mellow dark notes were provided by a deeply, fruity, cup of black coffee. Black coffee is my drink of choice, now, for coastal walks, after two separate incidents of having the frothy top of a flat white splattered onto my face. I’m not a fan of drinking good coffee through a plastic lid. Thus the weekend map of my walking experience has two man made colour memories and four natural ones all combined to suggest the booming of a storm, the sound of Oyster Catchers and the irritating pulse of a triggered alarm system all interacting with a swirling seascape. This image just represents a tiny moment of time, all senses disturbed by powerful gusts of wind.
Another day, another storm and a revelation. Living on a small peninsular is a unique experience and one that I am not always able to express with words or pictures. Painting the Screaming Eunice experience made me realise that there is a third way.
Screaming Eunice was the big ticket event of the extended weekend.
Screaming Eunice
Franklin arrived on Sunday. No show stopping headlines and ‘just’ an amber warning. He kicked the already dispossessed dustbins further down the street in the same way that a tin can might be kicked by revellers leaving the Royal William Yard. He dumped loads of rain on us and blew it up inside waterproof clothing by wickedly changing direction.
Eunice was here for a day and gone a trail of celebrity damage left overnight . Franklin is hanging around, booming down chimneys just to let us know he is still here, wailing over the rooftops looking for mischief. Making solid mature trees jig around like children. He sets off car alarms and leaves them pulsing into every aspect of a quiet afternoon. Franklin is not a nice storm.
Accidentally, while creating a colour memory, colour wheel, I created an image of an imaginary beast which very much conformed to my imaginings of Storm Eunice as she hit land in Plymouth. She didn’t stay in Plymouth long and did less physical harm locally, than she did further in land. I call her Screaming Eunice because of the high pitched wailing and booming that accompanied her arrival from the Atlantic, alongside the record breaking gusts of wind and physical damage.
Screaming Eunice
Unknown to us Screaming Eunice brought something else with her. We saw the the effect but didn’t know the reason until later. The dogs were mostly unpeterbed by their initial walk in Eunice. After the walk I settled down to paint my visual record of the morning walk. Hugo and Lola were snuggled in the studio dozing their way through Eunice at her worst. Without warning Lola woke up and was inconsolable, nothing would settle her. Forty minutes later she could only be calm when snuggled on a human. Unknown to us Eunice brought a huge amount of strange and wonderful smells. Scent is Lolas absolute favourite thing in the world. Eunice however brought so much unusual perfume, poor little Lola was overwhelmed . We only realised when her Stylist put up a message on Facebook.
So, stranger things have happened than me naming a storm, Screaming Eunice and then painting her. It turns out that Screaming Eunice also has body odour issues. Who knew?
Well Eunice was quite the storm yesterday. Living on a historically fortified peninsular of rock that juts into Plymouth Sound during the worst storm for more than thirty years was always going to be interesting. Made even more so by needing to create a colour mind map of my daily walk using all my senses. Eunice hit land further down the coast at Sennen and barrelled her way across the country via the Bristol Channel. So we were not exactly in the eye of the storm, that said it was a weather event when not doing anything too adventuresome was advisable.A morning dog walk introduced me to Eunice and she was not happy
Eunice screamed between the elegant Georgian houses, screams of distress and melancholy. She boomed against fortifications built by Henry VIII and dumped water on concrete defences built for the many wars and skirmishes that Britain has been involved in. Eunice was not a happy woman. By the time we reached our favourite coffee shop she had taken to flinging dustbins into the air and overwhelming the small boats resting in protected harbours.
All this on a day that I was being ‘aware’ of my walk with all my senses so I could create a colour map of the experience. Certainly not in any sense topographically accurate but definitely synesthesically so.There are also two actual cultural references. I didnt hear bright red on the walk yesterday but I knew we were under a red warning with a strict advisory not to venture too far. It would have suited me far better artistically and synesthesically if the warning had stayed at amber.The synesthesia of a warm coffee shop was altogether a huge deliciously cacophonic callaloo of colours and sensations, as was the whole day, but I chose to depict it with the logo and tranquil white. A place of sanctuary in a world of sliding, feral, dustbins.
So welcome to my sketch of Screaming Eunice. Done quickly while she screamed in my ears. Topographically inaccurately drawn, it is a distillation of a moment in time and location. Sound, sensations, colours, geography and great coffee all in one picture.
The big P.S to all this storm chat.
I am very aware of the cultural appropriation in this blog. I work at a museum, The Box, and have spent months in the company of the Songlines Exhibition. A masterpiece ( mostly mistresspieces) of Indigenous, Australian peoples art. The image I created looks like a rip off, it isn’t deliberately so.
The word Callaloo- a word gleaned from a Trinidadian work friend, she used it to describe the mixed up chaos of our work environment ( operating theatres) after a heavy night at the office. It is a word I use often in my head when synesthesia and real life collide.
A Callaloo is a Trinidadian vegetable stew. It is also used by Trinidadians to describe the rich cultural life of their island created by the historic blending of people of many different heritages. The word is also used, by Trinidadians to describe a muddle or mixture. Something my head is all too familiar with.
It was a quick sketch but completed with mindful, meditative colour mixing and intuitive painting. As it happens it is also predictive. The weather forecast for tomorrow is predicted to be very stormy. No swimming or seal spotting for us. Storm Eunice is about to batter the southwest coast. This morning, though, all is bright and beautiful.
My apologies for the blogs being more than usually peppered with art stuff. I am in the midst of an on-line art course called Finding Your Colour Voice. I am trying to complete the course initially in a little over the ten working days and two weekends. My plan is to do each day’s tutorial and weekend projects as soon as I can after they drop onto the website. After that I have another 4 months when the content is available to me to study more at depth. Precious Pondering time is mostly colour related at the moment.
My project yesterday was to create colour charts from a huge variety of sources. I made a start by producing 4 colour charts of places from memory. I’m going to share two of them as they are my short term memory efforts. Unsurprisingly they are of places close to home and easily visited to check out how accurate my memory is. I also have recent photographs to share my thoughts. On reviewing yesterday’s work, I am immediately struck that with these two I have very specifically created a winter colour palate. The other two places I completed are clearly less season specific, I haven’t visited either of them since the pandemic started.
I am particularly pleased with the Cornish colours, I wanted to show the softness of the county. Something that is less obvious in the brashness of summer. Something that doesn’t show well in the photograph is the greigeness that cloaks the county frequently.
Stonehouse is altogether ‘harder’ despite being geographically not far away. It does however share the greige and that colour,or indeed sensation is much better depicted on the Stonehouse colour chart.
Immersion technique is vital in both sea swimming and working through the exercises set by Tansy on the course.
I am pretty much on target with life, but the colour course not so much. A daily lesson is uploaded and there are weekend projects.
Here we are on Tuesday already and the paint is only just drying on Fridays tasks. I’m using watercolour which dries in seconds so I am substantially behind.
So, for me, Tuesday is the new Saturday. Tomorrow is of course Wednesday, a day I have high hopes of catching up. I have one of those 8-8 time slots for a booked gas boiler service. 12 hours in which to wait for an engineer to arrive when in theory I can whip out my paint brushes and fill my time with colour.
In truth I have four months to get all the colour course tasks completed. This is not good news for a recidivist procrastinator.
The moon has always inspired humanity, acting as a ‘cultural mirror’ to society, reflecting the ideas and beliefs of all people around the world. Over the centuries, the moon has been interpreted as a god and as a planet. It has been used as a timekeeper, calendar and been a source of light to aid nighttime navigation. Throughout history the moon has inspired artists, poets, scientists, writers and musicians the world over. The ethereal blue light cast by a full moon, the delicate crescent following the setting sun, or the mysterious dark side of the moon has evoked passion and exploration. Different cultures around the world have their own historical, cultural, scientific and religious relationships to the moon. And yet somehow, despite these differences, the moon connects us all.
Museum of the Moon allows us to observe and contemplate cultural similarities and differences around the world, and consider the latest moon science. Depending on where the artwork is presented, its meaning and interpretation will shift. Read more in Research. Through local research at each location of the artwork, new stories and meanings will be collected and compared from one presentation to the next.
#MuseumofTheMoon
My complicated image at the top of this blog was a happy accident. Whilst standing in the queue for coffee I found one of those mirror trolleys that tour guides use to point out architectural features in the ceiling to avoid their visitors fainting due to overstretching their necks.
What better way to view a ‘cultural mirror’ than through an actual mirror. There was a very stern message not to move the trolleys.They were in a dark corner. So I just contorted myself a bit and got the best shot I could without breaking any rules.
An indoor moon and Mediaeval Cathedral looking like the best roller coaster in the world.
Not a muddy puddle, yet. Tasked by my on-line art course to take 3-4 hours creating a medatitive painting. Using only red, yellow and blue watercolour with colour mixing and just painting shapes. With the washing machine and dishwasher taking the load I set up the radio. Set to talk shows so my synesthesia was shut out of the process. My synesthesia bends and blends music and colours together and often informs my art, but not today. Watercolours are tricksy things and quickly turn to mud even when you least expect it. Who knew 3 hours could pass so fast.
Then just a minute on digital manipulation and something lively appeared.
Time to return to to the domestic machines and do some meditative domestic. No amount of digital tweaking makes that any more thrilling.
I’m a bit over commited for this next couple of weeks. I’ve enrolled on an on line colour course and yet I have given myself no protected time in which to do it. Life spluttered along today with two things cancelled one thing added and a regular commitment re instated. Yet I did find time to do a colour mixing experiment and watch a video tutorial. The colour mixing turned out not to be as easy as I had first thought!
But in a positive way.
Yesterday I cracked on with both the exercise and some homework. Tomorrow I just need to catch up on the actual project for today and then being ahead with the homework should have me almost up to date by Friday. Three hours of meditative painting for me tomorrow.
In Wordle news, there was a shock in store today! 5 letter words with American spelling have made themselves a part of the game. I did not see that coming. Something else to think about with this new obsession. Should have realised of course as it is an American game.
theoldmortuary.design 