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
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 was the perfect Spring Day so we set off to a perfect beach for a long meandering dog walk. The beach and surrounding estate were sold over winter.
Sold for an undisclosed sum. The asking price was £30 million
It is alleged that the previous owner had wanted to turn the area into a millionaires play ground. If that is true,that would have been rather sad. Bantham is a spectacular place enjoyed inhabited and visited by regular humans since the Bronze Age.
What makes you laugh?
Now it has to be said that I laugh at most normal things, but the idea of a natural paradise being turned into an unnatural paradise also seems to be so laughable that I can quite see why local people protested with enough vigor to stop such a scheme. I hope the new owners don’t give them cause to protest again. For now all seems peaceful. We paid our £5 parking fee, had the beach mostly to ourselves and the dogs made themselves giddy and exhausted with play and paddling.
I took some deliberately bad photographs to reprocess into Hybrid images and was once again surprised and puzzled by my results. Just two of my chosen images worked. Jenkins Boathouse turned out pleasingly vibrant.
Whatever blog was going to flow today has been bounced by a fellow artist sending me this page from a local newspaper. Not exactly headline stuff but page 5 in a local newspaper is still page 5 in old media. For some reason the free newspaper rarely makes it through my letterbox. There was every chance I would miss my moment as yesterday’s news.
In other news we spent a pleasant hour crafting with our two year old grandaughter in the local museum and art gallery.
I did all the right things assembling materials and sharpening pencils but was not allowed near any of her creative space and could only use the glue stick under her supervision and tear paper to make a picture. Which she needed to finesse before it was done.
Thank goodness for Hybrid Printmaking, which allowed me to sail abstractly into the sunset.
I believe my confidence levels are at about the right place. But I would say that wouldn’t I?
Like many people I am a little in awe of hugely confident people but I am wise enough to know that massive confidence in others is built on foundations that are often less than desirable or wealth and status.
I am a lover of moderate confidence x compassion and interest in alternate ways of doing things. With a specific ratio of 35:65
35 being confidence and 65 being all the other elements of thinking, including doubt.
Clearly I sit comfortably on this ratio in my own opinion. It doesn’t mean a 65% lack of confidence. More like 65% opportunity to learn new things, see a different point of view or be flexible.
These images are 35% of my creative output of the last 2 months. The other 65% will never see the light of day but that 65% made these what they are. Less is more in confidence and creativity.
Some days are just so full of lovely conversations that it takes a while to sort them and file them appropriately in my memory bank while extracting the nuggets of gold to be used immediately.
One such nugget, is that my evolving photographic technique is called Hybrid Printmaking. Using printmaking knowlege combined with digital techniques ,my analogue skills just happen to be medical imaging, to create unique artworks.
Following on from that conversation was an explanation, see below, which I possibly cannot recreate as succinctly as it was explained to me.
“When an analogue skill becomes redundant it can become an enlightenment in the digital world”
Wow!
Less wow was my choice of clothes yesterday. Back buttoned dungarees on a day when I knew I would be using public toilets for a large part of the day.
theoldmortuary.design 