Saturday was not a day for swimming, so great were the winds and the rain that it was not a day for beach huts either. Which is why I managed to get this shot of beach huts uncluttered by the human form.
All started well enough.
But the weather was just not going to permit safe sea swimming so dog walking on the South West Coastal path was our substitute activity. We explored the area around Swanpool in Falmouth and ate picnics in the car while the weather swirled around us. The photography owes a lot to filters and this delightful seaweed which has been ripped from the sea floor by the storm.The seaweed provides the colour which is picked up in some of the shots.
I used the silky water filter and saturation filters to put some colour into a very grey day. I also accidentally created this double exposure which has quite a retro feel.
So off we go into a Sunday Celebration of the Silky Water feature as applied to a raging sea.
The good news is that the sea is less raging today so swimming is back on the Sunday agenda.
Things are warming up on the creative side of @theoldmortuary . This cunning device is squeezing the air out of greetings cards that I packed yesterday , ready for the Spring Exhibition of Drawn to the Valley. Who could have guessed that a fan annual from the seventies would create the perfect size to support a heavy weight to exclude air in the wrapping envelope. In the interest of honesty and with respect to Mr David Essex this annual has not been under my pillow for ever. That would just be very strange.
An old friend sends me gems like this from time to time. I could also have used a David Cassidy Annual from the same era and source but yesterday I chose David Essex to spread the load.
Added to my current domestic admin, of which there is lots, I now have Exhibition Admin, which is much more pleasurable.
#mayinthevalley
The closing date for the exhibition has passed and now myself and the rest of the organising team have the pleasure of sifting through the entries. Some of which are featured on the #mayinthevalley Instagram posts above from the artists_of_the_tamar_valley Instagram page.
All this activity and business is an exact replica of the work we did last year only to have to cancel the exhibition at two weeks notice.
This years exhibition will be unimaginably different . 50 artists who have lived through a pandemic. 50 diverse experiences of love, loss, isolation and change. There is an amazing energy exuding from the works we are unwrapping ( currently in the digital sense )
The Spring Exhibition is always about new beginnings but the Spring Exhibition of 2021 is promising to be an altogether more zingy new beginning than usual. On a more self interested level I still haven’t got the gold leaf on my little pictures or even started the large one. It is a theoretical picture right now.
New beginnings are one thing, just getting started is the current problem!
I’ve spent the day immersed in Tranquility Bay. Not actually, of course, but it has filled my mind a lot. The next exhibition I am taking part in is called Resurgam.
The work we offer for selection should reflect new beginnings after the last year of Pandemic restrictions and lockdowns. I am planning a series of paintings to reflect the sense of calm that sea swimming has created while the world has been a little crazy.
4 mini pictures are on the go at the moment.
They feature the rocks at Tranquility Bay at High Tide. They are resting overnight to be finished later in the week. The best way to clean painty fingers is to take a dip in the actual Tranquility Bay. The sunset was bright and I was feeling bold so I took the phone into the water to catch some waves.
A touch of increased saturation in the camera settings makes the photography quite painterly. Really cold fingers meant that this camera moment couldn’t last long .
The one above has an abstract sparkly heart. The paintings are also waiting for some sparkle, I’m waiting for some gold leaf to put in Drakes Island.
Our second Mayday weekend of the Pandemic has passed. In many ways that seems more something to reflect on than Easter weekend. Mayday is associated with joyous events in our corner of the world. @theoldmortuary there is no particular pattern or traditional behaviours. Locally we have a May Fair, a rare event in our locality to wander the main street and bump into people that we know. In comparison to other May Day events it is no great shakes so we are not always faithful to it. The picture above is of a local gentleman who is always there and always dresses up in a meticulous costume to bring a smile to peoples faces.
One Mayday we hired Mr Blue Sky as a belated birthday gift, we all have birthday s around Christmas so belated gifts are not unusual. Mr Blue Sky took us to the Gower Peninsular, for happy, but chilly, camping.
Last May Day the world was reeling from the realised impact of the Pandemic and @theoldmortuary we were reeling from various life changing events that were landing on us to add to the burden of Pandemic angst. Life felt a bit like this safety sign for the quiet lanes nearby, where horse riding and cars share the space.
The sadness and difficulty of this time last year have given us all a push in new and unexpected directions. We have to see the world through the lens of our communal and personal losses and experiences of the last year.
In my experience all things tend to follow Newtons 3rd Law of Physics.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
The things that made last May Day and the surrounding period of life quite shitty have altered the world and each persons perception and lived experience of this May Day, and all days.
A year ago @theoldmortuary would not have considered sea swimming to be a natural part of life and yet this year it couldn’t be more natural than to take a dip in the sea and feel utterly captivated and joyous about it.
We’ve bonded with some lovely people over the last 6 months in chill sea and the socially distanced warm up after.
Also last year or any previous year a trip to Ikea would not have been on our acceptable activities list. But yesterday we made a small list and joined a Disney length queue to get into our local, Exeter, store.
Because of Covid restrictions the store was not packed with people but it was packed with texture and colours and smells. The stand out smell was the carpet department, just delicious!
Sadly no meatball lunch as indoor eating is still not permitted. But looking through our altered lens the trip to Ikea on a Bank Holiday weekend was an absolute pleasure not a chore.
It unexpectedly lit up our life.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Sometimes you just have to look for it.
Today starts with an early swim. Swimming in cold water feels slightly less daunting than the other event of the day, a trip to Ikea! Needs must though and domestic reorganisation started last year during lockdown is coming to a conclusion. I can’t say Ikea is the final piece of the jigsaw but close to it. This will be our first time in a furniture store for over two years and our first time so far from home for 6 months. What a strange patch of life we’ve lived through. I’m looking forward to the colours and textures of the fabric department. No meatballs today though!
Just to finish up a very brief and somewhat dull blog. One last picture from Totnes. Cherry Ice Cream with a wafer.
Today we took a trip to Totnes. The last time we took a trip deeper into Devon it was 6 months ago when we also went to Totnes to do Christmas shopping for the Christmas that never was.
By coincidence we recieved this traditional May Day gift of Lily of the valley from a friend who lives in France this morning, she and I have worked, danced and laughed together in Totnes and Brighton long before real life and children tamed us.
Totnes is an alternative type of place with a firm sense of the importance of traditional and Pagan festivals. Ordinarily a trip to Totnes on Beltane/Mayday would be a whirling, psychedelic , Maypole dancing festival of alternative experiences. Only partially out of Lockdown, today was never going to be as vibrant as normal but our visit today was still vivid in a low key way. Just to celebrate Beltane in its Phallic/ Fertility glory I captured an appropriate shadow.
Accidental because the reason for the photograph was this lost earring, preserved, for its owner to find on top of a bollard that has been many different colours in the past.
Other bollards dressed up for the occasion.
Totnes is a rich source of Street Art. Some featuring Tom of Finland . Quite appropriate for a festival kind of day.
And some just near some spiral stairs which is about as close to a Maypole as we got in 2021.
The smells from Street food and Coffee from the many independent cafes can’t be reproduced with words. Neither can the sounds of music in the streets, layered together , sometimes with a fusion no one would ever plan ( Prog Rock and Church bells) and other times with a mellifluence that was hard to walk away from ( Harp and Violin). Totnes made us smile today.
Beltane wouldn’t be Beltane without the leafy face of the Green Man.
May 1st and we have plans to travel a little more than 10 miles!
But first news of the last swim of April. “April is the cruelest month” a line from T.S Eliots’ poem, Wasteland,written after and about a pandemic.”We dared to hope” a line from the poem, exactly matches the optimism of the ‘ bobbers’ as we emerged out of our first winter season of cold water swimming.
April has bitten the bobbers on the bum swimming wise. The weather has improved and the sea water temperatures have started to stabilise, and even rise a little, but we seem to have had some of our most challenging swims recently, most of us succumbing to ‘After drop’ after a swim in April even though we have avoided it throughout the darkest, coldest months.
‘ After drop’ was unknown to Eliot when he published Wasteland in 1922. His poem written after A World War and the Spanish Flu pandemic, it could only have been more glum with a portion of ‘ afterdrop’ included in the narrative.
“Afterdrop” is common after swimming in cold water; you get out and feel fine, and then you start to get colder, sometimes growing faint, shivering violently and feeling unwell.
As you can see from the photographs in this blog, the last bob of April 2021 was a much more joyous affair. Using T.S Eliot as our theme it was more ‘Cats’ ( Old Possums Book of Practical Cats) than Wasteland.
As it happened the last day of April was also a bobbers birthday. Tranquility Bay pulled out all the stops to make our first after-swim, bobbing- birthday picnic a big event. The Bobbing Balcony was available for out door snacking. Street art made the location more vivid.
There was cake.
A Chinook fly past.
Exuberant waving to Sailors returning to port.
Happy quotes.
Low energy time keeping, to mark time passing.
And a puppy.
Thanks to Helen for having a birthday and serendipity for providing the entertainment.
Yesterday we did our usual evening swim at high tide. When we were leaving we passed a small non-swimming bay . The rising tide had brought a bouquet of long stemmed flowers to the surface, someones ashes had obviously been scattered earlier in the day. Scattering ashes on the shores of rivers or the sea is significant in some religions and something that many people choose to do religious, or not.
7 years ago I was creating work for a group exhibition in London.
On the way home from work I had seen a group of bikers scattering ashes on the beach of the Thames,a rather muddy location and not too far from Tate modern. Alongside ashes and flowers they had laid old motor cycle sprockets to be gently lapped and then consumed by the incoming tide. In Memoriam worked very nicely with the theme of the upcoming exhibition and with the help of a friend, Pat Calnan, who sourced old sproketts, for me, I was able to recreate the act of remembrance and make a series of paintings.
Choosing to scatter ashes in non traditional places can give family and friends spectacular places to return to as an act of remembrance.
The Bikers resting place. Below Millenium Bridge, London.Unknown persons resting place yesterday. Firestone Bay, Plymouth
I realise in this smaller picture of sproketts in mud I’ve made them look a little like old headstones in a Victorian cemetery. Accidentally closing a circular creative thought process.
Yesterday I got the art cards printed that will be sold during art exhibitions this year. I realise I’ve chosen two smelly subjects as my images of choice. Scratch and sniff card seems to have gone out of favour but even if the print shop had offered such a service I doubt I would have chosen the option.
Mackerel smell wonderful when freshly caught and grilled, like all fish not so good after a while, and this chap was painted two years ago!
The second card is a digitally enhanced photograph of the back stairs of a disused Plymouth nightclub. For many years the club had been closed and was the desired location of a Super Church. While interminable and ultimately unsuccessful planning permission was sought the building was mothballed. Again not a great option for scratch and sniff.
Mothballs was not the fragrance that tickled my nose as I took this picture. Damp, mildew and the vestigia of human sweat, tobacco, beer and pleasure were the backnotes to the headier notes of urine and weed.
Maybe my art cards are not such a big ticket subject for Pandemic Pondering #400. But they are about recovery. Helping local business by spending money close to home.
Geddon- a word used in the Westcountry. It has multiple uses. Derived from two words get and on.
It is used to express surprise and disbelief, but in this context it is used as a word of encouragement. It can also be used as a greeting instead of hello or goodbye.
Normal blogging service will resume later this morning. Its a swim lesson day and I haven’t even made the sandwiches!
So a late start for the blog but with the added bonus of some dog pictures. The stand out feature of this weekend has been the wind. A very brisk Easterly blowing into Plymouth Sound affecting everything weve done. Al Fresco Dining, Bobbing, and dog walking. Nothing I’ve produced photographically has shown the severity of the wind. Anecdotally Miss Lola was blown off her legs yesterday. A situation only remedied by a very tight cuddle. The swimming lesson outing required the van to keep Miss Lola on board and in a good mood.
Hugo was also not averse to a bit of van comfort while swimming lessons were affecting the quality of his Sunday morning.
Some outdoor activity was permitted in the morning schedule. Lola agreed to a pose that demonstrated the wind direction.
Hugo also attempted a similar pose but just ended up looking messy.
The most important part of the day was guarding the beach awaiting the return of the swimmers.
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