Category: Serendipity

#1276 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Serendipity1 Comment

Do you vote in political elections?

I do. Quite a few years ago I narrowly avoided running over a political leader, he was a lucky man that I was concentrating. I was in bits he had stepped out in front of me from between two parked cars. He shrugged his shoulders in his expensive camel coat, gave  me a small hand flap of thanks and went on his way. This seemingly minor moment in my life when I absolutely did the right thing always haunts me when I consider the damage he has done to our country. This morning is no different.

Moving swiftly on, our first rose bloom ever on our defensive planting scheme bloomed and drooped. We plucked her tiny head from her damaged stem and popped it in a shot glass.

She is a very thorny rose who has been purchased specifically to ramble over our garage roof to deter the neighbourhood cats from getting into our yard and having a shit. Which is exactly the word I used when I nearly ran over the politician. At the time I said it because I was frightened. Now, well…

#1275 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn art, Serendipity1 Comment

Beltane , Mayday, caught me out yesterday. It was a day filled to the brim. Not another thing could have been squeezed into any second of the waking day. So much so that the blog was brief and largely unexplained.

I combined two exercises from Paint Like Turner to create a painting of our local tidal pool.

The first big takeaway was that watercolour painting 250 years ago was not done on paper that was anywhere near white. So the process took about 24 hours as I dyed paper with cold tea.

The process and the result.

Then dried the papers in hot bright sunlight, which bleached out the colour a bit. I think I quite like painting on imperfect slightly beige paper. In real life the image has a warmth about it which I quite like.

Then to read the instructions and dig around in my paint store for the suggested colours or as close as I had.

I was working from one of my favourite, very atmospheric photographs of the pool.

At this point I should point out that this is the pool on an excellent day.

And this once again is the painting. Very curious to create art from firm instructions.

I need to sort this horizon out before actually attaching the mount.

I was quite thrilled that the painting more or less has a Turner colour palate as demonstrated by the biography I am also powering through.

But the painting is nothing like a Turner in reality and much more like my photograph.

Which rather neatly brings me to the end of the day. Which was spent with a huge glass of Pimms , celebrating a friend’s success in the London Marathon. 26 miles of determination and endeavour.

This photograph has the colour palate of the sun going down through a glass of Pimms.

A Beltane well spent.

#1271 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Serendipity1 Comment
13 years ago

Wisteria in April is a fabulous herald of a properly established Spring. The Wisteria above and the white spider set the bar very high. The Wisteria grew on a pergola in my Cornish garden and attracted white crab spiders, who could be a little spooky.

Another one that we visited yesterday in Cornwall was in a glorious mood.

Ours in the yard in Devon after just under a year of being in our possession, is not so forward . In fact it is seriously behind the curve. But one day I might feel the urge to paint it. For now the Wisteria of Pentillie Castle will have to do.

#1270 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Procrastination, Serendipity2 Comments

A big but belated event is occuring today. Very late into the project to create art that is inspired by the JMW Turner 250 celebrations, a book, How to Paint like Turner, will arrive.

Coupled with the discovery that my pastel store has only deliciously soft colours  lurking in its dusty drawers. Apart from the new, vibrant, kids on the block, who are not actually as fabulous as their much older colleagues. I want to paint flowers.

Is there any jeopardy to this book arriving? Of course there is! I am the woman who always wanted to study anything but the thing I should be studying.  So creatively there is now an annoying little worm in my head that is telling me to paint flowers. Mr JMW Turner did not paint flowers.

This worm is an old associate. When I should have been reading this many years ago.

He told me to leave my books and go to the Tate and study the works of Mr JMW Turner. Which I did.

Now I actually need to study Mr JMW Turner the worm calls my mind elsewhere. This morning I am thrilled to look at this physics book as if it is an old friend. The words, essential at the time, beguiling me because they are part forgotten or so embedded in me that I no longer notice them.

Of course the worm is actually procrastination. Something I am particularly adept at, and curiously good at concentrating on. Happy Sunday.

#1269 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Drawn to the Valley, Serendipity1 Comment

A very long while ago I was gifted these fine art pastels. They had belonged to a friend’s mother who had been a well received flower artist. On her death the pastels found their way to me. I have had them nearly thirty years and she was very old when she moved on to the great studio in another realm, so these are probably more than 50 years old.I worked out yesterday that in my 30 years I have used about 20% of what I was given. After a sort out I had 5 empty drawers. For the first time ever I went into an art shop and bought some pastels. Some really bright pastels to create a specific image.

I really only needed  red,orange, bright pink and black. But the local art shop didn’t sell single pastels. Although made by the same manufacturer as my old pastels these giddy contemporary pastels are a little more difficult to use, they are possibly a student version . A bit of research tells me that Rembrandt pastels were first introduced in 1924. There is every chance that some of my pastels are nearly that age. Some of them certainly lived through World War 2 in London with their previous owner.

Favourite tree on Mount Edgecumbe

  Which is rather fabulous as I am creating a time warp landscape that features Devonport, formally Plymouth Dock, a favourite tree, duplicated.

Fireworks or Incendiary Devices over Devonport formally Plymouth Dock

Fireworks or incendiary bombs  and of course, given the current project Mr JMW Turner.

Mr Turner under a tree.

I think the landscape, should it need a genre might be classified as Magical Realism.

Turner overlooking Plymouth Dock for 200 years. Inspired by Wallpaper.

And a direct Turner quote

My blacks are deliberately very black and the brights are either sombre or joyful. The Plymouth Blitz or Firework night.

All this from a box of old pastels and a few gaudy new ones.

#1267 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn art, Serendipity4 Comments
Crossing the Bar II

Describe a risk you took that you do not regret.

Now I am very much risk averse , harm averse would better describe me. But if I switch the word risk for unpredictable outcome or experimentation then I am much more comfortable with the whole concept of taking a risk. I am not a huge fan of timid or obnoxiously certain people because their place on the risk taking spectrum is so different from mine.

Arty and creative risks are my favourite things to do. A bin full of failure is the foundation of my creative practice.

I took a risk with the picture above. I had a stash of very old  (20 years) but very good quality Ink Jet paper.

This image is a bit of everything, gelli printing, collage, watercolour and pastels. Under such pressure many papers would fail and this one was no different. But the failure, where the surface pulled off is almost its greatest success. The orange area above the boat got a bit too wet in the process and the surface started to lift off. Working into the area with pastels created the cloud texture.

Then a bit of photo meddling created two different images.

Crossing the Bar III
Crossing the Bar IV

Each one is a risk I am happy with.

#1266 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Meddled Photography X Watercolour, Serendipity1 Comment
View from the Quarry, definitely at Saltram.

An Easter weekend of socialising and doing yardening jobs meant that the jobs were all done, but the resulting need to visit the tip was put off until yesterday. Which turned out to be a gift from the Goddess of Serendipity.

Yesterday was the 250th anniversary of the birth of JMW Turner, the artist whose works are the inspiration for the next exhibition I am entering. On the drive to the tip I listened to the radio and two very interesting women were discussing both his work and the changes that he caused in the critical thinking of Landscape painting.

JMW Turner was a regular visitor to Saltram House in Plymouth, as well as the wider Tamar Valley area. His work is held in collections the world over. In London Tate Britain holds not only a collection of his works but his papers, sketches and other items

The Turner Bequest comprises the majority of Joseph Mallord William Turner’s works at Tate. It was established after the artist’s death in 1851 and includes nearly 300 oil paintings and around 30,000 sketches and watercolors. The collection is now housed in the Clore Gallery at Tate Britain. 

One such item is the sketch below,

And where was I as I listened to this…

Chelson Meadows Recycling Centre (Tip). Definitely at Saltram

…at a tip, on the site of an old quarry. Definitely at Saltram. From famous English Romantic Painter to the distinctly unromantic dumping of a stinky, old, water butt.

I marked the serendipitous moment with two photographs, one an image I meddled with.

And the other an image of the most optimistic placement of a chair to sit and take in the view.

The chair is just under the red star. High tide visits only and only by using a small boat. 250 years on, what would Mr Turner make of his  Quarry location?

#1263 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Serendipity1 Comment

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 Avon

Burgh 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.

Happy Easter.

#1261 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn art, Serendipity2 Comments
Work in Progress
©theoldmortuary

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.

It didn’t last.

#1260 theoldmortuary ponders.

On By theoldmortuary.designIn art, Serendipity1 Comment

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.

Decisions, decisions, learning and growing…

Or maybe not.