Here is a conundrum. I did not see the last live performance that I experienced but I did hear it. I went to Plymouth Hoe, this morning, for the V E Day 80 Civic service and arrived too late to see anything apart from service personnel’s bottoms.
Or the back of the Mayoral Party.
But I did hear some marvelous music and listened to the Churchill V E Day speech in full for the first time. All in all a most exceptional and interesting dog walk .
Even more thrilling, one of the people at the top of the Lighthouse is my friend Jenny. She is the smaller human of the three.
May is always my favourite month. 31 days of gorgeousness. I have been nurturing two climbing roses since my birthday in November. This one is called Claire Austin, she has been chosen for beauty and practicality. She is a spiky and reliable woman. Chosen to clamber onto a garage roof and deter the local cats from using our yard as a latrine. Not the most glamorous of jobs for such a beauty. I am still painting Turneresque images . 250 years ago when Turner was a visitor to Plymouth my back yard would have just a rocky outcrop surrounded by sea on three sides. Claire Austin would have been scrambling over rocks and turning her many pretty heads to the sun, I gave her a little bit of Turner yesterday.
The other rose is also growing but does not have a single flower head. The name ‘ Crepuscule’ is an odd word that makes me think of grumpiness. So far this rose is living up to the sensation of the name. Sturdy green growth but no sign of glamour or effort to climb anywhere. No background painting for the grumpy one . Instead, I picked some Arum Lillies at the Tennis Club. Cool white beauties under trees in an old quarry. Probably the quarry where the rock that was used to build my house was quarried from.
Just a waterfall in the English countryside, below a pond.
With a glass shute that humans and cows can walk under.
And a message.
If people, or cows for that matter, for just one minute, allowed Modern Art to get into their heads rather than allowing it to flow over their heads, the world would be a very different place for them.
Or maybe significantly different. Not so likely for the cows.
5 minutes is all it takes at Delamore Arts. Staying longer is even more interesting.
List the people you admire and look to for advice…
My actual list of admired people that I would go to for advice, specific to me, is subject to a strict Non Disclosure Agreement with myself.
They know who they are.
But I am an advice and knowledge junkie and will take advice or knowledge from anyone, admired or not if advice or wisdom is needed.
Unsolicited advice though, is not my thing. Just about tolerable if given with love or care but most of it just rinses off, unrequired, unrequested and unneeded. Selected deafness can be a superpower.
So can a killer sentence.
“That is really interesting, but I am afraid I am not interested”
Maybe just as a thought bubble or a quote on a T-Shirt. I will leave that to your own discretion.
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…
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.
What is your favorite holiday? Why is it your favorite?
An evening walk at a marina gave me the perfect image to describe a favourite type of holiday. And I am not a boaty person, but the name says it all.
Not just holidays though although I may have to google the word holiday.
Holidays are just an extension of ‘ moments’ or ‘taking a break’ Periods of life that differ significantly from the mundanity of the norm.
I had loads to do yesterday but the two big dog walks of the day gave me the chance to take two mini coddiwomples. The one in the boatyard and one in a city park.
The city park, courtesy of Victorian municipal planning gave me quite the tiny coddiwomple in bright April sunlight. From a shady English Woodland…
To the fiery colours of Far Eastern Azalea bushes, simply by turning my body 90 degrees.
Two unknown destinations when I set out on my mini coddiwomple. A tiny holiday from the days admin.
I can never be sure where a book will take me and this one is no different. But the project for today is unexpected.
Drum roll…
Turner did not use white paper or canvas, his whites are created by white paint. Which I am slightly averse to. True Whites in my paintings are usually gaps in the paint. Today I will be soaking paper in cold tea and drying it in the sun, for a more random 250 year old look.
These slightly mad little experiments are unlikely to make it into the public domain, even at a Turner inspired exhibition, but the way colours react in different circumstances is fascinating to me.
But none of this is where this book has taken me in the last few days.
While I was busy doing a job not involving art. I was on a parallel and self guided path of art appreciation and dabbling with watercolour. Until I decided to give art a more academic and educational space in my life by committing to many years of part-time study doing a Foundation Degree and then a Fine Art degree. While still studying the essential science stuff for my career.
Without much research I started the journey towards a degree in Fine Art, imagining that I could immerse myself in the world of artists from Turner to the Impressionists. Not to be. Without due diligence I had signed up for a Contemporary Fine Art Degree. One of life’s awkward moments, regrettable at the time, but the fees had been paid. Turner and the Impressionists slipped from view, pushed out by Rothko and Grayson Perry and many late 20th and 21st Century artists*.
*This was the best learning experience ever, so glad I made this error.Contemporary Art really stretches thinking, and thinking makes for great pondering.
This last couple of months has been the first time I have been truly back with the older generation of artists for 20 years.
The things I did not know about Turner are manifest. In the last few weeks it has been easy to find Turner locations on the Devon/ Cornwall border. But unknown to me my London life was very Turner centric. The number 3 bus from Crystal Palace to Oxford Street is like a Turner Experience. If only I had known when it was my daily commute.
I took this quite a few years ago because life was mimicking art.
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