Finally, yesterday I was ready to ditch any form of wetsuit and just swim. Unencumbered by a lengthy dressing and undressing process. Summer has arrived in my swimming life. The day had been a collection of small domestic positives, admin and chores achieved and dog walks in the sun. One of my walks located some old friends, the white cows who normally sit on the green are having a rest and possibly a spruce up in one of the local secret gardens.
A small tin has also arrived. A reward to myself for selling a few pictures recently. The topics of the exhibitions I am entering later in the year need a more earthy feel than recent works, so I bought some earthy colour watercolours hand made from natural minerals in Pennsylvania just to start off my thinking process.
One of my evening swimming companions took a fabulous panoramic shot of Firestone Bay. The colours in my little tin would also work quite well if I attempted a sketch here one evening.
For the last few weeks I have been involved in a Wordle Whatsapp group. It involves a group of people connected with a fiftieth birthday party that I went to in Pangbourne. It must be a sign of age that the only significant thing I don’t remember from the party is talking about Wordle. Perhaps even more important is that it appears to be an early morning WordleWhatsapp so I wake up already under pressure from the really early birds.
Now my early mornings have so many possible starts. Dog Walk? Blog? Wordle? Shower? Breakfast? Book? Staying awake beyond midnight gives me the chance to Wordle or Blog before most people are about, but me and midnight are not as well acquainted as we used to be since I swapped NHS life for that of Museums and Art.
All the interiors or fashion magazines mention Wordle Green as a key colour this year.
I’m not convinced, myself, that I could wear Wordle Green or live with too much of it. But some of my favourite colours are greens. When the sun is out in April it makes greens especially vivid. So taking my queue from recent style magazines I’m going to feature some almost Wordle Greens for the end of this pondering
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Plymouth to Gunnislake railway journey. Bright shafts of sunlight hit overgrown hedges along the track . April 2021Inherited 1970’s coloured glass tumblers sitting in the sun waiting to be packed for a house move. April 2021Easter painting from our Grandchild in Hong Kong . April 2021Seaweed in the tidal pool at Firestone Bay. April 2021Old door near the Cremyl Ferry. Stonehouse Peninsular. April 2021
All the dates on these pictures predate Wordle Green by a year. If only I were published by the New York Times, the hot new colour on the block could have been…
Some days should be celebrated for their ‘ normalness’. Lola has returned to her pre-surgery, happy, self so the dog world, in our house, has returned to near normal. In the outside world, we had a day that was really very similar to pre-pandemic life. We said goodbye to some friends heading off for some prolonged travelling and I went to an in-person bookclub where 90% of the members attended with no-one away with Covid. The only person who couldn’t attend couldn’t come because she was too busy elsewhere. These may be really mundane observations on the activities of a day but the fact that they are so normal is spectacularly exciting. Near normal days have been almost impossible for more than two years. Normal is really rather lovely. A normal day ended with a beautiful, but normal for here, sunset. Pretty much a perfect day.
There has been an abrupt cold weather change this week. The sun is out but the temperature is decidedly chilly. Goodness knows what the sea is doing, from a distance in the early evening it appears to be very dark in colour. Closer up during a bobbing session on Wednesday the bay was this gorgeous teal colour. Bobbers can have lively imaginations about the sea creatures they can see when the water looks like this.
This week I’ve started work on a longstanding commission for some paintings of things that are actually in the sea.
My starting point is Mackerel.
Three jolly mackerel posed in the bright sunlight this week.It was so cold they didnt thaw out at all during the half hour posing session. Natural sunlight brought out all the colour on their backs and the subtle iredescence of their bellies.
It must be amazing to sail close to shoals of mackerel. I find them a really beautiful subject to photograph and paint. But being near them alive and swimming must be really special.
For this commission mackerel are going to pose on the fishmongers paper they arrived in. The crumples and creases make some really interesting shapes on a neutral background when lit by sharp morning light.
Enough of fishy posing and pontificating we are nearly at the weekend, we have arrived in April and here the sun is shining. Happy Friday, take care with cunning April Fool jokes, my early morning wake up by Alexa was the first to catch me out this morning. Enjoy the weekend.
Early morning on the Stonehouse Peninsular. I’m freshly out of a hot shower and on an early morning dog walk, knowing full well that the next time I am standing here, in about an hour, my warm clothes will be off and,along with other bobbers, I will be submerging myself in the Atlantic. Nearly three weeks of a nasty virus has kept me out of the water. My lingering symptoms are no longer significant enough to keep me on the shore clutching a hot drink and nattering with Coach. Three weeks out of the cold water is a significant mountain to climb. She said mixing her metaphors like a pro. I’ve even added arty filters to the image to make it feel more enticing. Today we have a first time bobber joining us and a visiting bobber as well as several Covid recoverers. Definately a day for pulling on our big girl pants and getting on with it!
Yesterday this huge boat was tugged past our bobbing spot. I could feel the thrum of the three tugs long before I saw the vessel.
Yesterday, I wished I had been in the water as this boat passed our swimming zone. There is something rather thrilling about being in the water when the tugs are working really hard, guiding big ships through the safety channel. The rumble of hard working engines in water turns into something that is so much more than a tingle as it is transmitted through our submerged bodies. Its a tingle but fatter, not quite a throb. Whatever it is I could do with one today to encourage me in…
I learnt last week that longstanding residents of Stonehouse call the recent influx of wild or outdoor swimmers “Dryrobers”. This is infinitely more polite than the residents of the Lake District where the same groups of people are called ” Swimmers in Wankerobes”
The bobbers are unapologetically swimmers who wear these types of garments.
Nowhere in the companies website do they mention increasing, post bob, talking time or the comfort of patiently waiting dogs. There is even a large pocket that can accommodate a champagne or prosseco bottle for Birthday Bobs.
Yesterday the water temperature was a balmy 10 degrees while the air temp was 7 degrees. Today they have both dropped a further degree. But even in such chilly times we managed over half an hour of proper post swim chatting.
Certainly in large numbers ‘Dryrobers’ look like swarming, plump, insects stuck forever somewhere in the pupating stage of life. With head feet and hands emerging from a protective cocoon their bodies have no intention of leaving.
The popularity of outdoor swimming is a post-covid phenomenon that shows little sign of going away as the pandemic ebbs away. Coastal areas have become 365 days a year destinations, which is almost certainly a welcome boost for independent businesses who suffered so greatly during the multiple lock downs. Swarms of happy, healthy people is a good thing to have emerged from a sad and difficult two years of Covid-19.
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.
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.
Funny to start an early morning blog with a sunset but this one is a pointer to the next day, which is today.
Yesterday was a day of dreadful mists and traditional West Country Greige.Until this gloriously over the top sunset arrived, better late than never! The whole day had been an impenetratable colour and sensation of meh. My actual day was hardly any more enlightened with dull, domestic tasks and my relaxed moments filled with a book I had no wish to read. Over Christmas a small pile of lovely new books has appeared. I have yet to start any of them due to other reading commitments. In the greatest piece of bad luck, this months book group book is by a new- to- me author that I have a tiny bit of history with. I will name no names but the author is a well known T.V. presenter whose books, apparently, are both breathtaking and on many lists of bestsellers. Prior to Christmas,and probably against my better judgement I downloaded one of her literary mistresspieces. Having read one chapter I returned it, the prose being not quite to my taste. Flimsy would be my best description. Imagine my horror when the book club book for January was by the same author. I decided to adopt the cold water swimming approach and just get straight into it. I dedicated all of my reading time over two days plus some extra to get it done so that I could start on my Christmas pile.
Was my one chapter and out behaviour the correct approach? Mostly yes, but the plot of the book club,book choice, was really quite clever and deserved much better, deeper writing than the celebrity author had bothered with. Surprising really as she is not a foolish woman and has a wide breadth of life experiences. The editor also had an off day, some of the inaccuracies were absolute howlers that had me reading them several times to try and make some sense of them. There was no sense to them!
So, bad weather and bad book was yesterday and so far I have no idea what today will bring, but my, very cold, early morning walk shows promise.
The dawn sky was as good as last nights sunset. There is a millionaire parked up in the Sound.
Luxury Yacht just off Drakes Island.
I think I might have chosen somewhere a little warmer to park my $250 million super yacht in January. Presumably the owner of both the Dallas Cowboys and this boat has his reasons.
More heart warming than a Super Yacht was this bouquet of flowers on a bench. The bench is dedicated to someone, now deceased, who loved this area.
The dew that had formed at dawn created a poignant reminder of the tears we all have for the people and moments that we have lost forever.
And an even more powerful reminder to push on through the greige days because the sun always returns, eventually.
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