Blue, blue, electric blue. The words that stick in my head from David Bowie singing Sound and Vision.
After nearly a year of living very close to the sea, I have a huge colour palate in my head that is the colour of the sea, I also have a lot of sounds and visions. I’m in the early stages of a commission that will reflect how the sea changes. I am taking a mixed media approach to the early work.
The Atlantic in my little patch of Devon can be many different colours, not always blue and sometimes quite grotty.
The sounds also change depending on the tides and the weather and the shapes in my bigger abstract try to show the sounds by shape and the interfaces between two different colours.
This is a big old piece of paper for a water colour. I have no idea quite how this project is going to play out, but for now, just charting blue/ greens is very relaxing.
Early morning blogging, with birdsong. The sun is blindingly up and after a hard working weekend I have somewhere cute to sit and drink the first cup of tea of the morning.
Thanks to Google and the advice on how to neutralise the smell of dog wee,the concrete no longer smells like the leather making area of Marrakesh and more like nothing. Just the sweet smell of nothing!
This yard grows things extraordinarily well that our previously rural garden did not. Irises and Alliums are a big surprise this spring.
I might even move into this space to do a bit of painting, but todays task is more challenging. I am going to restring two old washing lines. That is going to be interesting…
#209 theoldmortuary ponders promised the revelation of the weekends grand plan. Two long paragraphs were lost by inatentive fingers and no amount of searching in the nooks and crannies of my WordPress history or archive files revealed the missing links. I couldn’t quickly rewrite them and the grand plan itself required attention. The illustration above hints at the reliability of hard copy versus electronic.
The plan for the weekend was only decided on a whim on Friday. I’m not even sure I even thought about it before pronouncing. “I think I am going to remove all the fake grass this weekend” The job had been started 6 weeks ago when the first strip of fake grass was removed to give us a two metre flower bed. Then last week another four metre ‘L’ shaped flower bed was revealed. My pronouncement actually only involved a raised patio area but unlike the others we had covered it in container grown plants. What I had suggested was a monumental task with added unsavoury undertones.
The previous owners two pug dogs had used the fake grass as their toilet. The fake grass over flower beds had drained into soil, the patio area was a big old slab of concrete. When we moved in we were only renting the house so had to leave things as they were. We cleaned as well as we could and vowed to remove it as soon as we had bought the house. The house sale rambled on, delayed by the death of the descendent of Robert the Bastard who was given our tiny portion of land in 1066! Winter arrived and we did not have the appetite for a yucky job in the cold.
We are no strangers to yucky jobs. When we were rebuilding and repurposing the building that was the old mortuary next to our Cornish cottage we chose to clear out the undertakers workshop and Chapel of Repose ourselves, before the builders moved in to turn it into part of our home. 50 years of that sort of business, long before health and safety regulations and 50 years of neglect after it was closed because of health and safety, was a heady mix of bodily excrescences and vermin excretions. So we have some unusual expertise.
Obviously our dogs had taken to using the informal, low effort toileting area too. Saturday was spent moving full and heavy plant containers down to the far end of the yard, this meant that our energy levels were pretty depleted by the time we had to roll up and bag up the fake grass. It was every bit as grim as you might imagine and the urine soaked concrete slab was a pretty stinky thing. It has been scrubbed and hosed many times now. The plan was to allow it to dry off and paint it, but as it has dried off a curious thing has happened. The urine has discoloured the concrete and brought out the colours of the sands that were used in its manufacture. We may well be left with a slab of concrete that resembles a warm pinkish/orange marble or rock.
So yucky job done, there was a ridiculous number of plants to be either repotted or planted in the soil of the revealed flower beds. The job was just about completed by the time of the Sunday evening swim. Since then we have had heavy showers of rain. There has been no chance of taking a series of work complete photographs. This yucky job may well stretch to another blog!
To finish up, a picture of our neighbours chicken checking out the sweet new leaves of a Silver Birch that has moved closer to her strutting zone.
This is our almost daily reality on the morning dog walk . Royal Marines out for a training run. Yesterday the bobbers experienced this, perfectly, in time run as they walked from the car park. In our street marines were practicing running with 60kg weights on stretchers. Other days they run in full combat gear and carry guns. Hugo and Lola are never reactive which is a good thing. The bobbers, though, were a little more vocal. Obviously in a good and positive way. Without exception we have all worked in public facing jobs. Doing jobs that are made a good deal more pleasant by the public being, at the very least, clean. Royal Marines on these training runs may be a little warm but there is always a, just washed, fragrance about them which we can appreciate.
Marine Green seems to be a bit of a theme for this blog. The saltwater pool that the marines were jogging past was also, like the marines, dressed in shades of green.
Fragrant , in a good way, and so perfectly in time that they can be turned into a kaleidoscopic image. Welcome to the Weekend.
Starting the day with a sunset maybe a bit counterintuitive but last nights sunset was so crisp and clean it is a shame not to share it.
Sunsets were a bit of a thing yesterday in the studio too. Still sticking with the coursework of my ‘ Finding Your Colour Voice’ I painted a bobber, wearing a ‘Raspberry Beret’ in the style of meditative shape making and colour blending.
And there I leave you with a fine and delicious earworm for the day.
Morning mist cleared, yesterday, to reveal a very blue day, all fresh and twinkly. We had plans to catch a ferry to the local park which is just across the river in Cornwall.
A very low tide and being the first customer gave me the chance to take this photograph of the sweep of the slipway. Four of us had planned a combined dog walk, we gained an extra dog as another friend has succumbed to the dreadful non Covid virus. So Ralph joined us, very much dressed to have a blue day.
We were early enough to see the heat rise from a freshly manured flower bed. Surely a sign that Spring is here.
Also a sign that writing a daily blog can affect the way you respond to things. The fountain should be the star of this photo but I am more thrilled to have captured the steam rising from the flower bed behind.
A day out with dogs can have its moments and the dogs took off, unleashed, into the formal gardens where a gardener shouted at us for their bad behaviour. To be honest it could have been a recorded warning as we never saw the actual gardener at the time. So intent and camouflaged, was he, with his bush trimming that the only evidence of the man himself was his fury.
The whole incident must have un nerved me because after that I failed to take any further photographs for the blog and it is a spectacular location. Our walk was always going to be shorter than the location deserves as a trip to the dentist was planned and a friend was coming over for the afternoon. We have decorated three rooms since she last visited and she has undergone a few medical procedures so stairs are currently not her friend. So we employed technology to show her round the upstairs rooms.
Another friend was supposed to be presenting the interior design improvements but probably won’t get a call any time soon for real TV work, as waving and clambering in the bath does not make particularly slick viewing.
Still photography may have done the job more effectively but would not have caused quite the same levels of mirth and merriment.
Sunday already in what has been an unusual week. We should be just returning from a city break in Spain. However our new passports failed to arrive, we had both planned for this unlikely event by making, but not discussing, Plan B’s. Mine was to take a city break in Britain, Hannahs was to decorate the spare bedroom . Hannahs Plan B won the vote which made for an unusual week because I was able to attend two meetings that I had sent my apologies for.
The book club meeting had the potential to be a little awkward as I had not read the book as I had not anticipated being there. Fate however was very kind to me. As I arrived people were unusually standing outside the venue and looked very pleased to see me. Mistakenly they all thought I had the key. Since I knew I shouldn’t be there, I felt smugly confident that I was not the key holder. I joined them outside and we all looked expectantly at the next arrival who surely must have the key. Once we were all there, it was plain the key was missing in action. Book Club was officially cancelled. What are the chances of that! I didnt have to admit to not having read the book. The key was later found in someone’s book bag.
Meanwhile I was hatching a virus, not something you want to take on a holiday. More Novid than Covid I could still go about daily life and we sourced stuff for the redecoration of the spare room. Largely trying to re-use, re-purpose or recycle. We did one trip to Ikea for some hanging rails and one trip to the local Scrap store for fabrics. We will finish the room later today so pictures tomorrow.
My other meeting was a gathering of artists to natter, drink coffee and plan for future exhibitions. Artists were encouraged to take a small piece of work with us to do whilst nattering.
For a while I am sticking with the meditative mark making and colour mixing that is being taught on the course I am doing. Even in the midst of great quality conversations I found it was quite easy to ‘doodle’ with colour and shapes. The top picture is the whole thing. I decided to depict the meeting in colour. The central motif was my coffee cup full of gorgeous multi-flavoured black coffee.
Around the coffee cup I doodled the twelve attending people. 11 artists and one art lover. The art lover, a lovely man called Nick was depicted slightly differently from the artists , I just used two colours for his part of the picture.
Everyone else got more shades of colour and were a little more entwined depicting exchanging of ideas. Some people get larger segments than others to denote that in any meeting you cant always talk equally to everyone.
With just a little digital tweaking I have turned the whole thing into something quite different. I have superimposed the black and white image over the coloured version. I always make a digital black and white copy of any picture, it helps me assess colour balance and tonal changes before the work is finished. I can’t quite work out if this image expresses the energy of the meeting, or, indeed, the exhausting elements of this weeks Novid *virus.
* Novid , a nasty old virus that consistently tests negative for Covid-19
This time last year our precious Cornish garden plants had been in their containers,for moving house, for nearly six months. Ready for a pre Christmas move in 2020. The transaction was long, with many pitfalls along the way. Right now they have all spent 18 months in containers despite many of them not being considered suitable for container growth, we have only had one casualty. The house sale contract was only actually completed late in September 2021, not a time when we could do too much about them. Another whole winter in containers has done them no harm and this weeks brief sunshine has brought out some blooms from under planted bulbs.
This Buddha got a major head injury in the move but has grown, over winter a fine wig of succulents to cover up her caved-in temporal and parietal bones.
Two pumpkins from October have also survived the winter and are bringing colour to our yard. Despite all the recent storms, we are due another one today, Spring might well be just around the corner.
Most artists work in isolation, myself included. Today was quite different, 12 artists from Drawn to the Valley got together in a cafe to natter and get to know each other. Most of us were unknown to one another or had not been in contact for a long period. We plan to meet regularly from now on, once a month, in the same location, Ocean Studios Cafe in the Royal William Yard, Plymouth.
Some of us brought small projects to work on, others just brought themselves and fabulous conversations.
I wondered if it was possible to paint a meditative mind map whilst in the company of others and it turns out that I could. Depicting the flavour flooding out of my herbal tea and mingling with the intriguing topics of conversation that were surrounding me. It is currently unfinished because I also talked a lot, no surprises there. But I am further along than when I took this picture.
Without passports we are seeking our holiday pleasures much closer to home. At home to be precise. I am a complete sucker for peeling paint and although this neighbours door is not strictly peeling it is the sort of thing that I love to find when I am abroad. Bright shafts of sunlight would make it perfect but yesterday was not that type of day here.
Stripped back ready for refurbishment there is real history in these paint layers. The door could be original and may date back to the 18th century. Once a grand townhouse built some time around 1760, the home has been converted into flats. Stripped of uniform colour it is now obvious that the letterbox was not centrally placed.
If the door is original the letterbox would have been retro fitted for the start of the postal service in 1840.
By the time I walk past again today the door is likely to be shiny and bright under a new coat of paint. All that simple domestic history hidden again until the next time.
Today the number may be less informal.
Even this simple photo reveals another little piece of history. A modern door security lens. So much to learn from one simple door.
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