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.
My apologies for the blogs being more than usually peppered with art stuff. I am in the midst of an on-line art course called Finding Your Colour Voice. I am trying to complete the course initially in a little over the ten working days and two weekends. My plan is to do each day’s tutorial and weekend projects as soon as I can after they drop onto the website. After that I have another 4 months when the content is available to me to study more at depth. Precious Pondering time is mostly colour related at the moment.
My project yesterday was to create colour charts from a huge variety of sources. I made a start by producing 4 colour charts of places from memory. I’m going to share two of them as they are my short term memory efforts. Unsurprisingly they are of places close to home and easily visited to check out how accurate my memory is. I also have recent photographs to share my thoughts. On reviewing yesterday’s work, I am immediately struck that with these two I have very specifically created a winter colour palate. The other two places I completed are clearly less season specific, I haven’t visited either of them since the pandemic started.
I am particularly pleased with the Cornish colours, I wanted to show the softness of the county. Something that is less obvious in the brashness of summer. Something that doesn’t show well in the photograph is the greigeness that cloaks the county frequently.
Stonehouse is altogether ‘harder’ despite being geographically not far away. It does however share the greige and that colour,or indeed sensation is much better depicted on the Stonehouse colour chart.
Misty nights have so much more charm than misty mornings, currently. There is a cloak of greige over everything this morning. It started to creep in last night making our evening walk softer and more mysterious.
At the book club meeting yesterday a friend said she felt suffocated by the current weather. This morning it is easy to sympathise with that statement. January really is a hard month to love.
There was a break in the greige yesterday. I am ashamed to say I missed it, a fellow ‘bobber’ grabbed this photograph yesterday morning at Trematon.
Goodness me, another late blog for the best of reasons!
November is my birthday month so I always get a boost of love and gifts in one of the darkest months.
November 2019 was pretty stormy and in November most normal human beings knew little of what the next 4 months would do to the whole of the worlds population. At a more granular level we certainly thought life would evolve and change at a fairly normal pace. In November 2019 we got our kicks on my birthday walking on stormy beaches Then a pandemic happened and strange and unsettling things changed our lives forever. Wind on two years and we get our kicks swimming in stormy seas in November and any other month. What started as an alternative to swimming in swimming pools during lockdown has become at least a twice a week habit. Winter swimming in particular is addictive and hugely rewarding, the buzz after a winter swim is hard to explain.
Todays swim was pretty rough and bouncy but enormously energising.
And then the bobbers had a surprise in store, and this is the reason for the late blog. After our 9:30 swim we had an 11:00 birthday party. The sugar and carb rush of party food on top of the post swimming high is an extraordinary feeling. We may never give this sea swimming malarkey up and with 14 of us in our group now there will always be the occasional party!
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