Spring fever

Lovely bluebells at Dudmaston yesterday. This must be one of the most magical times of the year in nature, I love the intermediary times of spring and autumn. Autumn makes me feel gothic, romantic and vividly sombre. Spring is kind of mystical and mysterious.


Bluebell heaven.


I've finished my small tree in blossom piece...


...but I've an idea to surround it with a frame within a frame, so I've begun these simple vignettes.


I'm doing them in a kind of scraperboard or sgraffito style using coloured pencil and oil pastel. I like working this way, it's a nice way to get colour and line to co-exist. Though the end results are pretty fragile.

Time, like an ever rolling stream...

Yesterday was another lovely day today, though I missed most of it being at work at the library.

After tea (or dinner, the main evening meal) I rushed into the garden and garnered the dregs of my energy to make these 2 quick sketches. About an hour and half's work I managed (listening to The News Quiz, The Archers and Front Row) before I began to get cold and tiredness caught up with me.


Mom's always buying plants then, when a few weeks (days sometimes) later they start to wilt they get transported outside. These are the remains of a hyacinth (actually I bought that one for Mum) and a rose. The third (on the right) are my 'tete-a-tete' daffs, which I will eventually get round to planting in the garden for next year. Whenever I hear the phrase 'tete-a-tete' I always think of Jane Austen. I can't remember which novel it was (it may have been Pride and Prejudice) but it was definiely in an Austen novel that I first encountered this phrase, and it was a very long time ago!


After those dead plants I made this quick sketch of the top of our garden (I was a day ahead of myself when I dated it you see). The sun was setting and catching the edges of the new leaves coming on our old apple tree (on the right) and the dead leaves still clinging to the branches of our poplar tree (middle). Everything's starting to come into bloom now and it makes me happy to see it and sad too. Sad because of the losses of recent (and more distant) years, sad because of how time 'like an ever rolling stream' has played a trick on me. I've blinked and half my life has gone.

I had to Google the fragment by Isaac Watts by the way, I remember it from a Divine Comedy song, but my fragile memory lost more than it remembered.

To err is human...but it's a blumin' nuisance!

It's been a lovely spring day today, if a little rushed for me as tonight is the opening of the West Midlands Open 2010. It's hard for me to concentrate on my work for this, and other reasons, but still I make progress on my new drawing.


The sunshine just won't leave the boxroom alone though, prying into my drawing, distorting it, blurring it, making me squint so I can hardly see what I'm doing at all.


I made a pretty major error with my drawing. I don't know how detrimental this will be to the completed piece. It's more problematic with this one because I'm working on watercolour paper without any 'ground' work laid in with gouache and gesso, so it's blatently obvious that I made a mistake as the drawing will forever be scarred by a raised cicatrix of gouache. Pen and ink might have a 'safe' sound to it, but it's actually quite a dangerous medium to work in, totally unforgiving in fact to the erring draughtsman. Your attention only has to lapse a little and you have ruined your drawing irrevocably.



I've grown adept of disguising my blobs and errors over the years, thought not so imaginatively as David Cox, who transformed the blotches and marks on the wrapping paper he used for his beautiful watercolours into birds, wheeling through the blustery often rain drenched sky.



Last night's Mad Men was as superlative as ever, if a little more cluttered and snappier paced than usual. And this morning I've enjoyed travelling through time via rail at this nifty BBC web gallery. I love old railway posters, beautiful shapes, bright and breezy colours, liberating and optimistic. Was there ever a time when they didn't drip nostalgia? Even when they were brand new? I love them in the same way that I love the old Shell posters, many of which were designed by well known artists and illustrators of the day including Graham Sutherland and Edward Ardizzone. Travel is food for the mind, the body and the soul. That's what I've always found, anyway.