New paintings and regular art updates.
I did a quick sketch from a photo I took today. Wish it was drawn from real life but I was walking so I didn’t get the chance to sit and draw….St Thomas’s Church, Penkhull, Stoke-on-Trent. The Wassail starts out from the village hall which I’d just across the road to the right of the church. At the top of Trent Valley Road. #bandofsketchers today’s prompt was religious building..
A song for the Apple Tree. To an ancient tune….thanks to my friend Bruce for the words!
Old Apple Tree, We are Come to Wassail Thee
Wassail Song
Old Apple tree, we are come to wassail thee,
All for to bloom, and to bear thy flowers and fruit so free.
Wassail! wassail! all round our town;
Our cups are white and our ale is brown.
Our bowl is made of a good ashen tree,
And here’s kind fellows as will drink to thee.
Hats full, caps full, five-bushel bags full,
Barns full, floors full, stables full, tallats full,
And the little hole under the stairs, three times three!
Hip, hip, hurrah! shout we.
We found an apple as green as grass on our apple tree this December just after Christmas! It was in a sheltered part of the garden and had clung on round the back of the tree. Now it’s sitting in a bowl on its own. Pride of place. We may have to pour libations onto our trees. Wassail!
Two drawings prompted by a friend who is interested in more abstract work. The first is a repeated line drawing of carrier bags using two pens held together. Then I wrote over the top, plastic carrier bags, too much plastic in the world. The second is meant to represent folded paper. I could also have tried using masking tape but I don’t have any. So I drew on limited colours and varied the thickness and weight of the lines. Digital drawing.
Through the dark night a butterfly flits, grey and green, not a moth. Looking for night-time flowers, like night scented stock.
The ghostly wings drop tiny scales, dusting the flowers with small droplets of white and grey.
Wings like snowflakes, flying through the cold dark, settling in a crevice at dawn. Sleeping till sunset arrives again….
Why is it
When you
Cross your
Eyes
You get
Double vision?
I see
Your face
In my
Glass
Don’t laugh
At my
Crossed
Eyes!
Is it
Double vision
Or a
Double cross…?
Apple found in our garden in December. I wrote about it in a blog about Wassails. We joined in a virtual Wassail at the weekend and drank too much cider. People posted photos of previous years Wassails when they walked about with flaming torches around the boundaries of the parish. No threats were made but there were so many of us we had to have a police escort and cars were stopped as we wandered down the road to the Penkhull apple tree. A few jolly hours to beat back the cold and the dark. In some places in the past they used to shoot shotguns at the trees to make them flower and bear fruit. There are other traditions where they beat the trunks of Walnut trees to get them to bear fruit. We’ve never had that problem with ours. The squirrels always find enough nuts and then we have to find places far away to plant the saplings, we’ve already got too many!
I think I was trying to do abstract faces with lines here. Somehow the doodles at the bottom of the picture seem to fit with the contours above. I don’t remember the canvas so I probably painted over it. Sometimes what you paint is not what you want and you have to scrap it. Sometimes you fool yourself into thinking somethings OK when it really isn’t. I like some things and they just won’t work…. I may try and alter this in a digital app? Don’t know. I think this image is about three or four years old….
Lockdown, I can only go out for exercise and do essential shopping.
But when you think about it, it’s not that bad. I’m not stuck on an island in the middle of nowhere with no one to talk to. I am warm, I have food, I cn talk to people on the phone or online. I might be getting a bit bored. But it’s not like in the past, when I was a child. On Sundays everywhere was closed. No one that worked in simple, low paid jobs, could afford a car. Very few eople had tv’s and there was only one channel and a few radio stations. Computers didn’t exist except in universities or in the armed forces. The air was dirty and polluted, coal fires were the norm to heat houses. It was a different world.
Now we are linked? Possibly too much. But if we stay away from each other as much as we can? Things might just get better…
Experiment with Sketch app and photodirector. Trying to make this look like an old print, weathered and scratched. Faded and bitten out like an etching that has been worn out. Trying to look like a photocopy…
Mallaband-Brown