New paintings and regular art updates.
Oh I love pattern and colour,
I love birds, flowers and trees,
Green men, phoenix, mythical beasts.
Who wants bland and boring?
Who wants pale and wan?
Why not get those colours
Under your skin.
Life is so exciting.
Life can be such fun.
If only we embrace it
Under the sun.
Never give me plain things
Always give me jazz
Living in a coloured land
Magic has begun.
More sketches. These are of the restaurant by the river in Otley (finished), a pine tree outside the wizard tea room at Alderley Edge on the way home where we stopped for lunch. A woman and her dog sitting outside at a picnic table at the wizard tea room.
We travelled about 140 miles on that day so I was desperate fit a sit down and it was good to sketch while we were waiting for our food. A similar thing happened at the restaurant. We had a bit of a wait so I sketched the view but the food arrived before I could finish it so I added a few details when we were on the way home.
I posted a couple of photos of this painting a few days ago but I wasn’t happy with it. I was going to change it but didn’t know what was going to happen to it. I had ideas but as I worked on it I couldn’t figure out whether they would work or not. One side was complicated, the other to simple. How to balance the sides but not paint over the whole thing?
The solution was to paint over a lot of it, but allow the background to show through. I tried to go for an exploded boxes side on the left of the picture and a more curved pattern on the right. Also I added more green and blue to the right. Finally I added some metallic paint on the left to tone down the black I had used to paint the box shapes just on one side of each box/object. Anyway the cat seems to like it!
Encaustic is using a small hot iron to melt wax. You then used the iron to place it onto thick card and move it around until you have made a picture. I tend to draw patterns with it I like the arched shapes and feathered patterns you can make with the pointed end of an iron.
Other things you would need are newspaper to place the cards on while you are working with hot wax. Pointed heated styluses to draw into and with the wax, a fire blanket to place underneath everything. Cloth to clean the iron between different colour waxes and also soft cloth to burnish the final peice and bring out the shine of the wax.
Our set has about two dozen colours so there can be plenty of choices of wax to create different patterns.
I learnt to do this from one of the workshops our art group organises from time to time.
It was early this morning when we saw this Fly Agaric mushroom in the hotel grounds. There was the bright red cap with its white spots, and something had been nibbling it! I know these fungi are not safe to eat, poisonous I think.
The colours are pretty accurate. The sun was shining from a quite low angle so the red is a bit burnt out.
This is one of the most amazing fungi I have ever seen.
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A while ago Penkhull residents association decided to have a competition to create a flag for the village. The pictures surrounding the final flag were the 10 designs that had the most overall influence over the final design. I was really pleased to find out that one of them was my design. (the middle top design).
It feels good to have a flag to describe the village. The oval and lines coming in symbolise the village green and the roads coming into and surrounding it. The cockrel is based on the weather vane on top of the church. The colours are vibrant and cheerful. Local people had a choice of 4 designs taken from dozens of entries. The central flag in the photo was the winning design.
We briefly visited Yorkshire sculpture park today. The sculptures usually seen there are by Henry Moore. However we didn’t have time as it was a flying visit so we looked at sculpture by Giuseppe Penone.
I’m always looking for things to draw so I drew a few of his works and a couple on the veranda where we had a quick sandwich….
The sculpture park is set in huge grounds with a lake and pieces of art dotted all around the site. There are also underground galleries which is where some of Penones art was situated.
Entrance to the park is free. You just pay for parking.
The sculpture park is near to junction 38 of the M1 motorway in Yorkshire a few miles south of Leeds.
I had an idea inside my head for a painting from digital (pixels) to analogue .. But it wasn’t like this. I had done an interesting digital drawing a few days ago. It was meant to look like that. Not this mess! Trouble is it’s due in today, but I have got to be somewhere else. I will crave a few extra days but not sure I will get them….
This needs rescuing. Maybe I should scrub it out and start again ….
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As you can see my original idea is nothing like it except perhaps the colours.
What should I do….? Follow me to see if I can get something decent out of this!
Time and tide wait for no man
Tidal reef,
High tide……
Why tide?
The Moon pulls on the Earth and the Earth pulls on the Moon. They are gravitationally linked so that one face of the Moon always faces us and the water in our oceans is attracted upwards towards it by its gravity. On the other side of the world there is also a rise in the waters because there is less gravitational pull on the oceans because they are futher away from the moon…..
Why high tides?
The water is pulled up so far by the moon, but as water flows inwards towards the land as the tide comes in it can also rise further if it is pushing into a narrowing area such as a gap between two islands or into the narrowing channel of a river or stream. In this case sometimes the water can overtop the banks if it is a particularly high tide, such as a spring tide. The water will rise higher if it is forced into the estuary by wind as well as tidal forces.
One third of the world’s population live on various coast lines around the world. If the world continues to warm up then these people will be at risk from the rising tides caused by global warming. Many countries have built costal defenses but these are being damaged every year during stormy weather. Replacing the damaged protective barriers is being abandoned in some places as not cost effective and some costal salt marshes are being recreated to protect the land.
Fluffy clouds, mares tails and con trails at Spode today. I loved the way the sky was crossed and patterned with clouds. The sun was quite low and now we have moved into autumn it took on that crisp shimmer when the heat of summer has all but been extinguished from the sky. The warmth seems to wash out of the blue and it becomes a deeper hue.
Round about the skeletal remains of parts of the spode site sit like dinosaur ribs, shed of flesh and skin, one gaunt necklike chimney sits upright looking out over the landscape of rust and broken bricks.
All this hides the beating pulse of creativity, artists, ceramacists and other makers populate the various untidy buildings. Glass and clay, paint and photography, laser cutting and architecture. All of them dwell under the fluffy white clouds, mares tails and con trails.
Next weekend we are having an OPEN studio. On the 6th and 7th of October.
Admission is free from 11am to 4pm. You are welcome to come into the studios which are open to the public. There will be much to see including a new exhibition of people’s work on the theme of transition. We are at the Spode site, Elanora Street, Stoke, Stoke-on-Trent. The way in will be signposted.
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