New paintings and regular art updates.
I placed this skull inside a roll of sellotape to give an idea of scale. It’s sitting on an A6 sketchbook. I think we found it on a walk about ten years ago. I think it’s a rodents skull but the jaw is missing. I have it in my office room and use it when I want to do a still life (death)… A memento mori?
What is death, what happens when we die. To be left as just the bones. Oh sorry, getting a bit maudlin.
I need the seaside, it’s been a couple of months since we went and I really miss it. I want to see the big blue sky. The blue or grey waves. Stormy, misty or sunny. I don’t care.
I like being beside the sea like it says in the old song, I’m not really bothered about being on it. I don’t like the motion of the ocean.. Up and down, around and down. Waves, breaking over the boat.
Yes, I need to go on a trip along the coast, taking in the scenery. Looking at the boats, feeling the breeze.
Memory of a visit in 2017 to a cafe in Prestatyn, Wales. It popped up on my Facebook page today. I remember the place, really interesting, there were lots of houseplants in the window.
Sadly I don’t know if it’s still open after 18 months of covid. I hope places like this have survived, but there have been so many problems that we have all suffered. I will try and call in next time we are over there.
Shells
Mussels
Remind me
Of the beach
The sea
Washed by waves
Crushed underfoot
One day you will be sand.
Random inflated lobster seen three years ago at Shipley in North Yorkshire. It was a giant of the species. I think there was a food festival on? But as Shipley is well inland I don’t think it was from a fishing fleet!
I love the two wheel cart it sits on, presumably to move it around? Would it have been in a parade of giant shellfish? I don’t know… Crabs moving sideways, Oysters opening and closing, massive pearls shining in the sun.
Bright red, ike a post box. It must represent a cooked lobster… Poor thing…
Ripples remembered on the beach at Rhyl. Memories of walking on that beach as a child. The gently sloping beach would allow you to walk in shallow water as the tide came in or went out. I remember walking over those ridges that were quite hard, my little feet could feel them, they don’t flatten as your weight goes onto them if you are a child. Rhyl beach is long and wide when the tide is out. When I was small I wandered off to paddle in the sea. But when I turned round I couldn’t see my family anywhere. It was before I found out I needed glasses and it was only a kind person who took me to the lifeguard station where they used the tannoy that helped me to get reunited. On the same holiday I think I wandered into someone else’s caravan because it looked like ours? I must have been about six as I got glasses aged seven.
In about 2006 and 2007 I painted several murals in the Arnold Bennett suite of the Leopard Hotel. It has appeared on Britain’s most Haunted on TV and until a couple of years ago was still open. Now no one seems to know what is happening with it. I’m sure it still needs a lot of work doing on it. No doubt my murals will get painted over if it is refurbished. It’s sad, because for a few years the place thrived. But there was also bad luck there. I wish things coukd be better for it. X
Climb a tree
Go up high
Up the branches
To the sky
Rough, hard bark
Hard to climb
In the dark
And down again.
Eighty foot
Old and strong
Limbs of great girth
Twisted and long.
Memory showed
Trees far up there
If I climbed up?
I’d get a scare!
I remember a cyclo camping holiday in Wales with my hubby. We forgot the main tent. We got to Wales on the train and to our campsite. It was only when we unpacked the tent we realised we had left the tent airing on the washing line at home. We had to tie our groundsheet onto a young man’s tent for shelter, it was raining and not good under there despite having our sleeping bags. So we went in the camp bar and bought the lad whiskeys to say thanks for him helping us out. Then in the morning we realised we had spent all our holiday money on booze so we had to comeback the next day. We ended up in the guards van of the train with a rugby team because there were no seats. They were Very Rude! Worst holiday ever!
Hot day, blue sky, barely a cloud in the sky, cattle in a field, reflections in the canal. Memories are made of this, blues and greens, shade and light.
I have memories of days like this, maybe not as hot, but they were calm and happy. I remember a time when things were not scary. Oh there were diseases around, and awful things were happening. But I was a child. I didn’t know about them.
Then I remembered the disaster at Aberfan. There was a land slip of old mining waste. It slid down a hill and landed on a school. Children and adults died. That was the first TV report I remember seeing.
Now rivers rise and places flood all the time, “hundred year events” happen every ten or twenty years. Storms dump three months water on a country while other places suffer heat domes and wild fires.
Will the wonderful days of summer be once in 100 days instead? Maybe we need to sort it out NOW!
I wrote this a few days ago but for some reason it did not publish? Now on a grey, dismal day I look back after another walk and Im sad it wasnt like this, but glad it was a lot cooler!
Mallaband-Brown