New paintings and regular art updates.
Cabbage leaf, green and wrinkled, veins branching out like a tree toppled at forty five degrees. I love the squeaky, crunching sound as you chop through it with a knife. I have a strange memory of someone hacking at a cabbage ‘head’ to make the sound effect of Ann Boleyns head being chopped off. This is a savoy cabbage, dark green, leafy, full of vitamins and minerals. Hopefully not too overcooked (I’m making our evening meal).
Ink bleeds through paper. Draw around those patches, lines and dots, and you get a patchwork ‘map’ that looks like roads and boulevards, streets and squares. A change of colour for city blocks. Villages line up on roads between fields. Some streets are tree lined, others are concrete. Does it show your age? Are you industrial or agrarian? Modern or ancient? Fortified? Or do you see veins, arteries and capillaries?
The leaves will turn soon, green turning to golds and oranges, the wind blowing through the branches, stripping them until they are bare. Cold and frosty mornings crisping the leaf litter. So that eventually the skeletons of their veins are exposed. Children making prints from the leaves, painting them and pressing them down onto paper. Making them into patterns. Making them into wreaths and table decorations. Using gold and bronze spray paint to cover them. Adding a bit of Holly or Ivy and a red candle for Christmas cheer.
After autumn, Winter chills, usually wet now instead of snow. The branches bare until Spring arrives. Then buds, expanding into leaves again. Back to Summer, heat, flowers, scents, shimmering haze. Life.
Mallaband-Brown