Flowers for May

THESE TINY SAXIFRAGES are my small windowbox garden, planted not long ago, and reaching towards the light that tips on these bright mornings over the top of that oldest thatch onto my paintings as they are born. Through their stems I see the village go by from my desk. Children walking to school, unfathomably huge lorries of logs, texting horseriders, and ladies on bikes... This view was included this week on Terri Windling's window view blog feature, where you can see views through windows of folks all over. Looking from inside out.

I write from the edge of London now, half way to Suffolk where I'll be selling my wares at this weekend's Weird and Wonderful Wood fair. Come along if you are passing by Stowmarket, I'll be in the barn! The journey has been epic so far: relearning my rusty driving skills in a little rented van, and on the way finding myself stranded (and threatened with police!) in a petrol station without enough pennies to pay for £5.68's worth of fuel! I was rescued by a petrol-station-angel in the form of a lady eating a sandwich who crossed my palm with 5 pound coins as she overheard my panicked phone call to the bank! (I then had to go back sheepishly and ask her for 68 more pence!) We exchanged addresses for the return of the loan and I blessed her in my thoughts all the way!

... and stopped for a cup of Verge Tea, teabagless as I was:


Life is a whirlwind of paint and colour this May! I have so much work to complete, and I am fighting not to get buried by it all! But I look forward to June, when days will be clear to walk up hills and look over the edge into the unfolding year... And all the while I delight in every little plant that blinks from the verges: goosegrass, dandelion, nettle, stitchwort.
I leave you in haste with my Summer Crow, painted for Melanie in watercolour as the last in my commissioned series of four crow-seasons. He too looks out across summer fields grasping a sunflower in his claws...

A spring walk one sunny evening by the river

Gnarls in the Branches

LAST NIGHT brought a sprinkling of snows that seemed to fall underneath the streetlamps only, but this morning the snow is gone. This corner of the country is the bare toe poking out from under the snow blanket that covers the rest of England. The skies have a leaden lowness to them here and the winds are chilly. We have discovered a little track that winds behind the carpark fence and takes you into muddy fields and eventually forests, where we've seen treeroots knotted like old ladies' contemplative fingers, abandonded trailers and puddles which turn the trees upsidedown. And we've eaten peanutbutter sandwiches and talked to horses with coats on, and worn our legs out walking for miles.


Back in the truck I have been hunkering down at my desk with an oil lamp and headphones and painted fervently, trying to pretend that the view out of the window is not tarmac.
Melanie has commissioned me to paint four seasons of crows, the winter aspect of which I made last October. She has been waiting patiently for the next one and I have finally completed it.
This painting has been through a gnarled struggle of sorts.. mainly because I drew it out onto the watercolour paper way back before we left Scotland and it has sat tucked inside the sketchpad ready to paint since then. Somehow the momentum of a work gets lost for me if I leave a gap that long within the process of working on it. So I tried to paint it and there were moments when I thought it might be getting somewhere but by the end I despised it. Really it was so dreadful I had to start again. And of course when this happens my confidence plummets to a place where I am convinced I can no longer do it.


I needed to replensish my reserves of inspiration and so buried myself in various Arthur Rackham books... A master and a half he was, and also an accomplished drawer of crows and gnarly branches. I looked in close detail at his lines and tones and marvelled. I think to try to emulate the old masters is a good way to learn, but it raises an interesting dilemma for me: because imitating a contemporary feels very wrong, epecially the copying of ideas ... so why is it alright if the artist is dead? Artists in days gone by would have always learned by copying their predecessors and I think this is an extremely valuable learning method, for somehow the knowledge enters you through the pen and bypasses your rational brain, eventually becoming lodged inside your subconscious fingertips.. so that you are just better at it than before!
It seems to me similar to the oral tradition of passing down stories from generation to generation, but instead of tales, design ideas and specific ways of making image are passed down, and over time this knowledge is naturally subtly altered with each person it passes through.


Ever since my schooldays, I have had an aversion to someone looking over my shoulder and copying.. it makes me cross, it is as if I am being stolen from. I remember an occasion when I was about 9 and we were asked at school to draw our initial made from all the things that represented the thing we loved to do best. I painstakingly drew a letter R with the straights made from pencils and paintbrushes and the semicircle was a protractor. (not that I was keen on maths, it just belonged to the contents of my pencil case which meant drawing to me) But being a slow dreamer-Rima, another boy whose name also began with R had taken my idea and got to the teacher to show his drawing first. I was very annoyed, but this beady-eyed teacher knew what had gone on, and told him off for copying. I was inwardly relieved. And to this day, the idea of someone taking something that represents me and passing it off as their own somehow panics me. It's as if on some inner level I am being erased I suppose. I think this is more relevant when it comes to ideas... it's ok to learn by copying another's technique, beneficial in fact. But it must be filtered through your own eyes and ideas before becoming an artwork I think.

So, I have studied Rackam's works at close proximity these last few days and been inspired. I have made a work not nearly as wonderful as his, it is different... it's my own ... but I was helped by a skilled teacher long dead.

Treescapes & Seasons (..Seascapes & Treasons?)

UP IN OUR CORNER of Scotland where the clouds are almost within reach, we are being buffeted and blown, whipped by the tails of gales and peppered with ices and hails. Even a flurry of snow happened upon us the other day. It is freezing and wet and the shortlived warm autumn colours are being blown off their branches and lay sludged at the roadside in a brown puddled patchwork.

I have just finished a small commissioned watercolour painting of a crow, sitting up in winter branches overlooking a small hamlet in the hills where a chimney smokes and reminds him of the origins of fire. This painting is for Melanie who loved the Lenape legend of the rainbow crow and the smoking chimney is a remnant of the fire in this tale. I delved into my lovely brand new box of watercolours for this painting and used a smidgen of gouache for the snow on the branches.
As he is packaged up and readied for a trip to the post office (a windy six mile journey for us) I am stacking books upstairs into "going", "staying" and "mum and dad's house" piles... there's rather a lot to fit into our compact little rolling home.

The other day I bought a tiny locally grown pumpkin which we roasted in the oven, and after we'd eaten it we curled up to watch a lovely film which we had already seen at the cinema, but wanted to see again. It is a Gaelic film, a tale of a grandfather on the isle of Skye and of the tales that he tells to his grandchildren, and of the mystery in the seas and trees of the island. It is a beautiful film, all spoken in Gaelic using unknown actors and painted sonically with a haunting musical score. Here's the trailer... I highly recommend you buy it, download it, enjoy it. It's called SEACHD: The Inaccessible Pinnacle.

Wishing you all warm ends of Octobers with no draughts blowing down the gaps ..

Naomi & The Devil of Darkling Green

TODAY'S TALE takes us into the mind of a young girl who is not like the others, into forests and derelict mental asylums, into a village plagued by Strange Goings On and

a murder of crows,
a caucus of crows,
an alibi of crows,
a hover of crows,
a congress of crows,
a storytelling of crows,
a horde of crows,
a muster of crows,
a parcel of crows,
a cowardice of crows,
a cauldron of crows *

arriving in ever growing numbers to take roost on the roofs.

I am very pleased to announce that I was happened upon this winter by Danny Rhodes, a Kent author whose new book Naomi & The Devil of Darkling Green is to be published by Scott Pack of The Friday Project in spring 2009. I have been set the task of bringing Darkling Green and all its inhabitants to life with my pencil and paintbrush and I am very excited indeed...


*some collective nouns for crows ... aren't they wonderful!