An English Arcanum

A WHILE AGO I told you of three mysterious hares who shared between them just three ears and yet had two ears each. All over Dartmoor these hares can be seen, in the roof bosses of churches, on shop signs and plaques on buildings. And now they can be seen leaping around the second album from Oxford folk band Telling the Bees. You may remember my artwork for their debut Untie the Wind. And just one year later these four talented musicians have put together another exquisite collection of music. An English Arcanum is a mossy basketful of eleven sonic tales made with bagpipes and concertina and voices and mandolin and cello and a good deal of acorns, and it is just wonderful. I was delighted to be asked again by this lovely foursome to make the artwork for their music and this time I am even happier with the result. And so, I am pleased to say, are they. It is all rendered in fine fine pencil. An old one-toothed man, a wayfaring musician, walks out of the woods carrying a barrel organ / cabinet of curiosities which bears a compartment for each song. (The lone tooth was inspired by the one swinging gnasher of a rural farmer called Ivan who we met on a windy hilltop in Wales!) From under his hat poke oak leaves and he wears a pilgrim hat badge of a bee. If you look closely you'll find all sorts of little puzzling details which will make sense when you hear the songs.

(please click to enlarge)

Inside the three strange hares circle the CD deftly as the music plays...



Oak twigs entwine with lyrics...



Old riddles are unravelled by the four winds...

And the four musicians look on proudly...

The new album is already receiving deservedly glowing reviews and the official album launch is this Friday 27th November at the Queen of Clubs cabaret, Holywell Music Rooms, Oxford, if you should be in the vicinity. Otherwise you can have a listen and order a copy of the album for £12 from the band themselves here, or find news and buzzings on their blog.

For me there is something intrinsically right about combining music with imagery, if you listen to this beautifully crafted music whilst looking at the drawings I hope you can almost imagine the pencil strings thrumming.

An English Arcanum is exactly that - a beautiful evocation of an old and strange yet wildly familiar England.

Acorns and Blackberries

ALL ALONG THE LANES the brambles are fruiting. In between jagged stems burst little black juicy clusters, each day bearing another nearly ready berry. Our long walk to town is slowed by these waylaying roadside treats. Some blackberries are small and still too sour, others fall apart to a sauce in our fingers. Some are crunchy with seeds or beasts. For the perfect king berry, hardest to reach, we must compete with feasting wasps. Some say you shouldn't pick blackberries after Michelmas (29th September) for the devil comes down and wees upon them. Perhaps we should make a blackberry crumble soon.


And I have been painting, a tiny work, wrapped around with blackberries for an approaching autumn. This is a wedding pendant, commissioned by Anna and Justin who we met at a fair. They are to be married this month and wanted a tiny painting for her to wear on the day. It measures about 3 inches in height and will be worn with a forest green dress. On the back I painted their initials and the date of their happy day (All full of nines like my own date of birth!). There's a smoking rural cottage and hills, and in front of it a two handled lovers' cup. I hunted my books on folklore to find a nice image for a wedding, and found that two spoons on a saucer means a marriage approaches.


Blackberries are not the only fruits in my work of late. There are acorns in the album artwork for the second Telling The Bees album which I have been working away on busily with my 0.3mm pencil. Most of the main drawings are done, but I still have all the smaller work for the interior to do as well as knotting it all together with words and layout.
For those of you who haven't seen it before, you can see my work for the band's debut album here. We were delighted to finally meet Bees' songwriter Andy and his missus Nomi last week as they travelled past our Dartmoor field with bagpipes and mandolin, and tea and biscuits and talk were enjoyed.
This time the artwork includes a sort of wayfaring musician, coming out of the forest, who is at the same time some old oaky symbol of England. He carries a barrel organ / cabinet of curiosities, that displays an object for each song. I shall leave those discoveries until the day when you hear the songs. They are delightful. On the CD circle leap those three hares again.


I found this oak berry and leaf in the grass here the other day. Though the trees are still green, the morning airs feel different. We are remembering the time of year when we used to light fires before breakfast, and can smell the leaves thinking about browning. I always find the turn of this new season hits me like a memory of all past autumns in my life. Soon I will turn thirty which is a bizarre thing indeed...

The mists between horses and hares

AND SO WE TRAVELLED OFF from Wales towards the Big Green Gathering, overnighting on this spot along the A466 - a picturesque stretch of road that runs down beside the Offa's Dyke path for a while. We don't often see our truck home from above, but there we could walk into the conifer forest above and look down on ourselves as the mists rolled in. We thought we'd outrun the rain as the sun tempted us back towards England. But it caught us up. And low clouds skidded over us dropping their downpours and rushing on. We even saw a cloud outside our back door, hovering over the river valley. A gruff man pulled up while we were parked here and asked if we were selling our truck. He told us he'd owned it once, but we didn't believe him.
And then we drove on, down winding roads that lost us a wing mirror at one point due to a wide-wandering Hymer.


All the way to Cheddar we drove and gathered with others ready for the festival. But it was not to be. A police injunction stopped the event from going ahead, and so over the next few days many sad people chugged away from the muddy field through the ceaseless rain and back to where they'd come from. We were due to be joining the permaculture area there, with our truck dwelling friends Hannah and Daniel. Eventually another field was rustled up for those who would have been our permaculture neighbours, to have a mini gathering on the edge of Dartmoor.

There we spent a week with other lovely people. We sat around fires and sold some pictures, we walked and we sat, we met hedgehogs and gypsies, we learned stove making, we watched films in yurts and chased children. Here we all are attempting to assemble a geodesic dome with the two truck houses in the background and a twin or two in the foreground.


There were moments of despair as we realised our coffers were nigh-on empty and the rain did nothing to cheer us. But people bought pictures and the sun came out.. and life went on.


And then we wandered on. Further north into Dartmoor we went, taking care to use the main roads. Then as we approached our hilltop destination we found ourselves in first gear on hair-raisingly narrow steep bends, but we made it. And now we are here, in what might possibly be our favourite place in England so far.


Parked on the top of a hill we can see for miles over the moors when the clouds clear. Such an amazing landscape I have not come across before. There are those most English of gnarly oak trees gripping the stony lane-sides, there are delightful villages, delightful people, and the views are just incredible. We've met the ponies on the hill, and I even lay down next to some afternoon-snoozing foals. Out of our round bedroom window we've watched the clouds skud across the full moon amid the most beautiful of skies and the quietest of airs.





And most delightful of all I seem to have walked into the land of mythic artists. How pleased I was to meet Terri Windling and her wonderful work in the flesh. In fact it is she we have to thank for field hunting for us. I feel just a little starry-eyed to have a writer and artist whose work I have long admired come to tea, and humble to have her admire my work in turn. I can see why these artists who dwell inside tales have chosen this corner of England for their homes. There is something 'other' about the land, but it is absolutely not describable in words. It is for me a little like the warm memory of a deeply enjoyed book. Meeting this land is like meeting a love. It is wild yet familiar, and I think I should paint in it.


Before all of these latest journeyings, my friend Poppy sent me a wonderful piece of stitchery that she spent weeks working on. It contains words from the Havamal and old blackwork patterns. I shall be framing it and hanging it in our sleeping quarters soon, I think it describes things for travellers well.


While we are here, in between visiting lovely people and exploring the moors, I am working away on the next album cover for Oxfordshire folk band Telling The Bees. Amongst many folkloric symbols woven into their music, which I am to illustrate, is a strange symbol, the so-called Tinner's Hares, a triple hare icon, where three hares share just three ears, yet appear to have two each. Oddly I have seen this symbol here where we are, on shop fronts and posters. It seems that there are more triple-hares in Dartmoor than anywhere else. It is an old symbol, which like the Green Man appers often on medieval church bosses and the like. But no-one knows quite what it means...

Wet socks and disappointment

NEWS AT LAST, but it's bad news I'm sorry to say. On the day when folk like this cheerful bunch on the right might be flinging themselves eagerly around a garlanded maypole, I have far less fancy-free tidings.
The hard drive people have sent me the final "diagnostic report" today following its £200 visit to a "sister company" to be fixed. Alas no data could be salvaged from it, and so that's apparently that. How very very disappointing this is. I am trying hard not to be suspicious about this company who may well have known that it was a dead end job at the beginning (they offer a no data, no fee service), so told me that it had to be sent to a "sister" company for a non returnable £200 to be fixed before they would know if the data was recoverable. I don't know. I would rather think the best of folk, so I am just going to have to swallow it and accept the loss. I am having it sent to my brother who has the right kind of brain and fiddly tools and who might just be able to do what the experts can't, but really I think that indeed is that.
I will be gathering any files lurking in the odd dusty corner of other people's machines, and unsold paintings can be rescanned. As for everything else... I will just begin again happily, and not dwell on what else might have been on that hard drive. Thank you again to everyone for their goodheartedness and words of hope. I've spent the rest of the kind donations on a new robust hard drive to replace the old one so that I can begin archiving my work again; it has a rugged orange off-road rubber protective jacket and an estimated maximum "drop height" of 35 inches!

Hey ho ... in other news... Telling the Bees now have a lovely new website, which I have been busy making this week, and the album is receiving jolly good words from folk all over the place.
We've had dreadful weather lately.. pelting hail storms and thunder and lightning. A visit to town the day before yesterday to get groceries and glass cut for our round window left me with squelching shoes and shivering soaking socks.
The mystery painting is to be completed this very evening and while the potatoes bake in the oven I invite you all to dry your wet socks by our lovely fire...

Telling the Bees

A WEEK after the Sunday-of-Lost-Data I have a little honeyed tale for you. Yesterday the postman brought a thrilling package of CDs, all printed and proper... my first ever album artwork for the fabulous debut release by Telling the Bees ~ a band of four lovely Oxford based musicians who might describe their music as ...darkly crafted folk, classical, cinematic, prog, acoustic-chill, psychedelia!

Untie the Wind, as the album is called, is a wonderful conjuring of a darkly imagined England, and for me has a very strong flavour of something friendly yet strange, and it is this folkloric old and yet not old world that I have tried to conjure in my drawings for them.


I was inspired by the old folk custom that inspired the band's name: that in English villages back in the days of superstitions... it was very important to inform the beehives and their inhabitants of any news: changes of ownership, births, deaths and marriages, otherwise they would take umbrage and leave their hives en masse. The custom was for a newly bereaved widow or heir to go up to each hive, tap it three times with an iron key and then inform the bees that their master had died. Sometimes the hives were adorned with black ribbon to show that the bees were in mourning, or left a small piece of wedding cake to share in matrimonial celebrations.


Telling the Bees will be performing at gigs and festivals across the country and if they buzz through your corner of the woods, I urge you to go along and dance to their evocative mandolins and English border bagpipes, fiddles and cellos, concertinas and songs.

Do click on the pictures to enlarge them.


"A Bedfordshire woman was telling me the other day," says a writer in a Northern daily paper, "how her son had been stung all over by bees. 'And no wonder,' she said, 'he never told them he was going to put them in a new 'ome, and everybody knows that before you goes to put bees in a new 'ome, you must knock three times on the top of the 'ive and tell 'em, same as you must tell 'em when anyone dies in the 'ouse. Ef you don't, they'll be spiteful, for bees is understanding creatures, an' knows what you say to them."

Just the same as a month before,--

The house and the trees,

The barn's brown gable, the vine by the door,--

Nothing changed but the hives of bees.

Before them, under the garden wall,

Forward and back,

Went drearily singing the chore-girl small,

Draping each hive with a shred of black.

Trembling, I listened: the summer sun

Had the chill of snow;

For I knew she was telling the bees of one

Gone on the journey we all must go!

Then I said to myself, "My Mary weeps

For the dead to-day:

Haply her blind old grandsire sleeps

The fret and the pain of his age away."

But her dog whined low; on the doorway sill,

With his cane to his chin,

The old man sat; and the chore-girl still

Sung to the bees stealing out and in.

And the song she was singing ever since

In my ear sounds on:--

"Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence!

Mistress Mary is dead and gone!"

some verses from TELLING THE BEES by John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)

Honey and Klezmer

A SWARM of bees for you .. a little detail from the album cover I have beeeen busy with. Following the doldrums with the first attempt, I decided to begin again... and am thankfully much happier with this version, which I have drawn in pencilly detail and which is quite different from the first. I was newly inspired by an old folk custom that the band have based their name on and I was lucky in having plenty of time to do this work again, but isn't it just horrible when you hate your own work?
I would like to raise a glass to the tremendous Propelling Pencil which has enabled me to endulge my finicky nature in my drawings lately and dispense with a sharpener!
As I write, Tui is coaxing the fire into life with some kindling cut from some abandoned old fence posts we came across a while ago, whilst we debate what we can muster up for dinner from a few lentils and some brussels sprouts at the bottom of the fridge and listen to the frankly brilliant Amsterdam Klezmer Band...

Bees in a Blizzard & Dripping Pianos

TODAY I SIT at my desk looking out at a blizzard of wild sideways-swirling-snows and paint bees and gnarled trees for an album cover commission ...

Meanwhile Tui has been sneaking into the village hall across the way where they keep an old piano in the men's toilets ... he hid his recording device inside the back of the piano whilst he played to the sound of cisterns refilling and dripping taps.