Clare's Blog: See The Light

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Thu, 29 Jul 2010 Here's number 9 of the series 'Chalkland Wildflower Meadow' I feel completely gripped by this meadow beside which I've lived for 22 years. This one is called 'Sun Beginning to Set Across the Chalkland Wildflower Meadow' and sums up the look as far as I see it of just what it says. I'm still attempting to make each individual mark more abstract, and as this is number two of this particular composition, and I'm planning a bigger version still, number three, I suspect that some changes/progressions/experiments are afoot...All of the meadow paintings are on a square format, but I'm keeping most of it under wraps until November/December when they'll go on exhibition at Acanthus Gallery in Wareham. Still no Colin. My twin, Kate, and me...of maypole dancing age?

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 Still nothing on Colin to report; I hope my instinct, that she's away with the gang, is right. It seems that the third brood this summer, now flying, have ousted the now teenage brood who are off in the fields gleaning. I really miss seeing her but of course have to keep a perspective on things. The longer I don't see her (five days now) the more marvellous it would be to have her fly down to the doorstep again. A little field vole has discovered seed left on the step for Colin and keeps zipping back for it. I've been on the bathroom roof at the back of the house looking over the cut meadow; its a collection of tracks, grass-cutting tracks, tractor tracks and my imaginary threads which the swallows weave as they criss-cross the meadow catching bugs. It reminds me of the way that patterns are woven around the maypole by the children weaving in and out...I have a bugbear about maypoles -Miss Hake, dreaded headteacher of our primary school- ALWAYS chose my twin sister to dance around the maypole but never me...yes I resent it to this day, I don't of course resent my sister but I do DESPISE Miss Hake for it...still. Be fair to young children; I so much wanted to do it, I must have had the face that she disliked!! Link to film from bathroom roof http://vimeo.com/1371640

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 I've been enjoying skies full of marks. Layer on layer, enigmatic, like a good painting. The wildflower meadow has been cut and baled. The swallows are still skimming it for bugs. If they dragged a silk behind them like a spider, they'd have woven a thing as thick as a rug by now. I watched a buzzard and a kestrel hunting on the same thermal the other day, round and round. I couldn't tell if they were paying attention to each other or not. The bird I haven't seen in the last three days is Colin. There are sparrows around but it seems not Colin. None of the seed which is out is being taken by them at the moment so I'm hoping the gang of young sparrows is off among the wheat fields. The cut meadow.

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 Colin's favourite dress Sitting rather folornly on the doorstep this morning as its two days since I've really seen Colin when she breezes in with a gang of youngsters and comes straight to the step for a mealworm! I was wearing the dress she recognises best so maybe that has something to do with it...she loves her mother in pink!

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 Hmmmmmmmm....no sigh of Colin at all today, in fact very quiet on the sparrow front. Even my bird feeder, which is sometimes emptied within a couple of hours by sparrows, is still half full from yesterday. I guess they're all off with the combining. .. http://vimeo.com/13525815 .. Martha Waintwright at Larmer Tree Festival last Sunday .. A fleeting visit from Colin last night and nothing thismorning; the farmers were combining yesterday, I reckon the sparrows were gleaning the leftovers. Here's a bit of whats going on at Chettle Village Hall this week.

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 This morning I had a spare half hour to blog or to sit on the doorstep with Colin...Yesterday I hadn't seen her all day (for the first time since we found her) so Colin won. She's cracking tougher seeds but still has those yellow marks at the side of her beak, relic from the time her beak opened much wider and was bright yellow around the edges. I don't know if those yellow bits will fade entirely in the end, but she still seems not quite fully grown. She perched on my sandals, my knee and my hand and chomped mealworms and sat right in the middle of her seed bowl again and flung the seeds far and wide looking for her favorites (golden linseed I think; hard to tell...everything flies in all directions). Last night with my Monday class and two people from my Chettle course we went to the Blandford Museum to draw. Its a museum full of local history from neolithic (think Knowlton!) through Iron Age, Romans, Saxons, Medieval, civil war, local gentry, the great fire of Blandford 1731 (town re-built by the Bastard brothers), war time, farming implements and a model railway of the track and Blandford Station blown up by Beeching (quoted by wikipedia as 'lifted') in 1969. Everyone drew, including me. I found a small human skull and a collection of bones and bowls, but everyone drew a variety of things from the eclectic collection. Tonight I've been in my shed working on more 'marks'. Blandford Station April 1963

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 These are the the two definitions of 'exotic' which pertain to my summer school (and my classes in general); 'Strikingly unusual or strange in effect or appearance' (this is how I'd like my students to think about their finished work) and 'Of a uniquely new or experimental nature' ( this is the attitude I'd like my students to have during the making of their work) Knowlton Church and Henge; painted possibly eight years ago? Now in Tokyo.

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 George and I cycled to Knowlton today, a 14th century ruined church (with earlier Saxon remains in evidence) built in a Bronze-age pagan earth circle (early 'Christianisation' of local religions). I thought I had mentioned it in an earlier blog but couldn't find it... Colin and I spent time on the doorstep, although she was reluctant to come to me initially because I was wearing a different dress...black instead of pink. The other day she had been wary of me because my hair was up. Her mother wears pink and has her hair down! I put my pink cardigan on and things were fine again. She pecked my toenails until I fed her. I put a bowl of mixed seeds down and she got right into it experimenting with all the varieties. Some were too much for her beak to crack, others she loved, like the linseed. She flung quite a lot out of the bowl if she disapproved. Once again I've been working on my 'marks'. This is a section of another painting -as yet too figurative for the marks not to immediately mean something- but I'm working on another version from the same drawing...and as a whole the painting might be more enigmatic...but thats for a later date! Tomorrow I set up the hall for the first day of my 2010 summer course on Monday...an exotic and busy week. Its hard work but I really look forward to it every year...thank goodness its only a week!

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 Colin still visits the doorstep for wheat and mealworms. I know she's feeding herself because often she'll arrive with a beak covered in what looks like the white stuff from the wheat-heart. We have wheat fields within her distance, I'm sure thats where she goes. It was wet and windy this morning, she came for as much as she could eat because she was wet already and I assume she doesn't want to be out getting wetter as she can't change her clothes like we do! This was Colin yesterday on my knee. She'll still jump and sit on my necklace so she can peck my chin. I'm still working on my 'marks'. Here are two rather poor photos taken with my phone (and reflecting the flash). These are from two of the square field paintings; At the moment the paintings are not big, the next ones will be big. Its affecting the way I shall be painting and handling paint for the next while. Its still a case of being completely enraptured by this chalkland wildflower meadow behind our house. Oh dear!! Just realised my bad maths...should be 0.1% of the population might respond to a spam email...not 1%...

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 The 'comments' facility was becoming clogged up with spam..for insurance comapnies and 'cialis' sales...what the hell is cialis??? And who on earth buys it because they've been spammed with all these junk emails??? I'm completely fed up with people trying to sell stuff that 99.9% of spammed recipients don't want (including me). Do 1% of the population really make it worthwhile spamming the other 99.9%? I suppose I don't need to ask the quesion. I've just been reading about Gillian Ayres - "Gillian Ayres is a contemporary painter, mural artist and teacher. Her exuberant work is in the vein of American abstract expressionism and European tachism, which is characterised by the spontaneous brushwork and drips and blobs of paint direct from the tube." I really love a lot of what Gillian Ayres paints, I love the shapes, colours, marks and the way the paintings suggest elements such as plants or people. I can't bear to read about an artist who is described as using 'drips and blobs' or is placed under a tag such as 'European tachism'...what is that? Wikipedia tells me that it is 'considered to be the European equivalent to abstract expressionism' but actually it tells us nothing about Gillian Ayres' paintings other than someone, probably not Gillian Ayres, has placed her in a box to which she most likely would not confine herself.

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 It was a really genial family gathering yesterday at the big oak dining table in my gallery. The hedge-row vase was moved to the fire hearth beause it so completely blocked the view across the table in all directions and not least because it also was covering the tray which Simon requisitioned from the Table Mountain Cafe when we were in South Africa. Colin, in her newer persona of being nervous of everyone except me, disappeared as soon as everyone arrived and couldn't be more than coaxed to peep out of the hedge and cheep quietly. Within about 30 seconds of them driving away down the track Colin was on the doorstep! I suppose its naive of me to think its amazing that she is so sensitive about other people. I am clear that the best thing is for her to be nervous, and when she was with me on the doorstep she was cowering at a noisy bi-plane going over. I'm not sure if it was the shadow or the noise (or both of course) which spooked her. She seems to be spending time away for longer, and eating less with me so I'm assuming she's learning to forage with the other sparrows. She's still wont to sit on my necklace and peck my chin so I think she sees me as one enormous mother but she can't quite work out where my beak is because she pecks my toe-nails too!

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 Forgot to mention, Colin and I spent some happy moments on the doorstep, I endured her attacking my toes when I didn't hurry up with the wheat seeds. I'm trying to teach her to twist the seed off the main stem, she's getting better and better, also her beak is becoming stronger and she is more dextrous at manipulating the seed in her beak to squeeze the seed out of the chaff. She turns the covered seed around and around in her beak and gradually it breaks the outerlayers off and she can squeeze the white heart of the seed into her beak. She goes mad for wheat, really loves it! I've been writing tonight but its so stilted. I can write here easily and I can pour forth on any subject by voice...various people threaten to get me a soap box, but writing for other reasons...tough, I'll have to keep practising. We've put our new reclaimed-oak dining table up in my gallery for a big family lunch party tomorrow. I had been watching the Hampton Court flower show on telly this evening and was suddenly inspired to make a vase of hedgerow weeds and flowers for the middle of the table. I went out and picked large poppy seed-heads, aquilegia seed-heads, various cow-parsley-like umbellifers, dock seed-heads, tall grasses and some creamy-pink dog roses and put them all in the glass vase that came from Grace. Of course they look fab! So I'm hoping that Simon's friend, who is sleeping tonight on the sofa-bed in my gallery doesn't suffer from hay-fever! Umbelliferae, as my students know so well already, make wonderful foreground references in a painting, and combine a lovely sturdy structure with very delicate flowers (although its the overall structure which interests me). Apparently the word 'Umbelliferae' comes from the same root as the word 'Umbrella'...they certainly do look very umbrella-like.

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 Another painting by Kandinsky. I was looking through a book and came across this painting by Wassily Kandinsky. It comes close to what I think John Epstien was talking about. The marks seem to be a response to something looked at but not a direct representation of what he saw. They give the feeling of close-up, distance and space in-between but are suggestive rather than precise about what the subject is. There's movement, texture, colour and balance...or off-balance...and it comes together in something intriguing, exciting and exquisite. I'm still completely taken with the daisy meadow at the back of our house. I hadn't realised its a chalkland wildflower meadow being carefully managed by my neighbour the farmer. I'm looking at it for the marks it leads me to make which individually mean less than they do combined. The field is probably why we have new wild flowers such as Hawksweed growing in our garden...self seeded from the field...I love it! Best of all..when someone was talking about Hawksweed on the telly the other day they said it grows on 'low quality soil'!!! I've seen Colin several times today. She's still loving wheat and will tug-o-war over a mealworm.

Sun, 04 Jul 2010 I've discovered Colin's new favourite food; this morning when I was cycling with George I picked three heads of not-quite-ripe-wheat and brought them back for Colin. She absolutely loved them. When I squeezed the seed heads a kind of milky squidge came out and Colin couldn't get enough. I wondered if, as the seed wasn't quite ripe, perhaps it had a slightly alcoholic effect. Colin was on the doorstep frequently today, pecking my toes and hands and generally nagging for wheat! I've continued to think about John Epstein and his 'marks', and continued to work with that in mind.

Sat, 03 Jul 2010 Is it really Wednesday since I blogged? Its all got rather busy! Colin is spending her third night in a row out. I think she's moved out finally and fully, I can't even imagine her flying back into the house. Its very odd but she's become nervous of everyone except me. I still mess about with her on the doorstep playing tug of war with her mealworms. I think it trains her to tug at things such as seeds which need tugging from their moorings in order to be eaten. Although she will still hop onto my hands or feet, I don't feel I can pick her up and cuddle her anymore. She used to love it, need it even, but now I would certainly be invading her space to do it. Instead I nudge her or gently shove her like an irritating sibling might. She's spending more and more time away, foraging for herself I hope, between her visits to the seed pot and the mealworm pot on the doorstep. In my mind I'm planning amazing sparrow-houses for Colin and the winter...something to keep her warm and dry...Thisevening I went back to Grace's house, her daughters have been clearing it out. Among the things set out from which I was able to choose -I took a wonderful glass jug and a lovely simple glass vase. Grace would know why I chose those...in class we paint flowers in glass vessels, always with the water at half-full to show the distortion of the stems through the surface of the water. I see too many paintings where its clear the artist hasn't looked at the effect water and glass have on what they contain. The house is now sold to someone who is going to call it 'Grace's Cottage'..perfect!

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 Colin must have heard the weather forecast; she's sleeping idoors tonight...on the bookcase behind the curtain ruffle! I'm working on a new set. I've been thinking a lot lately...while sitting with Colin...and remember way back to my first Art School in Taunton, a teacher called John Epstein. He'd look at my work and draw l-o-n-g on his cigarette and say '...try and make marks which respond to something but don't represent them exactly; marks which show foreground, depth and distance without having to be something specific...I shouldn't have to see a mark which tries to represent something like an elbow or a tree...but should be a response to looking at those things...(l-o-n-g drag on fag)'. With my recent cycle rides and the chance to look at close and initimate landscape I'm finding John Epstein's words coming back to me. Colin spent the night out again but came back for some breakfast. Tonight is going to be wet and windy...hope its not too much of a shock!

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 I spent a very happy hour on the doorstep with Colin yesterday. Its easy to pass more time than I realise. She seemed fine after her previous night out but last night returned for a night back up on her bookcase; she rests on the corner of a very tall book/dvd case behind a ruffle of the curtain. Earlier in the day I had been in my shed and thought I heard Colin which is unusual for the far end of the garden. Finally, trusting my instinct (there are a million sparrows down by my shed) I went looking; I found her caught in the neighbours fruit nets, she could have been there quite a while. I got her out and I think she was so shattered she slept in my hand for about half an hour before recovering. We whiled away yet more time on the doorstep...

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 6.45 this morning and Colin is back feeding on lightly crunched seeds. I squish them in the tweezers which have fed her since the beginning. As she still hasn't quite the strength in her beak to crunch them open from dry, I assume that that is what I saw the parent sparrows doing down at my bird feeder last night for their youngsters. I was great to see Colin back, I knew if she hadn't returned something would have happened, so last night I didn't dare say I was expecting to see her in the morning.

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 So...this is the first night Colin hasn't come back. I'm gutted. She fed several times today, and I even saw other young sparrows down by my shed, both feeding themselves and being fed by a parent so I think she still needs food from us. I'll just hope that her first night out is successful an she comes back tomorrow for more seed and mealworms. I notice the other youngsters were fluttering their wings like Colin does..either to say they want food or in deference to their parents.

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 Colin now spends almost the entire day away. She'll pop back sporadically for some mealworms or an attempt on my tea; and she comes home to sleep each night on her spot in a ruffle of the front-door curtain. I'm not sure how far afield she goes when she's away, but she seems to have forged a tentative friendship with a group of predominantly female sparrows. We've been off line for a while because Simon cut the telephone line. He insists that its the same colour as the clematis he was cutting back, hence his mistake...we forgave him partly because it hurts him more than anyone else to be off-line. Another day slowly bringing an idea into a clearer focus...a little bit of drawing outside and a little bit of painting. Looking forward to a day in the shed with no outside responsibilities other than iron some shirts and roast a chicken....

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 Colin is out in this big wide world somewhere and its fairly nerve-racking not to know where. but after walking around the garden tweeting, I find her in a thorn bush near to the house. She seems to realise she's a bird...or at least recognise some affinity with the other sparrows in her neighbourhood, but I think it'll be some time before they accept her so I spend a fair bit of time out in the garden just watching. Colin has been good for me in that, while watching her, I have had some real thinking time around my next set of paintings. Today twenty square canvasses arrived via FedEx, but for days now I've had images forming in my head. Of course an image in the head bears only partial resmeblance to the final images on the canvas but they are a strong driver towards getting to the next and the next and the next and the end stage. I can't imagine my life without those drivers...ooooppppss...Colin is pecking my toes on the bottom doorstep! Means she wants maggots!

Sat, 19 Jun 2010 Colin has had a day being busy. This morning she went outside for the first time. She flew quite a way from her cage and then realised she was some distance both from me and the cage. She came back to the cage but was a little more nervous; she tried to burrow under my hand and hide for a bit. She's loving live maggots, no trouble eating them by herself whereas she had a lot of trouble getting mealworms down her throat by herself. She's pecking at her millett and drinking from a pot of water by herself. All good moves! Today for the first time we saw her doing nest-like things. She's collecting strands of grass and placing them on nest-friendly ledges or in nooks and corners. She's also attempting to take my hair and Simon's arm hair. If she thinks she hasn't been given enough food recently she'll fly to whom ever seems most available. Here she's landed on George's shoulder, but also she'll land on any of us, close to our faces, and peck our lips until we get maggotts for her. I've been writing today. Thinking about things and writing. Winding down from Dorset Art Weeks is always a time for thinking. Cycling with George every day has given me a chance to look at some fundamental elements of landscape, particularly close up landscapes...landscape of the prosaic, rural, every-day, small.

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 I've made Colin a dust bath and she's been bathing away in it...instinct kicked in again. And here she is up on the dresser camoflaged by a large French soup tureen, one of her favourite places to watch an England game.

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 George and I have been on a bike-ride thisevening and so I took the opportunity to look for foreground references. I love these hogweed type umbellifers, they have such great overall structure and stature, and then are so delicate when you get close. Its another of those things I'm constantly nagging my students about; see a view through a foreground reference, relate the distance to the near-ground and you'll get the perspective and scale of distant elements right. It is a lovely evening, Colin is flying around the sitting room, she's found a hiding place right on top of the dresser, behind the pots and bowls up there. She's as hungry as ever, as chirpy as ever, as funny as ever...and I'm thinking I might take her outside into the garden this weekend...into the outside world.

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 so...don't let 'technique' be the first thing people notice...they'll miss the message otherwise. I have been sitting quietly in my gallery writing emails and Colin has joined me, having a fly around and checking out the perching places. After a while she wanted to know what my laptop was all about (I have radio 4 'listen live' on), she's fascinated by the sound. I let her sit in my lap until she pooped twice, at which point I sent her off for a flutter. Today I put dry 'eggfood' in my hand and she was eating for the first time by pecking from my hand rather that having mealworms and suchlike shovelled down her throat (in the manner of a parent-sparrow). I have seen her pecking her fresh parsley and pecking a hanging half-coconut filled with fat and seed in her cage, but not from the flat of a hand. I really need advice on how to teach her to feed in the outside world...I think this will be quite a challenge.

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 Its Monday night so I don't blog because I teach on Monday night...but I know how keen you all are to keep up with Colin...she's really well, been really hungry today although I'm trying to get her to feed herself (from her various hanging seedy things). She's preening and nagging her feathers and pulling them into some sort of shape but she still looks like a scruffy nipper. I've been increasing the amount of seed I give her. I've had a woodburner installed in my gallery; its great, will be much better for the paintings and particularly work on paper in the winter. Tomorrow I'm delivering a painting to South Petherton and our dining table and chairs to my niece and nephew just outside Taunton...hired a nice big U-drive van!

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 Colin has had a lovely evening flying around the sitting room. She's met a lot of interested people today and tasted some new delights but there's no doubt her favourites are minced beef and fresh parsley She's now on her top rung chirruping to the Germany - Australia game...and has now in fact fallen asleep...must be a dull game! Had rather a lot in today which is joyfully the last day of DAW and tomorrow its full steam ahead in my shed on something that is burning in my brain...but enough of that, I'm not telling what it is! I've just been on a very pleasant debrief at the pub with all the other artists on the A354

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 Colin is flying!!! She was airborne for the first time today at about 5pm and hasn't looked back. We have to put the cage over her which she doesn't seem to mind; it gives her a frame to pratice hopping from twig to twig (so to speak. I took her outside in her cage to listen to the birds singing, she joined in, and is now on her top rung watching Dr. Who and singing. Today she's eating baby-beef food mixed with the 'eggfood' we got from the petshop. Colin has a slightly mucky butt in this picture because she sat in her baby-apple food. I've cleaned her up since then because she's not so good at that yet! She's loving sitting on her top rung and singing at us all! On another note, its a mad weekend, I'm booked to be in two places at once and flitting between the two. Tomorrow is the last day of Dorset Art Weeks and I'm off to the pub with fellow DAW-ers to ...

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 Colin; Day eight...flapping his/her wings, eating heartily, she's a joy! Mary brings her into the garden each day to hear the birdsong.

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 Here is Colin on day seven, trying to go walkabout off my hand onto the fender seat. I'm thinking he might be a Coleen as he's developing those pale stripes behind his eyes like the female sparrows have. I guess he might be still too young to be sure. When he's not out and about he loves being in this little woolley hat which Mary knitted a long time ago for one of her teddies. Colin nestles up under the kind of rim he's created, it seems very much like a nest, and when he's nuzzling I imagine its like his mother rustling about in the nest beside him. He's been preening and scratching at the waxy tubes on his feathers, and gradually they're all fluffing up, but I think until they're clear of the waxy stuff they itch and irritate him...nature's way of clearing the wax off! He's still as hungry as ever, but really doesn't like to get up before 7am which amazes me. I thought he'd be awake with the dawn chorus (4.30am) but thats just Simon and me...because the cockerel is crowing in the field beside the house at that time; you can be sure that Colin is still snoring. I went to see the paintings of my friend Claire Thomas today and they took my breath away...I recommend a visit.

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 Day six: I'm sure now...and only since this afternoon...that Colin is a sparrow! A House sparrow. He's scratching and plucking all those waxy tubes off his feathers to reveal very sparrow-like looks; he's also tweeting like a sparrow. His appetite is as good as ever, he's stretching his wings and perching. It all happens so fast!!!!! I think its all pointing to one thing...a sparrow!!!!!

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 Day five; Colin is looking so grown up now, he's eating a huge amount and chirping all the time. Like a baby he has day time naps, but is a very good night sleeper and doesn't like to be disturbed until about 7am. His feathers are beginning to make him look like a real bird and he's just able to perch on our fingers and almost hold his own weight. He's still very good at pooping while his rear end is held over the side of his woolly-hat-nest. He practices wing flapping when he's on our hands and replies to our attempted chirrups. He's so gorgeous, we all love him! Its been unexpectedly busy today (DAW) with some really interested and interesting people. Caught me off-guard...I was planning to be holed-up in my shed all day!

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 Colin is alive and well, enjoying the caterpillars and mealworms. His feathers are growing visibly longer each day and he's moving about much more on his sturdy legs. Mary has found that if she feeds him then holds his butt over the edge of his wolly-hat-nest, he'll poop to order! I'm in charge of him today as Mary has a 2hr revision session in school this morning and then an exam this afternoon -for that reason I did night-duty with him too although on the whole he sleeps through the night. Yesterday morning was the quietest day on the planet for Dorset Art Weeks, but I guess everyone had a lie-in, went off to the pub for lunch and then all came to see me in the afternoon! It went mad for a while!! Lots of very lovely people!

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 Colin is alive and kicking! he had his first live food this morning...a little caterpillar..and it went down vey well. Mary's giving him a while to check it digests well before he gets the next one. Otherwise he's having mealworms and some baby bird mix called 'eggfood' Another busy Dorset Art Weeks day yesterday. Today is sunny but with a cooler breeze.

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 Just to let you all know that Colin is doing fine...he's sturdy and eating well.

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 L-o-n-g day and I'm tired! Mary has rescued a baby bird. We waited several hours to make sure it was completely abandoned and since then she's made a nest and been feeding it mealworms. It's a vigorous little thing, its little life is tenaciously clung on to. I think its a blackbird because its legs and feet seem too big for a smaller bird. Mary and Dan have called him Colin

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 These are the two drawings from which the painting is growing. Spiderman is picking an apple but of course he won't be able to eat it... he is a masked hero... ...and here, she, is masked, anonymous and her testimony is worth half that of a man's (hence two of them in the emerging painting). Busy time for Dorset Art Weeks, I have had a lot of painters visiting and asking what/how I do what I do etc. Simon says I'm a painter's painter, I'd say he's right.

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 I'm beginning to make sense of some large drawings; putting the elements into one drawing which is the basis for a bigger painting (stretched a big-ish canvas yesterday). I love still-life so the excuse to bring it in to any painting is worth taking up. These are three stages through the same draiwing. I realised I needed a stronger light-source and thats what happened towards the end. I was listening to a fantastic radio play at the time. I often associate paintings with the plays I've been listening to while making them. This particular play was about a stolen Dragon's egg. Forbidden Fruit.

Mon, 31 May 2010 I keep thinking about a line in the Book of Ruth 'Call me not Naomi'. Naomi means 'nice' in Hebrew but she felt she'd been dealt a bad hand by God and so said 'call me Mara'. Mara means 'disobey'. Actually she didn't disobey anyone, she went with her daughter-in-law (Ruth, who promised to 'cleave' to her) to Bethlehem, home of her kinsmen, where Ruth met Boaz and eventually married him...fantastic story and well worth reading, but that phrase 'Call me not Naomi' keeps ringing in my head. I heard Arvo Part interviewed on TV the other night. He apologised when asked if he had a message for his public; he replied 'I'm sorry but I'm not really interested in them. I'm searching for the truth of my own soul. The outside world sometimes looks amazing but is not all it's cracked up to be and so I try to ignore it'. Oh I fell in love with him then!

Sun, 30 May 2010 It's 11.33pm and I've just wandered back from my shed. I love the vast skies full of stars and the sound of owls hooting. I logged Ursa Major and found the North Star...in the right place! Some lovely visitors today, a lot of them interested in joining classes...so when I'm lacking confidence with my painting I know my teaching is valuable. 'The Artist' magazine have asked for an article, I've said yes, I'm looking forward to that...have many ideas and am not sure which one to follow.

Fri, 28 May 2010 So today has been very busy, not without a moment of recreation and relaxation, though, when I went with some of my students to The Forum Cafe in Blandford where an ex-student of mine, Claire Thomas, has her work up; and sublime some of it is too, particularly a little watercolour of Knowlton Church. Knowlton is a 14th Century ruined church (possibly on the site of an earlier Saxon church; Knowlton was a thriving Saxon town.) built within a Pagan earth circle. This was almost certainly case of the 'Christianisation' of the local population away from their Pagan religion to Christianity by linking the new to the old. The earthwork which encirlces the Church is Neolithic and probably about 3500years old. Here are photos of my gallery. It was once the woodshed and pigsty at the back of our house. In 2000 I had a eureka moment...I asked myself what on earth were we doing using the back sheds to store junk when there was valuable wall space within them? I hauled out all the junk we'd gathered and took it all to the dump. I painted the walls white and I put up two large canvasses and started to paint. This was before I had my large new cabin and was working in a smaller shed in the garden, so the wall space was a massive new freedom. Over the years we've re-roofed it, had the ceiling plastered and turned it into a great little gallery in which I keep an exhibition at all times. I work hard not to let this place get junked-up again...not always easy! The yard between the house and the gallery is a covered with a three-skinned plastic roof and so that too has become part of the space which I can use to exhibit. I have, of course, been changing things around, even since these pictures were taken yesterday, so it all looks a little like this...but not quite. Tomorrow we open...10am -so I can have a lie-in first!

Thu, 27 May 2010 It's been an evening of putting out signs and hanging and re-hanging for DAW so only enough time really to say there was an amazng moon tonight although the cows seemed prosaic about it. Its a fragile time, setting out these things which have surfaced from the depths of your soul and knowing that so many people who you don't know will pass judgement. Tomorrow -white wash, deliver cards to local shop, put out the recycling, poster to the local pub, teaching all afternoon, exhibition up in the evening at The Gorge Cafe..home for a tankard of wine!

Wed, 26 May 2010 I've been reading about another suicide in China; 21yr old Nan Gang, after his ten hour shift making motherboards for Foxconn in Shenzen, southern China. He'd come from Hubei province in the middle of China and was most likely the only child of his parents. Probably they thought he was making his way in the world having left home for a job in one of the fastest 'growing' places in China. Looking on-line at pictures of Hubei, I see it has two huge rivers running through it including the Yangtze with one of its significnt dams, the Three Gorges Dam. The pictures on-line of Hubei and the Yangtze are absolutely beautiful but perhaps Nan Gang felt trapped and unable to return home for fear of failing his family and utterly unfulfilled making motherboards on ten hour shifts during which workers were not allowed to speak to each other. This giant baby was born in Hubei province; the Chinese authorities think that the increase in the birth of giant babies is down to mothers' better nutrition. Whatever we wish for our children we probably mostly wish they could talk to us if they ever feel half as bad as Nan Gang. I wish he'd had someone to whom he could have talked about his life, even better I wish he'd had a life with normal friendly relationships and pastimes -happiness and fulfilment- and if he was the only child of his parents they've lost their life's biggest investment.

Tue, 25 May 2010 Hooooray!!!! I'm so sorry ! My site has been off line for a few days now. Its because the company who host my site made an automatic update but it re-set my Domain Name Server to a default setting which was appropriate to the previous company who were taken over by the new one...now they've sorted it and I'm very grateful...Phew! I hate being without access to it!

Fri, 21 May 2010 ...been working hard getting it all together for Dorset Art Weeks (begins a week Saturday). I'm painting floors, walls, hanging and re-hanging pictures, labelling, writing blurbs, price lists and generally sorting things. It means not much time to pass on my meandering thoughts...

Tue, 18 May 2010 I'm working on this painting of my Mum. I thought it would be a whole lot harder but I'm finding it incredibly enjoyable. My Mum is eccentric. Among her many exploits she started parachuting at about 40 and got a pilot's licence aged about 48 I think. She and a friend flew themselves to various places and countries..with some hair raising adventures and outcomes. This painting is called 'Cuppa Tea Anna Biscuit' and I've put our most eccentric tea cups in the background, all 'Limoges'. Today, every time I opened my shed door, two hopeful swallows flew in thinking it a perfect place to nest. Of course I feel incredibly guilty because it IS a perfect place to nest but I can't really let them, so I called my friend Chris to ask him what I could do. He came round with an old Guinea-pig hutch which we've rigged up under the eaves at the back of my shed and we're just hoping they may take up the offer. Watch this space... Meanwhile a little wren is building his nest in the tangle of old ivy branches clinging to the ash tree behind my shed...I have a perfect view from my window and I've been watching him carry in green moss all day. He has an extraordinarily strong voice for such a tiny bird.

Sun, 16 May 2010 I went to Cambridge yesterday for a graduation ceremony. Jack and his friends were getting their M.A.s, an honourary degree awarded four years after their initial graduation. The ceremonies there are always a visual archaic feast! -ladies and gents in funny headgear and furry edged cloaks speaking very polite latin to each other as they hand the graduates over for the receiving of their M.A.s. No photos inside I'm afraid but... once outside again... here are Seigo, Jack and Anna Seigo was the first person Jack met when we dropped him more than 7 years ago for the beginning of his University life, and Anna is a good friend whose father helped Jack at a difficult time. You can see...we spent the rest of the afternoon punting..and then to Tatties for tea and cakes. The graduates got to punt, the parents to relax and reflect (thats Anna punting and her mum Linda with me). On the way home (I did a day return by train, saved me hours of driving) through London I nipped out of the underground at Embankment because I love walking over the Jubilee bridge to Waterloo Station. A lovely evening with The London Eye and The Houses of Parliament in view. On the train home I comforted a very distraught girl who is 20weeks pregnant and had just eaten a piece of undercooked chicken in a restaurant; she was convinced she was going to lose her baby. I suggested that she not worry until she knew there was something to worry about and gave her my water and admired the scan photos of her little baby which were truly lovely (I'm convinced its a boy...but I didn't say so, of course!).

Wed, 12 May 2010 The oil-seed rape fields around us are an intense yellow at the moment, especially when the sun shines on them. The yellow is so intense that frequently at the horizon its hard to tell if the yellow is lighter or darker than the sky. The difference between 'bright' and 'light' can be difficult to discern. The first way to try and discern the difference between two areas of tone/colour is to squeeze your eyes increasingly towards shut and see which area diminishes first. The darker tone will diminish soonest and the lighter tones will remain in your vision longer. Sometimes a white object (such as a tea cup) is darker than the white wall behind it. It all depends on how much light falls where. We can tell that the tea cup has an inside and an outside. Being an object in three dimensions, straight beams of light from the light-source cannot reach every part of that cup; the light cannot bend around a corner and light the cup on both sides at the same time. It means that parts of that white cup will be darker than other parts and therefore if you're painting a picture of it you're going to need 'tones'...and a variety of them. You can make 'tones' with charcoal on paper, from the darkest your charcoal will make to the white of your page and an infinite amount of tones between the two. You can also make 'tones' with colour. You'll probably have an understanding of the various colours' 'natural' tones i.e. If I ask 'which is darker, yellow or blue?' you'll reply 'Blue'. Quite right too..on the whole. But if I put a lemon in a cupboard and shut the doors and put a blue bouncy ball out in the sunshine...which then is darker? The lemon or the bouncy ball? Ultimately tone depends on how much light is falling on..and is then reflected off.. the thing you are looking at. So although the oil-seed rape looks incredibly bright, I'm not sure that it can be actually 'lighter' than the sky.

Sun, 09 May 2010 I've been cycling along the lane delivering my Dorset Art Weeks invitations to everyone in Minchington this evening. I passed the nearby pond which has normally dried up for the summer by now, and saw lots of swallows dipping over the surface. I'd wondered where they were as I usually see many more over our garden and on the telephone line at this time of year, but the bug life is so dense over the pond as it begins to recede and the weed emerges all thick and smelly that the swallows will obviously remain there until it has dried up. The bug life was dense along Minchington lane too and I got them in my eyes and hair. Simon came back from his bike ride tonight complaining about the midges, but as I heard on radio4 yesterday that bug life is in decline worldwide I'm actually very happy that we were plagued by them. Once again it feels like this is a small corner of the world where things work. A winter river runs along Minchington lane (it feeds the pond). On the other side of the river are grazing pastures which are frequently filled with cattle and it struck me while I was pedalling that both the river and the cow pats must contribute to the abundance of bug life along the lane. This is 'Swallow over The Stour' which my friend Chris bought when he was feeling flush! and below is the detail of the swallow and its reflection as it dips down over the surface.

Sat, 08 May 2010 Blimey!!! I was just reading up on chaos theory(see following). What current situation does it most clearly describe?...Chaos theory is a field of study in mathematics, physics, and philosophy studying the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. This sensitivity is popularly referred to as the butterfly effect. Small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for chaotic systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general. This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behaviour is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable. This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos. It goes on...Sensitivity to initial conditions is popularly known as the "butterfly effect," so called because of the title of a paper given by Edward Lorenz in 1972 to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. entitled Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas? The flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of events leading to large-scale phenomena. Had the butterfly not flapped its wings, the trajectory of the system might have been vastly different.

Thu, 06 May 2010 Here comes the third result...Sunderland central...my heart's thumping...and its...LABOUR again!!!! Sunderland now has three women MPs, one of them only 26 years old. I have to declare here that I voted LibDem. Our LibDem candidate, Emily Gasson, was a student of mine for many years until she married Ed Davey and started a family. At the last election she polled just over 21,470 votes, Conservative 23,714 votes and Labour 4,596 votes. She took 2nd place with many more votes than some people won their seats with. We (north Dorset) are a very big rural constituancy, spread over a large area...renowned for being the constituancy with the highest life expectancy for men in the UK. I've been very impressed by the amount of political discussion I've heard among younger people this time, and their general raised political awareness compared to previous general elections. Its great also to hear there have been unexpectedly long queues outside polling stations...glad to hear we still queue! I'm sitting in bed with my laptop, polling day 2010, radio4, totally gripped by the first two counts called, up north, both for Labour. Gordon must be feeling good at this moment. I wish it could last. In the interests of fairness I've been checking other political party websites and came across this engaging picture of George Galloway looking the spitting image of Tom Jones (you'll remember we bumped into Tom on the waterfront in Cape Town!). Maybe there's a bit of body-double going on and it was actually George Galloway we saw on the stage swinging his hips and singing 'The Green Green Grass of Home' at the Grand Arena in Cape Town last month...what a thought!!!! What I'm unsure about is...Is George Galloway smiling like that to lure us in to voting for him or is he laughing at us? Whether he intended it or not, it has a feel of the latter.

Tue, 04 May 2010 I've started work today on some almost life size drawings. Isn't it funny how intentions lead to things you never dreamed of in attempting to execute them? Today I had finished some framing, stretched two large canvases and rabbit-skin-glued them, been thinking of political images involving scales, money-magnets (yes magnets, not magnates), tables etc. and somehow ended up with a female body builder. I'm going to juxtapose...juxtapose women's bodies with men's bodies, nearly life size...the first pair being a female body builder and the crucified Jesus. Make of it what you will but I'm loving it!!! Can't wait to get back to my shed!

Mon, 03 May 2010 Here she is, Alice Rate (nee Candy). She was my grandmother's grandmother and she lived at Milton but had a house in London where my grandmother used to stay. Her son Lachlan married Nita and they had four daughters. Nita and their daughters. Betty was my grandmother.

Sun, 02 May 2010 I'm a pea-brain! I've just realised to whom Nita must have been companion...my great great grandmother Alice Candy. She was a formidible Victorian matriarch, I have a photo of her somewhere which I'll scan and post. They lived in a house in Surrey called Milton Court, my mother was born there because her mother returned there to give birth. Milton is the house from which Lachlan and Nita were rejected when they married. After they were re-united with the family they went to live at a house called Stonewick which is where Nita died. They moved to Milton after that; I guess that is the house to which Gran returned from school after 'the event'. 'The event' was never talked about. How do I know about it? I think Aunt Lettice (Gran's sister) talked to my mother.

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 I've been working on 'Three Ways' again this morning. I'm just now heading in to Blandford to put a small exhibition in Blandford Museum...the new idea..'Painting of the Month', Blandford Museum..starts today!

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 This was my great grandmother, Nita Rate (nee Bennett). She was a companion to a wealthy lady in Linconshire (possibly?) whose son Lachlan was engaged to an heiress but fell in love with Nita. They married at a house called Wolverstone belonging to Lachlan's best friend Buppup and were promptly ejected from the family, but invited back into the fold after the birth of two daughters Peggy and Rob. I believe Lachlan had been working in a tanner's yard...not sure...sounds unlikely! They went on to have two more daughters, Lettice and my grandmother Elizabeth Angela (Betty). Nita was not ever really accepted, often referred to as 'the serving maid'. When my grandmother was 12, away at school, Nita drowned in the lake at the end of their garden, very possibly suicide. The newspapers were kept away from my grandmother and she never returned to that house and never really knew why. I have a silver sixpence on my necklace which I wear all the time. On one side its a sixpence, dated 1888 and on the other side is engraved 'Nita Bennett 1892'. My mother found it among my grandmother's things after she died. When my sons were born it was exhilarating, amazing and wonderful, but when my daughter was born, as soon as I realised she was a girl, Involuntarily I thought of my mother, my grandmother, my great grandmother; I understood the links of the chain. It felt like a continuous flower, opening and opening and opening and for one brief moment I also felt incredibly sad.

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 'Three Ways'...thus far. What a luxury Tuesday is! I can work all day in my shed and then in the evening too. I should give you an idea of my shed. I have sofa, rug, radio, old paintings, new paintings, paints, drawings, clutter, table covered in clutter, shelves full of paper, sketch books and drawings, old portfolios, a plastic crow, two heaters, a rolled up hammock, a laminator, a drawing donkey, an incredibly posh easel with a winding handle, electric tools (saw, drill, screwdriver etc.), a mangle, five hefty roof beams, two double windows and three glazed doors, peace, solitude...its a heaven! Mr and Mrs Pig seem to have reached a modus vivendi...she was fairly hacked off at his arrival yesterday whereas he seemed delighted! Even though he sometimes shoves the piglets away, they are unruffled by it, other than a bit of a squeal, and continue to run around his ankles irritating him. I\'ve decided he\'s actually rather good natured, because he\'s digging with Mrs Pig but has refrained from nagging her today and she\'s very happily digging with him. Out drawing the other day I came to this glorious place with three roads/tracks disappearing into the distance from the one spot. In this sketch there are two of the tracks, however I've begun the painting with all three. 'Three Ways' I think...

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 Saplings and Sleeping Pigs. I'm teaching tonight...as yet no car to get there...Simon not home with the big car and Mary not home with the little car... :)

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 Looking at the photo of Grace again is strange. Her face 80 years ago is so much like the face I know, all I can see is 90yr old Grace in school-girl clothes! And then of course comes the problem of believing someone has died. That photo brings an involuntary l-a-r-g-e smile to my face. I'm sure it was taken on the brink of Grace scampering off with that little dog.

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 I've been working on my 'pigs' painting. I'm layering and layering with colour and some spay-can texture but all the while trying to retain a gentle and rural quality. I'm back to the idea that some parts of the world seem to 'work' and this is one of them. I'm under no illusion about this being a cliche but sometimes a cliche is exactly in order! The duck hatched her eggs on Wednesday afternoon while I was at Grace's funeral. All but two hatched, the unhatched were addled so the neighbours dog ate them! and the duck was away almost immediately, not to the nearest pond but one a little further away. As soon as I can I'll get down there and check on them. This is Grace as a girl in India with her brother. The remarkable thing is just how much her face is hers -the picture must be 80 years old if not more and I've known Grace for only about 12 years. Grace was feisty, opinionated and, according to herself, 'vain' because she refused to use a wheely-walker right up to the end. What she called 'vain' I call 'strong-willed' which surely kept her determined not just to manage but to live a social and generous life until she died. She was very very funny and had a gently wicked sense of humour...I'm sure I can see it in this photo. She was really great, and deeply thoughtful. Its been a busy few days. We've been looking at colour in class. This week I asked my students to find two each of the following colours; red, blue, yellow, green, orange, purple, by cutting out small samples from the pile of National Geographics which Grace had given me a while ago. All the samples had to be different so the two reds had to be entirely different although within the category 'red', similarly the blues, yellows etc. Inevitibly it lead to questions like 'When does the red become an orange?' and so they were questioning the nature of the colours they were looking at, thinking about the boundaries between colours, purity of colour-in other words what does it take to knock the character of a colour back a little so that it becomes a 'dull' or an 'earthy' colour? They had to mix, with waterolour, exact matches of the samples they'd cut out and get both the tone and colour so close that I couldn't tell which was magazine sample and which was their paint. It seemed a simple exercise and a gentle one to begin the term with but it became as intense as I'd hoped it would.

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 First thing yesterday morning over our house... Driving to work yesterday the once clear blue skies were a weave of sky tracks in all directions, like a muslin veil. Ahh well, it was lovely while it lasted, a rest for the skies, but another event which confirms what a fragile web our lives depend on. It was Grace's funeral yesterday, I'll blog later on that.

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 Finally coming down to earth. I was about to set off with all my clobber to paint the other day...I walked out of my shed and saw through a gap in the hedge...eight little piglets fast asleep in the sun beside their mother, and I walked no further with the clobber, set up right there. So this is deep in the middle of the process of the painting, still many enigmatic layers covering the composition waiting to be resolved/restored. Although the painting is of a complete view, its really about the saddleback mother and her eight piglets. ..and here are some of them..

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 I'm finding it hard to get going again. Yesterday I went out and about, found a great place and did some drawing, but I've been looking at things -at other people's work- and that always leads me astray somewhat, feeling I should be doing this and that, and not looking to the kernel of my own ideas. Hey ho... First class of the summer term tonight, that always grounds me! One of my oldest and loveliest ladies died the last weekend we were away, Grace, aged 95 who'd been coming to me for several years. She was born in India to missionary parents. She used to cross India to get to school on a three day train ride. She didn't leave India until she was 17yrs old, landing at Liverpool docks, and was amazed to see white men labouring. Grace became a nurse and married a doctor. He'd died before she started coming to me so I didn't know him. Grace said there was never a day when she didn't miss India even though she never returned. She was absolutely compus mentus to the end. What I'm really grateful for is that I always gave her a kiss and a hug, and I last saw her just before we went away. Another of my students died sooner than expected (she'd been ill), the last time that I saw her I didn't say goodbye properly and I regret it.

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 Mum and Frank came too, Sadie and Stephan are only 20mins from them by car, on the edge of Taunton. This is the main sitting room...you'll be interested to see a Clare Shepherd gallery emerging! They're also buying the field beside the house...Sadie has a horse...the field is rough at the moment, and L-shaped like the house. They'll get it clear in time. This is the garden side of the house...they have a sit-on mower...came with the house! This the summer house from the kitchen window...and this is the way into the garden from the kitchen. They look out over the quantocks to the north, to the east from the garden is this lovely field and view. I went to see my niece and her husband (who lost his legs in Afghanistan last October) in their new house yesterday. Its great, plenty of space for everything including things like parking your car and having enough room to get yourself out of the car if you have wheel-chairs etc. to contend with. They have a car each, both automatic so that Stephan can drive either. The house is a bunglaow so easy access for Stephan everywhere. I'm uploading these pictures so that my brother (Sadie's Dad) can see them; they've only been in the house a week so he hasn't had a chance to get down there yet. The house is L-shaped and has a big garden all around in on three sides, overlooking fields...lovely!

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 Leaving the house, last picture from the balcony. I took several pictures with my phone camera as we drove to the airport. We passed the hospital where the first heart transplant was done in 1967, by Christian Barnard, and we passed shanty towns and apartment blocks with names like Tip-Toe, Chiltern, Dawlish and Dorchester. Sad to be leaving. Bo-Kaap The Bo-Kaap is an area of Cape Town formerly known as the Malay Quarter. It's essentially a Township on the slopes of Signal Hill above the city centre and is an historical centre of Cape Malay culture in Cape Town. The Nurul Islam Mosque, established in 1844, is nearby. Bo-Kaap is traditionally a multicultural area known for its steep cobbled streets and beautifully multi-colourerd terraced houses. We decided, after a quick last visit to Green Square Market (where I bought some wonderful excellent lovely ethnic sandals), to drive up in our tiny car to Bo-Kaap...Simon and Mary in the front, me in the back with my nephews Charlie and George. I don't think we were prepared for quite how vertical the dear little cobbled streets are...Simon came to a halt on the brow of one of these vertical hills having premature heart faliure as he tried to haul the little car up and over what felt like a ledge...didn't make for a calm atmosphere (only momentary of course!). The houses are eye-poppingly painted and lovely. If I lived in Cape Town thats where I'd be. Last day in South Africa...I wandered around Camps Bay to find some 'unseen' places/plants/secrets. Just around the corner I found these burned logs. I couldn't work out if they'd been part of a disaster-type fire or a naturally occuring fire but they made a splendid foreground to Table Mountain. If it had been a disaster-fire then the surrounding grass has grown around the logs thick and matted and tough. I tripped and scrambled several times. This lush green grass is part of that same matted cover. It looks so lush because I think there's a watercourse running under it but the thick weave of growth is like a mattress holding firm over the actual ground which seemed some way below. I bounced and tripped on the surface and got my ankle caught a few times. I think the main watercourse runs under these plants (lilies?) in the foreground.

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 This is how close Robben Island is from Cape Town...you can see across to Cape Town and Camps Bay, under Table Mountain, from the island. We were taken to the prison on the island. The man who showed us the prison was another ex-convict, a very quiet man, he seemed resigned...to his past? to the still troubled present? to the future which isn't coming fast enough? He was born in Soweto and had been an active member of the ANC from a teenager. I asked him if he was the only member of his family who had been active, he said his father was very political and had given him books and pamphlets to read but no-one else in his family was interested and his mother was very frustrated with his activism. I wanted to ask him much more but I think it would have been too personal and too explosive in front of the group...so I bottled. Nelson Mandela's cell Cape Town is a working port. Huge ships come in and out all the time, but the area known as The Waterfront is really the heart of the old working port; mostly fishing boats, day-trip boats, some cruise-liners and the ferry to Robben Island use The Waterfront. We had tickets booked for Robben Island, 11am on Sunday morning but had time to sit and watch as we were early by an hour (and I was nagged for it). -waiting for the ferry- Robben Island is so popular that you have to book about a week in advance. We were lucky that we were able to re-book our cancelled tickets within three days. -Leaving the port- Robben Island is remarkably close to Cape Town, in fact its remarable that no-one ever escaped by swimming, except that what looks 'close' is about half an hour of ferry ride over very choppy sea. -Passing the working port of Cape Town- We got to Robben Island and were met by a coach and an ex-Robben Island convict and taken all around the Island. We were told about the impact various countries had had on the fight for freedom (UK came out ok! -sanctions etc.). We were shown lovely buildings lived in by governers and their families on one side of the Island, chuches, a leper graveyard, a muslim memorial building, an old cannon built for WW2 but only finished in 1947 and referred to by our guide as Robben Island's weapon of mass destruction. -derelict buildings on the north east side of the island- The indigenous island is scrubby, low-rise planting, but the eucalyptus tree has taken over much of the other side of the island and soaks up so much water that there is no longer fresh clean water avaiable to drink other than that which is brought across in bottles. The island is currently populated with ex-convicts who work as guides, and their families. If they didn't have their memories to contend with the island is a beautiful place to live, reminded me of Tiree.

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 Table Mountain from the parachute landing site. Alan said he had a sense for the first time (even though he grew up here) of how vast the land is, how far it stretches and dwarfs Cape Town which had always seemed so big. The airstrip was ... basic, a wooden refreshments shed and an awning with benches, a corrugated iron hanger, a tiny wooden-shed-flying-school and a lot of parachuting/flying enthusiasts...all miles down a bumpy dust track. Alan was jumping from 9000ft after an aerial saunter around the Cape Town bay and further inland. He was strapped in tandem to the parachutist and, alongside, a man with a camera on his head was jumping to film it all. The Flying School On his way down...they free-fell for 33 seconds before the chute opened.. ..back on the ground. Lying in bed at dawn watching the ships come out of Cape Town harbour, they’re lit in street-light orange and remind me of watching the lorries at night coming down the A354 into Cashmoor. The ships are lorries of the ocean...or lorries are ships of the road! One wall of our bedroom here is a slab of glass, facing the sea, sunrise is fast, one minute dark, the next minute daylight and I can see what kind of day it’ll be by the amount of cloud coming off Table Mountain. Saturday and Sunday have had something of an internet connection problem, so I’m catching up on word and will update the website asap. On Saturday morning Mary and I got up early to get to the Table Mountain cable car for the first run up. It was so different from the other day; we drove up to the cable car base, no traffic, found an easy parking place, not one of the spaces where you have to parallel park along-side a sheer drop, and we got onto the first cable-car up with no trouble. At the top the views were expansive...understatement! and the weather was freezing. There is so much interesting vegetation you can see from the cable car but up on top not quite so diverse. On top we took ourselves to the cafe for a great breakfast, we bought two postcards and I stamped and wrote one to Jack who is China just now so won’t get it for a while. We were back down the mountain not much later. Our whole group headed across Cape Town and out the other side to what I think is fabulous scrubby land. Still loads of eucalyptus but plenty of what must be indigenous too. We met all of Alan’s family again (except for Lindsay and husband) at a tiny air strip where Alan was doing his free-fall-birthday-present-jump. It was incredibly exciting. View of Lion's Head from the cable-car half way up Table Mountain. Plant on Table Mountain View south along Table Mountain Looking down! (see the houses)

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 Couldn't go to Robben Island...went to Llandudno instead! Wonderful beach, massive south atlantic waves. Atmospheric, mist and sea spray in the air and lots of happy dogs. The beach was empty but for a few people walking and playing frisbee. There are at least three kinds of Cormorant that live along this coast but these were too far away to see which they were. Mary is off with the others to see 'Grease' tonight. Perhaps Simon and I will go out for supper along the seafront. Cape Wagtail Last night, just before going out to eat we went down to the sea for a swim. The light was lovely but the water was freezing. Some swam, some drank bubbly and watched...I did both. This morning Mary and I had intended to go up Table Mountain in the cable car but the weather was wet and windy...no cable car running...so we headed into the waterfront in Cape Town to take the ferry to Robben Island...all ferries cancelled due to bad weather! Ahh well...we shopped. I bought a silver thing to join the collection on my necklace. We got talking to the lady who sold it to me, Maya. She'd been born in Poland during the war. All her family died in Auschwitz but she had been given to the nuns in a convent and brought up a Christian. She had no idea she was Jewish until she was 15yrs old and Israel had been looking for and collecting up Jewish children in her situation to take them to live in Israel. She said the nuns said 'Oh yes..we have two of those' and they were handed over. There was more to her story, she'd lived in Israel very close to the Kibbutz where I had spent a year. She'd married an Israeli who was posted in South Africa, she divorced him and has never been back but her two sons are doing very well in Australia and UK. She said 'When Nelson Mandela dies the whites will flee South Africa -the blacks hate them'.

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 Today is hotter, sunny. The others have walked up Table Mountain. I stayed behind so that Mary could work on an essay. Our plan was to take the cable car up later, but when we got to the cable car base it was so crowded, about a two hour queue, so we left and have plans to go up early one morning...or maybe later today as its only a five minute drive to the base. So, we've been relaxing by the pool and sunbathing a bit, although earlier I went out and found a wooded valley. I sat and drew for a couple of hours. Great plants, exotic black butterflies. Yesterday was a cool and misty day. The others went shopping so I took the little car and went back south down the coast again. I came slowly home, stopping and taking time to look, and painting at one spot looking north towards the Cape Town bay, and at another wooded place where I saw pied crows and another sort of crow, possibly what they call 'black' crows, they're not carrion crows like we have. When I got back I sat on the beach at Camp's Bay and watched this family. I got talking to a young lad trying to sell me wooden carvings. He is from Malawi...no work there...everyone wants to be here in South Africa. There's a huge migrant population, about 6 million in and around Cape Town, in shanty towns, many contributing to the local economy but entirely off record so no one knows quite how much they account for. This little gull kept tip-toe-ing up to me so I caught him on camera! In the evening we saw Tom Jones at the Grand Arena in Cape Town...it was BRILL!!! but not a great pic...via my phone, doesn't do him justice!!!!

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 Finally..Camp\'s Bay This little bird, I now know, is a Cape Bunting. and this a red winged starling Slangkop lighthouse Cape coast looking north Some of the pictured didn't load succesfully so I'm loading them separately now. If you look into this photo you'll find three Eland; at the Cape of Good Hope Baboons grooming on the road. Yesterday, a trip to The Cape of Good Hope...was a wonderful drive along coast roads and through older established towns. We stopped in Simon's Town which has a distinct colonial feel with verandah-ed buildings and a small town square. It had been a naval base and so has plenty of boats in its harbour, but running right into the middle of the town is small railway with trains coming out from Cape Town. in the square there's a statue of a great dane called Just Nuisance who was made an able seaman on his death as he had spent so many years escorting the sailors on the train to Cape Town to visit the bars and then rounding them up at the end of the evening and bringing them safely back. At Simon's Town we also saw Cape Penguins. Its hard not to anthopromorphize them, they are so funny! Mary got very close... We were heading down the Cape Peninsula to Cape of Good Hope, but I was surprised to discover that the most southerly point is not Cape of Good Hope but Cape Agulhas to the East of Good Hope...so, behind the penguins you can see another point out to sea, and Cape Agulhas is beyond this point. Cape Point, Cape of Good Hope, is much like Scotland, scrub, heather, rocky, and even like the Isles...no trees (well, few trees), a sort of scoured landscape...lovely! and some cottages exactly like crofter's cottages. I'm sure the first settlers must have come from Scotland! This is looking towards Cape Agulhas and the Antarctic. It was hot, sunny and busy at Cape Point so nice to get on the road again. Fairly soon we saw Eland (in pic), a White Necked Raven (Mary saw another one later which I missed) but funniest by far were the baboons, strewn lazily across the road grooming. We had to slalom slowly through them so as not to hit them...they were like a complete family group with Big Dad, mothers, babies, teenagers etc. The Red Winged Starlings are very tame on Cape Point, and so are the Sparrows. I'm not sure yet what this little striped headed Sparrow is...need to research a bit, the other is a Red Winged Starling. The coast on the way home was wild and stunning. I wish I could spend at least a week at every bay, village and town, especially a town called Scarborough. Finally returing to Camp's Bay in the evening and supper at a Thai restaurant in Cape Town. The day before yesterday was a gathering of Alan's family at a hotel in the winelands called Devon Valley to celebrate Alan's birthday. We drove through mediterranean flavoured landscapes with cypress trees and stretches of vinyard. The skies here are are deep clear blue with a slight sharp egde to them, maybe autumn coming on. The vinyards are just turning yellow and copper, again maybe autumn. Alan's sisters have given Alan an in-tandem freefall parachute jump for his birthday present...we'll all be going to see him do it next Saturday! After lunch at the hotel we went to Alan's parents' house for a cuppa...and to see the watercolour I had done of their dog Tess which they've framed. They live in a retirement village with health centres, an arts centre, club centres, golf courses and an incredibly social community. Derek meets up to paint in a group at least once a week -not a class- he seems to have learned an awful lot from his group, his watercolours are really good. The radio is talking endlessly about Eugene Terre Blanche, the white supremacist who was murdered three days ago, and the song with the line 'Kill The Boer' being encouraged by Julius Molema, head of South Africa's youth movement. Their question is...are the two linked? I'm not sure if the incident is polarising people or revealing the polarisation more clearly. Mary bought a new hat!

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 Its been a long and wonderful day and I'm feeling very guilty that I haven't blogged fully...so...here's a picture of some baboons we saw grooming on the road and... I'll have some more time tomorrow in which to update. We're off today to the Cape of Good Hope after an English breakfast in Camp's Bay... looking out over the sea.

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 At 7.30pm we were home, whacked out after a lovely day and I thought...'I'll blog early and go to bed early...I lent my laptop to Simon who handed it on to Mary and now at 10.30pm I have very little battery left...of course I'm not moaning but tomorrow I shall do all the blogging I want to do before I hand over! Meanwhile...here's a picture of Mary communing with the Hyrax that come running up the rocks (loads of them) from the bay at the other end of Camps Bay and here's the odd little thing close up, apparently they are closest skeletally to an Elephant...not sure about that! Will look it up and blog further about today tomorrow!...was another wonderful day... More from yesterday...Weaverbird... and two Weaverbird's nests in the tree... ...and two more which had fallen out, all lined with feathers. Here is where the seeds are propogated... ...and Heather, Mary and Victoria outside the house.

Sun, 04 Apr 2010 Today we went to Alan's sister's farm, about an hour away the other side of Cape Town. We drove through vast open flat land, grass and scrub, which being the end of summer was dry and crisp. We saw cattle that looked like beef cattle, townships made of corrugated iron, roads being improved for World Cup football, volcano-shaped hills which rose out of the flat land to a point and then swept back down to the flat land. We saw Table Mountain, at a distance, as the table shape which gave it its name. We saw eucalyptus lined roads which reminded me of Israel, and place-signs to 'Bantry Bay' and 'Malmesbury' on the same board as 'Stellenbosch'. The gathering at Alan's sister's farm was a big family Easter party with sisters and brothers-in-law, nephews, parents, grandparents and all of us from UK. The farm is a nursery garden farm, supplying organically grown flowers and plants for large town displays/hotels and garden centres. We walked right through and saw amazing flowers even though the season is late, we saw the worm farm which produces a rich fertilizing compost and water and we were shown all the different ways and from where the seeds are collected and propogated. We saw more birds, several of which I photographed but haven't yet identified. The house is lovely, built by Charlie, Alan's brother in law, a wooden house built around its chimney-breast. We had a great lunch and then a boiled-egg-rolling competition, here are Mary and her cousin Lucy in full swing... ...I love that place! I hope I'll go again one day. Another of Alan's sisters lives and works there too, in her own wooden house which is like being in a jewel...something amazing in every corner...loved it!!

Sat, 03 Apr 2010 and we bumped into Tom Jones...he was lucky enough to have his photograph taken with my sister in law Victoria. This is the morning view of Camps Bay...and the evening view... We've been on the waterfront today, booking tickets for the Robben Island ferry. Saw a great group of orange-overall and welly-wearing singers and dancers performing...and Chris Yates if you're reading this I've bought you the CD but I'm going to burn it first!! They reminded Mary of a peformance some year 13s at her school had produced about Guantanamo Bay last year. There's plenty about South Africa that seems very western, but this group have the feel of modern indigenous Africa...and I really liked it.

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 Saw the southern cross and learned how to work out due south with the southern cross and two stars beneath it. Saw also Orion..upside down. Put my head upside down and there it was the right way up! Right...bed finally...for the first time in 36 hours. The first birds we saw when we arrived were Indian House Crows, lots of them, at a garage near the airport. I'm now reading on-line that they are a pest and that the Cape Town council has funding to eradicate them...I think it sounds like they have a vendetta against them, noses put out of joint by their success perhaps...and listen to this extraordinary claim...'Furthermore, their droppings at roosts and feeding areas have been known to strip paint off walls and deface statues' Shock! Horror!...sounds like London and its pigeons. To me the Indian House Crows looked rather spelndid, elegant and thick-beaked; attractive. Its the end of Friday, we flew all night and arrived here this morning at 8.30am in thick fog...as you can see the fog has lifted and the view of Table Mountain is clear from Alan and Victoria's house, including the cable car wire at the top. It so hot I've forgotten what its like to be cold! Red winged Starlings fly over the pool, with red wings, like Tristram's Grackle (Starling) in Wadi Rum but a different squawk. We wandered down to the beach and ate on the main street, here's Alan, and Mary with my sunglasses on. Her own sunglasses were the only casualty of the journey...cracked lens. Did I really say it was hard to leave our garden in Dorset?? It was then, but now its all amazing!!! We've hired a little white car to cart us further afield...but just now everyone is on the balcony watching the sun go down.

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 and these have opened since the last blog! This is the day we're leaving behind. Moving between two such different and distant places gives an extraordinary feeling of dislocation. At the moment I can't see why I would leave the garden coming into bloom and the duck on her eight eggs tucked behind a bush. She endured the hailstorm last night (hailstones still on the ground this morning) and is now enjoying the sunshine; she's absolutely stock still and thinks I can't see her. I'm hoping, when the eggs hatch, she can get all eight ducklings to the pond which is about 500mtrs away and across a small road. The way I feel about this place is that there are corners of the world which work. I saw the first bee out and about a couple of days ago, a big mother pig is digging in the field beside our house and her eight enthusiastic piglets are learning to do the same. The chickens, which came all scraggy and featherless from a local egg-farm earlier this year, are now plump and feathered. It's really hard to leave.

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 An amazing full moon appeared on the horizon tonight as I was heading down to my shed. I caught it on my phone camera, hence the quality. I've been trying to pack the essentials for travel, some watercolours, three brushes, arches rough block of paper, glitter spray, pencil case with blacks, whites and carbons, the multi-colour pencils from Royal Academy children's section, pencil sharpener and eraser, small watercolour moleskine and middle size plain moleskine and fine black pens...plenty of them.

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 Long conversation with my brother today, he's feeling so much better, putting on wieght and eating (quote) 'lovely food'. Four more weeks of antibiotics to go -hopefully it'll do the trick- Follow the 'comments' section of the previous paragaph to discover that my numbers were a little out!..and what the right ones are. (Although I think I was remarkably close, closer than I might have had confidence in being!) On broadcasting house thismorning they were asking us to look at numbers in terms of seconds in order to understand them, i.e. a million pounds become approx 30 years, a billion become 3000 years and a trillion became 30,000 years. Some of my students have trouble understanding tone, so I have often talked of it in similar way, in other words try to describe tonal difference in terms of distance. If a dark tone and a light tone sit side by side they have a greater 'distance' between them than if two similar tones sit side by side. I ask them to try and understand the 'distance'; eventually it becomes an intuitive perception.

Sat, 27 Mar 2010 At last some lovely weather and flowers in the garden. I planted bulbs all over the place last autumn and it feels like I've waited so long to find out what they are. So far we have primroses, oxslip, lungwort, crocuses, daffodils, last of the snowdrops, blue bell thingys and the beginnings of tulips and hyacinths...and black hellbore. There's a duck in the garden, tucked behind a bush, sitting on eight eggs. I'm not sure if I should do something (like put up a paddling pool) once they've hatched. Today I pegged a line full of washing and it dried fully outside for the first time this year...no having to air it indoors anywhere. My students' exhibition is finished now, there was one sale and plenty of great feedback. My Dad is staying and he hepled me take down the work. I found this photo of him recently...aged 17 in Oxford Street (he's nearly 80 now). I can't believe the weather forecast has just told me that alhtough tomorrow will be warm and fine, by Monday it'll be cold and wet again. Barring BA strikes etc., I'm thinking Easter in South Africa is going to be very welcome indeed. I'm really excited about seeing strange birds...pied crows, white necked ravens and mouse-birds. White Necked Raven (corvus albicollis).

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 Tentative news about my brother, he's at home and gradually feeling better. He is still taking the six-weeks-worth of antibiotics; the telling time will be when they end. Finally...a face to a name...here is my brother before the transplant with his wife Christiane.

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 Two more paintings by William Congdon (of the 'Dying Vulture' painting posted earlier on this blog). These two, 'Cross' and 'Crucifixion', come as close to perfect as I can imagine at the moment.

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 Now we're applying a more practical bias to perspective...looking at how objects relate to each other as they go back into the distance, however small that distance is. Sometimes I paint a still-life, but rather than set it up I swing round in my shed and 'see' what I find. Or, I'll set up the foreground and 'find' whatever is in the background. Probably the most important shapes to be looking for when painting a still-life are the in-between spaces...do I repeat myself?? They are the two dimensional manifestations of the relationships between two or more things even if those things have significant distance betwen them. They can't fail to help you get the shapes of the objects right, even when those objects are boxes with perspectives going in all directions. Its why a foreground reference is so important in a landcape painting...something in the foreground against which you can 'read' the whole view; othewise the view is without scale. This painting has various ways of describing distance, the road, the fence posts, the diminishing sheep but most of all the way the major elements relate to each other as they sit at different stages through the landscape's distance.

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 We've been looking at perspective, one point, two point and three point. The trouble is that I've never been taught so I've had to unravel it all myself and although my intuition is fairly robust, occasionally I think 'Well what the hell's going on here?' This evening, with one of my students, we were trying to understand exactly how Escher had fooled us with this everlasting staircase. It seems that the whole building conforms to three point perspective and that the viewer (and therefore the horizon) is well above the whole building...but that the staircase somehow doesn't conform to the same perspective...but blow me down I can't work out why! Anyone enlighten me?

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 'God was angry both with Ahab and his people for their idolatry and persecution of his priests, who were put to death in great numbers; and, as a punishment for these sins, He sent Elijah to tell Ahab that for three years and a half neither dew nor rain should fall in the land of Israel. As soon as Elijah had foretold this great evil, God bade him hide himself from the rage of Ahab in a certain place near the brook Cherith, where He had commanded the ravens to feed him. So he went and dwelt by the brook, which afforded him water to drink, while the ravens, as God had said, brought him food morning and evening.' This isn't the first mention of a raven in the bible. The raven is first mentioned by Noah, the first bird named in the bible, when Noah sends a raven (before the dove) to find dry land and it never returns. This is a detail from the 'Elijah' painting...in progress. I've given Elijah wispy white payos (hair above the ear) as an old man in hiding might have. I make drawings from which I work when making a painting; Whenever I'm stuck I refer to the drawing and I stick to the information it gives me. My drawings tell me what I want to know. If I need to know more, I work more on the drawing. They are the place to resolve the problems of shape, context, detail etc. I've had my dead raven out of the freezer again today. I truly love it and am thinking seriously of having it stuffed eventually. In the Quran, the story of Cain and Abel (Quabil and Habil) is much the same as in the old testament other than the following...'Then God sent down a raven, which dug the earth to show him how to bury the naked corpse of his brother.' -- Sura 5:31 But in a Jewish work called 'Pirke Rabbi Eliezer' (written possibly 8th century) we find this story: Adam and his companion sat weeping and mourning for him (Abel) and did not know what to do with him as burial was unknown to them. Then came a raven, whose companion was dead, took its body, scratched in the earth, and hid it before their eyes; then said Adam, "I shall do as this raven has done", and at once he took Abel's corpse, dug in the earth and hid it.

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 I\'ve begun to look at the raven in myth. A raven is the first bird mentioned in the Bible, Noah sends one out to find dry land and it never returns so Noah sends a non-carrion eating bird, the dove. In the epic of Gilgamesh there was a flood, a boat and birds...but the first bird sent out was a dove, the scecond was a swallow, they didn\'t return but the third was a raven and he returned to the boat. I have just begun work on a raven painting called Elijah. When Elijah spent time in the desert he was fed by ravens. from 'Gilgamesh', Enkidu rips a thigh off the bull of Heaven to throw at the goddess Ishtar.

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 I've been remiss about blogging lately...I blame the new series of 'The Shield' which Simon has on DVD...I'm totally gripped, it leaves me on a cliff-hanger at the end of every episode -unsurprisingly! I even forewent a slideshow of a family trip from years ago...I must be mad!! or hooked. Anyway, I had a long conversation with my brother today; yet another scan last Friday, the results of which, disscused yesterday, are better news than expected. The surgeon had worried that some ducts from the new pancreas to the gut were blocked. These ducts feed enzyme into the gut to help break down the food (my brother had been taking pills for that reason before the transplant). If the ducts had been blocked the pancreas would have had to come out, but it seems no blockage. There has been a compromised blood supply to the new pancreas, but whatever that event was, apparently its over. The scan also showed that his most recent antibiotics have significantly shrunk the bag of pus which has been causing so much trouble in his gut. He's going to stay on these antibiotics for at least six weeks...and best of all, his surgeon said 'When do you want to go home? Today or tomorrow?'. He also said...if anything happens when the antibiotics are finished...by pass the Royal Free and come straight to Oxford. I promise I won't watch any more (not much more anyway) of The Shield...once this DVD is finished. Here is a rather stern painting of me wearing a necklace given to me by my mother. It's an extraordinarily lovely Butler and Wilson necklace but I have so few times and places to wear it...roll out a red carpet please!

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 I put the second half of my students' exhibition up in the cafe last night...it looks fantastic. I had so many paintings handed in, towards the end of hanging I had to edit out some by those who'd had paintings in the first two weeks. Hopefully I can book the cafe again next year. This man was a master with light and dark, Winslow Homer's watercolour 'The Water Fan'. Note that the first layers of paint were the palest, they 'revealed' the lightest places only, subsequent layers were darker (increasingly), covered a smaller surface area, were placed on top of previous layers (in other words they didn't interrupt with previously 'revealed' lighter places) and the more layers the darker the tone. The shapes describing the swell of the water are much more simple and clearly seen than one might anitcipate, and the planning and finding of the lightest places right at the beginning are sublime, so that the finished piece appears effortless and completely convincing, and gives nothing away of how challenging the whole piece must have been to create! I'm off to Oxford to see my brother..yep! He's finally at The Churchill in Oxford!

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 A selection of pictures (taken with my phone camera)from the exhibition of my students' work. Note the reflection in the small daffodil watercolour...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 In praise of in-between spaces... The in between space IS the relationship between two or more objects or elements chosen for your composition. It is FAR more useful to you as an artist to start by looking for in-between spaces and building the composition around them. By looking for a shape which relates to two or more things and on which you can ‘hang’ the related elements you are more likely to see the elements of your subject correctly. This is because by looking at the in-between spaces you are making comparisons between the main elements. By making comparisons, you are asking questions about what you are looking at; you begin to understand how one thing appears as compared to another. An in-between space tells you about two or more things simultaneously, whereas seeing one element in isolation makes it much harder to understand what it actually looks like. Look at the working sketch by Carole Katchen. Visualise the shape between the man’s vest and the woman’s elbow. This shape has as much right to exist as the man’s hat or the woman’s hair. We know in reality it describes a gap, but in two dimensions it exists as a flat shape just as the man’s trousers do. Look at the underside of the woman’s skirt, the darker red shapes. What lovely shapes and how well they define where her legs are! It’s all too easy to ignore these shapes and expect the elements of your subject to sit successfully together on your painting; they won’t without an understanding of the spaces between them. I would also say, look at how certain elements relate to the edges of your page...otherwise you’ll find your subject ‘floating’ aimlessly somewhere in the middle of your page. See, on the left hand side of the drawing, how an in-between shape exists between the man’s hand, the woman’s hair, arm and skirt, and the edge of the page...there it is, showing you exactly where and how to compose the drawing within the edges of your page. On a slightly different kind of in-between space...I watched with pleasure today as one of my students ‘found’ a tree by creating it’s whole shape across the left hand side of her page and then proceeded to ‘reveal’ it by painting the shapes between the branches and twigs. The crop-section here is from one of my own paintings, where the tree and the child’s pole swing were ‘revealed’ by painting the in-between spaces. It makes for an exciting life!!!

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 I've been working on this raven today, and made another nice frame for another painting. I like my frames exactly the way I make them...the colour and contruction...I'm teaching tonight.

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 It was wonderful to see my brother. He is thin and tired but he perked up with a good political converstion and we had a good laugh over memories of a friend of his, Bugs, who is big in the Tattoo world and has now become a painter too, some of his paintings are rather wonderful (I found him on-line) This one is called 'Guitariste'. My brother has a large abcess in his gut which is difficult to reach but needs to be removed with an operation requiring a general anasthetic. He's in a catch 22 trap; he can't live with the abcess, it's what keeps re-infecting him, but he's not strong enough for an anasthetic to have it removed. When it's removed (its been described as trying to scoop up lump of mashed potato) many of the various bugs contained within it are likely to be released and bring about a massive new attack on his body...so things must get worse before they get better. He'll probably go to Oxford this week although the Royal Free want to hold on to him for a bit to 'build him up'. On a very happy note, his daughter and her husband (the soldier who lost his legs in Sangin) are expecting their first baby!!! Yippeeee...I'll be a great aunt!!! and my little brother will be a grandad!!!hhahahahaaray...there is a God in Heaven!!

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 Here is the William Congdon painting \'Dying Vulture\'...isn\'t it brilliant?? I love it. IN my shed I'm working on my Raven, I saw a painting about two years ago called 'Dying Vulture' by William Congdon (1957). I've only seen it once (it's at Kettles Yard, Cambridge) but it must have lined right up with one of my inner blueprints because I think of it all the time. There's no doubt it has influenced me because when I saw it I was working on another large Raven painting and seeing it resolved the way I was going to continue with my painting. Now I'm working on my 'Dying Raven'. I'm still thinking about William Congdon's painting but obviously on my own path now. I'm using a lot of colour with a view to knocking it back later on without losing it altogether. I've bought some liquin which I believe allows me to increase the transparency of oil paint and will try some transparent layers over the painting...glaze and scumble. The old masters used 'glaze and scumble' several times on one painting. With a transparent colour (Indian yellow)they would cover the whole surface of a painting then wipe the paint off certain areas such as the face. By picking up the bright face area with light paint (Naples yellow, white etc.) the background became darker and the face became brighter and glowing. It adds an extraordinary cohesion to the whole image too. I do this with my own paintings of faces but also with landscapes and other subjects. I'm hoping I can vary the colour of my transparent layers (normally I use only Indian yellow or Alizarin crimson for their high transparency) with my liquin. Howard Hodgkin uses wondeful colours and textures, many of which are not quite obscured, under subsequent calming semi-transparent layers. I've also been working on a self portrait version of my Jane Seymour. I'm off to London any minute now to see my brother.

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 3rd:Re-reading what I've said about Lord Ashcroft; I need to say that we give by direct debit to four charities every month and have done for more than 20years. We do more for other charities too including being trustees of a gorilla charity and raising money in various ways for it. www.G4G.co.uk Even so it never feels like enough, and I don't have a concept of -if every very wealthy person gave the same proportion we give, of their income, how far would it go to meeting the needs of the poorest parts of the world? Is the pit so bottomless that its not worth doing? On another note, my brother took a dive yesterday, I wonder if he's reached the bottom of his particilar pit yet...I wish...then it might be upwards from here. I'm going on Saturday to see him, still at the Royal Free in London. 2nd: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8537696.stm A link to Esther. 1st: Just looking at the pictures of Michael Foot (I think his dad was called Isaac Foot, what a wonderful name), I so completely approve of his duffle coat which he wore to lay a wreath at The Cenotaph in 1981; I approve now and I approved then. We’re plagued with the need to dress smartly. In our time of spin and shiny smiles, there’s something refreshing, real and appealing about Michael Foot’s duffle coat, as there was then in 1981. So many people have spoken lyrically about Michael Foot, not least Enoch Powell who said of him ‘He was the outstanding parliamentarian of our time’ and much more. I would so much have preferred Michael Foot to lead government rather than Tony Blair in whom it was hard to have trust -right from the beginning, with his evangelical zeal and his repellent look of ecstasy. My husband stayed up all night during that count. He was sure that if Blair were to win the election we would be heralding in the new age...I suppose we were doing so, of sorts, the age of see-only-what’s-on-the-surface-and-no-further, or the-means-justify-the-end-but-we-don’t-need-to-know...just-have-faith-in-our-glorious-leader. I was more cynical. I went to bed. Now with the Lord Ashcroft situation –how measly of him- we have to understand that smart suits are de rigueur, and the face of things is what we get until secrets are revealed by the media. Lord Ashcroft so coveted a title that he was happy to mislead even his close friend William Hague (how mortifying for Hague and what treachery from Ashcroft)...in other words we didn’t get quite what we were lead to believe we were getting, those supposed 10s of millions of £s in the tax coffers. Proportionally of course my dustbin man is probably paying more tax pro-rata, not wearing a smart suit (a green council overall instead) and I would much much much much much prefer to see him sitting in the house of Lords asking questions and voting on decisions than I would Lord Ashcroft. I wish that some of Lord Ashcroft’s 10s of millions of £s could trickle down to the tragic little girl Esther I saw last night on ‘Zimbabwe’s Forgotten Children’. Aged about 8yrs and suffering from HIV aids, she was saying ‘I’m so hungry; my body hurts in every place’. Maybe it would help if we knew more rather than less about Lord Ashcroft now, hopefully that quite a lot of his 10s of millions of £s are reaching small girls like Esther, who is so desperately aware of the sadness of her life.

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 This one is 'Garden Cove' the last one 'Twisting Stream'. As english as cow parsley and village church yards. We've been looking at landscape painters in class, I took in a scruffy but favourite little book about Ivon Hitchens. After years of looking after my own small children and feeling I never had anywhere near enough time to begin, let alone immerse myself in, painting, I remember finding this book on what must have been the first day of school for my youngest child. And so the re-awakening of my freer mind began; it was pouring with rain and I was looking at the view through the back window of my old shed. I worked on the same format using very similar colours to this painting, it wasn't a big painting, but the one which was the beginning of everything since...Although I never stopped painting when the children were small, and in fact often painted them, I was afraid of looking out at the world in case I suffered the frustration of not being able to respond to it. There's a particularly stunning view near here, above Tollard Royal, for years I wouldn't look out of the car window at it, it was too unbearably frustrating. Ivon Hitchens' paintings make me want to paint, look at paintings, talk about them, show them to people, they make me wish I had done them!

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 I heard my daughter wishing her boyfriend 'good luck' for tomorrow, he has his driving test. It reminded me of the day after I passed my driving test...I drove up on to Exmoor. The family had one car, an old Morris Oxford, and we all used it; consequently it ran on just above empty. I drove up to Brendon Two Gates with my painting things and sat looking across layers of moor with my canvas on the ground. I had to roll much of the way back down off Exmoor to hold on to the little bit of petrol. My teachers at the art school in Taunton loved the painting. It hung in the family home for several years and then I lost contact with it until recently when a friend told me she had a painting of mine in her attic...It now is stacked away in my shed but was an incidental admission in this painting (see crop) as I had been looking at still-lives and including whatever occured in the composition. It felt at the time like it had taken me years to realise the desire to do what I had just done -old enough and free enough to take myself up on to the top of Exmoor. Between Simonsbath and Brendon Two Gates is my favourite house, not much to look at but in a landscape which so closely aligns with my inner blueprint of a perfect landscape that I harbour desires to live there one day...Simon says he'd slit his wrists if we lived on Exmoor... ...even though he loves it there. I spoke to my brother today...its called a Gallium scan...all complex again, I'll collate the information in my head and say something about it tomorrow. Yesterday I put up the exhibition of my students' work in The Forum Cafe. Though I say it myself it looks really great. It entirely overcomes the challenge of being a diverse collection of work and looks cohesive and interesting and really great!

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 Finally there's a possible reason for my brother's sickness. The Galleon scan and a CT scan have been looked at together and show fluid on his cecum...(thats a new one on me)...it looks like a little appendix at the join of the small and large intestines. He's still at the Royal Free and very weak. The fluid wil be drained and if it turns out to be amylase it means his new pancreas is in trouble and he will have to be opened up and 'all fixings checked' (to and from the new pancreas I guess). If the fluid is something else it may just be an infection which can be treated, but so far John is still not taking anitbiotics and has a temperature. A temperature is one way of fighting infection so maybe he has some immunity of sorts. Jane Seymour and happy memories of history lessons with Miss Pike. Jane Seymour in her lovely frame.

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 I'm gathering work by my students for an exhibition at The Forum Cafe in Blandford. I have the cafe for a month so in order to accommodate everyone who is giving me work I shall be dividing the exhibition into two lots of two weeks. My students are an impressive lot and there is some fine work going in to the show. I will photograph the show when its up, meanwhile...here is a watercolour of some apples. No more on my brother just yet. I have made an exquisite (yep...I can hardly believe it) frame for the Jane Seymour painting. I hope I'm not deluding myself!

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 So Dad has been to see John today at the Royal Free in London and says he seems a little brighter; I can explain the complications now. Since the transplant, every five weeks John has gone into collapse with an infection. He ends up at the A&E of his nearest hospital, Royal Free where they treat him with antibiotics and move him on to Churchill hospital in Oxford where the transplant was performed. After a few days he’s responding to the antibiotics so the Churchill send him home, where he feels better for a while and even manages to combat his almost constant sickness and eat something. Five weeks later and he’s down again. This time he has refused antibiotics at the Royal Free because he wants to go straight to Oxford where that they can assess him before treatment, but Oxford are short of beds and can’t take him until possibly the weekend. Now John is very ill, very weak, having only fluids by drip and the Royal Free feel they need to do a super-duper scan which requires a radioactive injection and then the scan two days later. Being radioactive, it means he can’t have another injection for a few weeks. If he misses the scan day two days later he misses the chance of this particular kind of scan for some weeks to come. He had the injection yesterday and now hopes Oxford won’t come up with a free bed until after tomorrow when he has had the super-duper scan at the Royal Free, but he’s still struggling to hang on without antibiotics, against the advice of his consultant. Dad asked John did he regret having had the transplant and John said absolutely not...a small mercy, and a relief to any relative of an organ donor who might be reading this.

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 I’m in Oxford, with my younger sister Jane at her baby-clothes warehouse. I’ve just dropped Mary for an interview at Oxford Brookes. Jane and I are about to find Dad, he’s at Jane’s house waiting for news of our brother John. John was at A&E in London yesterday; at some point today he’s arriving by ambulance at the hospital here in Oxford which performed his transplant six months ago. He’s very dehydrated, not compus mentus either I gather. The decision is whether to open him up and look at the pancreas with a view to treating him, or whether to cut losses and take it out. I believe he’ll keep the kidney. It means he’ll be diabetic again and I’m not sure of the implications of that; it seems better than the condition he’s been struggling to live with since the transplant. I remember when we were living in USA, I had such a bad tooth, a molar near the back. I went to the dentist who was all for root canal treatment and what-not...I said absolutely NOT. I can live without it, just PULL it out please. I think it cost me $120 for the pleasure of it! What a relief it was; every time I poke my tongue into the gap I’m glad. I wish we had several pancreases in the same way we have several teeth; a synthesised evolutionary furrow to plough if diabetes becomes the endemic problem forecast? Why else do we have two kidneys, when we can live on 25% function of one of them, if not to mitigate the loss of one? And by the same reasoning several teeth? And two eyes? (although that may be for binocular vision, and in the case of birds, all round vision too.) I suppose stem cell research is dealing with these questions...growing one’s own spares for these eventualities. Update: My brother still in London, in Royal Free, waiting for a bed in Oxford. He's having liquids only and refusing all other treatment at the moment...complicated...too upsetting to explain.

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 This photo was taken on the first day when I was drawing on top of the black bales. The ravens are on the horizon. 19.2.10 3. I found a round fibre-resin tea tray, selected various good steep slopes, made some ice-runs and had a great time whizzing down them and trudging up to the top again. The nice thing about being on my own is that I didn’t have to share my tea tray, I just skidded down and trudged up until I was soaking wet and whacked! 2. I haven’t found the sledge so I’m going to search out something else which will do. The snow looks wonderful, on the hills it reveals every scar, every sinew and every crevice, but the fields are as smooth as an iced wedding cake. If I’d had an iced wedding cake an Exmoor scene on it would have been nice. As it was we had Wonder Woman and SuperMan cakes at our wedding. I’ve been on a favourite walk around Sparcombe Water; I could feel myself smiling all the way as the sun shone on the snow. I sent a picture message of a white Exe Cleave back to all my students who have hired a hall near Blandford and are spending the week painting without me! 1. Quantum physics: A particle can exist in two places at once? The act of looking makes the particle change its behaviour? Slippery!! Anecdotal: MP? I’m still fussing in my mind over this false-passport/sanctioned-state-murder in which we might have colluded. It’s been snowing hard again and I’ve been told there’s a sledge in a nearby field so I’m off to look for that and a hill with a gentle incline at the bottom...I don’t mind if it’s steep at the top. I shall only exist at the top or at the bottom...or anywhere in between but not all at the same time; maybe going so fast that I shall APPEAR to be in every place at the same time. 18.2.10 Robert Fisk in today’s paper is suggesting that although Israel is behind the Mahmoud al-Mabhouh murder it was done with British collusion and in the past similar things have been done with active US support. The people who committed the murder and were in Dubai at the time of the murder, presumably helping, must be such small-fry-pawns in the greater game it probably doesn’t matter what they feel about what they’ve done, and those whose passports they’ve used rank even lower; abused with no comeback and placed in a very vulnerable position. It’s been snowing hard all day again today so we walked to Exford to the pub to read the papers, have lunch etc. Snow well and truly settled, it’s hard to believe that this end of the week belongs to the same beginning! That warm sun and those clear blue skies with the ravens tumbling about...another time another place! Earlier today I was watching a flock of starlings feeding at the edges of the cabin where the snow is thinner. After prodding the ground with their beaks they were finding big fat worms and swallowing them down whole. One of the starlings has a completely deformed leg, he seems to have no trouble flying or feeding on the ground but I can’t see how he can perch. It struck me that he probably doesn’t know he’s disabled! Once again I’ve been working from drawings I’ve made this week...making clear the advantages of drawing while the sun shines. As ever at the start of a painting you wonder what the hell is going to happen with it, and is it worth sticking to? If you can disengage yourself from your feelings about the painting itself, simply continue with carefully found revelations, edges, areas and tones from your subject or the drawing from which you’re working, it sometimes happens that something interesting results. Looking out of the window...it’s unbelievable that we have more snow than we’ve ever had on Exmoor at this half-term time, and in Vancouver they have the least they’ve had in 100 years. ‘Law’ and ‘Murphy’s’ comes to mind. I don’t envy those in charge of this year’s winter Olympics. 17.2.10: woke up to this outside our window. The cabin is much warmer even though it’s been snowing hard again, sustained fire in the woodburner at least during the day. We went to Exeter to see George...a treat! I got up early, lit the fire and worked on a painting from a drawing I made yesterday above Chetsford Water. I’m shocked, perhaps naive...by the killers on false passports who murdered a Hamas man in Dubai...does every nation do it? How justified is it? Would they have done it/authorised it if they’d known it would be revealed? Are they smug? Worried? Ashamed? Embarrassed? Pleased with themselves? Satisfied? Ready to do more? Well paid? Unaffected? Affected? Just doing their jobs? In full support of what they’ve done? I’d be stomping mad if I were one of the stolen ‘identities’ -and worried for my safety. I spent £23 on three tubes of watercolour paint in Exeter today. 2. Sometimes I paint on location and at other times I’ll paint from drawings made on location. Today I’ve done a bit of both. There’s no doubt that the painting done on location has a much lighter touch, an immediate response to what one is looking at, with the subject available to be gleaned from as the eye jumps from page to view to page again. However the paintings made from drawings are much more likely to deal with composition, structure, shapes and tones...and an overall ‘feel’. They don’t have that same light touch but they have a stronger initial impact and clearer divisions between ‘light’ and ‘dark’. One very important result of filling my drawing books is that I can use them like a bank...I fill them with drawings from which I can extract visual information at any time in the future. I use the drawings and re-use some of them, as often as I like, as a basis for paintings on canvas. They have structures and compositions which have endless possible manifestations. The drawings in my drawing books are not lovely; they are an efficient method of note-taking and when I’m working from them in my shed they evoke very strong memories of what I was looking at when I made them. Here on Exmoor, if I’m not painting on location, I try to make watercolours from my drawings as soon as I get back to the cabin from my walks. These watercolours may be framed and exhibited when I’m back at home but they may prompt paintings on canvas as well. 1. Yesterday I walked with the others, along the coast, over North Hill and down into Minehead which has an extraordinary ‘old town’ with tiny thatched cottages and little streets...its places like that which give us an idea of the scale of the old days, certainly of the days when people walked everywhere unless they were wealthy enough for space and horses. Worlds, I suppose, were measured by walking distances - Lorna Doone is a great book for its descriptions of 17th century life on Exmoor, plenty of walking in deep snow to rescue sheep! There’s quite a lot of ‘new’ Minehead which is not so engaging –a main street filled with £-shops! I missed my stretch of strolling and sketching so I had the others drop me off a way from the cabin and I walked back. Today is the oddest day; we’ve had heavy snow and now streaming sunshine. I’ve been out drawing in the snow and am now going into the glorious sun...everything is glistening.

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14.2.10: It’s 10pm now and the fire is banked up and popping. The temperature is about 1deg. outside. The day has been lovely. I found a stack of black bales –like a castle- and sank in a dip right on top, between two bales, with my feet up on the bale in front. I had a wide view, the sun was shining and a half dozen ravens hove into view, scrabbling and gobbling...I was amazed! Eventually they flew north but two pairs peeled off and gave wonderful dual aerobatics which then became a display of four...watch and learn Red Arrows...the difference is that ravens can improvise their swings and dives and they seem to delight in doing just that, but the Red Arrows must spend hours choreographing and practising. Right...bedsocks...blankets...zzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZ It was a cold night but two duvets, several blankets and bed socks sorted that out. Simon was up early and got the fire going and then set off to Exford to get the papers. He dropped me half way so I could walk back with my camera, take photographs and suck in deep breaths of Exmoor air. You have to be careful with a camera not to miss the things you look at. The camera often means you peep through the viewfinder, snap and then never look again. I need to look and keep looking before snapping, and generally I’m looking for a ‘composition’ which the camera viewfinder then helps me with, and helps me to understand better once I’ve downloaded it to the computer. This time I found I was interested in the way the foreground beech banks veil the hills in the background, and exactly how much of the view behind the beech-veil was visible. When I look at the view my eye- focus jumps between the foreground and the background, compensating and re-focussing accordingly, but my camera will only focus on one layer giving me a chance to see how one layer of view relates to another with just a single focus. I suppose it’s called ‘depth of field’ in camera terms, and I could get the whole lot in focus if I wanted. I spent last night playing with my new paper...it was lovely! Last time I was here I was feeling dark and moody. I scrambled in the undergrowth along covered streams and small rivers looking for dark places with moments of light. Perhaps it was three things; it was autumn and the end of summer always feels like a loss, my nephew-in-law had just lost both his legs and some fingers off both hands, in Afghanistan, a couple of days before we came up here. Four months later he seems to be doing really well. He’s been selected to train for two Paralympics’ teams; shooting and tennis I think, and he and my niece are in the process of buying a bungalow. I’m feeling more open and ready for the blooming year this time; the only cloud and the third thing is my brother’s transplant. He had a kidney/pancreas transplant last August; it’s taking a long time to get better. I thought I’d be able to ‘tweet’ about him and the process, I found I couldn’t...all too painful to put into single sentences. Home!! I blogged on a word doc while away and will update bit by bit: 13.2.10. We’ve head to Exmoor today, very cold day, and met friends at The Red Lion in Dulverton...it’s how our Exmoor weeks begin and its where we step out of our lives which belong to other things and into our lives which belong entirely to ourselves. I have 100 sheets of Fabriano paper which I couldn’t stop thinking about all the way here. I remembered to bring my gum strip and already I have a stretched sheet drying on a board. We’re in the cabin, the woodburner’s lit but it’s still pretty cold. Bridget is cooking so not only do I not have to think about what to cook, I don’t have to cook it either. I can’t stop thinking about my new paper, about loading my brush with colour and off-loading onto my paper...I’m not even sure I mind what the image will be at the moment. I simply want the pleasure of negotiating with watercolour on my new paper. Exmoor, even at this drab time of year, has the most wonderful colours and textures as well as the eye-grabbing shapes of the hills and valleys. If a fashion designer were to spend time on Exmoor I can’t see how it could fail to influence the cut of a pattern or the texture and colour of a fabric. The hills are as sumptuous as body curves clad in rich earthy colours, the lines of beech banks clearly describe the hills’ edges... edges again...beech seems to hold on to its autumn leaves well into spring so they haven’t lost the orange glow. Now I just wish I had Mary’s ‘onesy’ with me, her all-in-one fleecy sleep suit...I’d happily put it on over my jeans! Because my time is my own here, I tend not to hang out with the others. I trudge off on my own with my drawing things and ‘fill the bank’ with sketches, structures, compositions, colours and notes. Its evening so all that has to wait until tomorrow. As soon as the first sheet dries I’ll test it out tonight with some colour and shape...I think I’ll try a bit of resist as well, I have my oil pastels here. %*&^$£)(& Can’t Wait!!!&)(£$^&*%

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 I'm off to Exmoor tomorrow for a week, to a place with no phone signal or internet connection. I've been watching a film about the Graf Zeppelin airship which travelled around the world in 1928. It's inner workings, engines, steering room etc look like something out of Metropolis (which I believe was released the year before). They flew in luxury, bedrooms and beds, tables, cultery and served meals, a chef and a bedmaker...it was gripping though, the most challenging moments being only just gaining enough height to surmout some Russian mountains, and surviving a storm and disappearing for two days over the pacific. The landscapes were beautiful in the black and white crackly film. I believe large lost chunks of 'Metropolis' (which had been cut after the film flopped on its first release) were found in Argentina. The newly found footage was in poor condition but has been restored using new techniques designed precisely to deal with the depth of damage. I saw metropolis when I was a student at Somerset College of Arts and Technology...made a big impression...two exrtaordinary things to come out of Germany at the same time. I've just read that the new version of Metropolis has had its first release today...what a co-incidence!

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 Kilvicheoun Beach When I was teaching on Mull there were two girls from Shetland working at the same place. They’d never been off Shetland and were amazed by the massive blue skies and warm sunshine further south (they said it always rains on Shetland). We were coming home one day from a trip to Kilvicheoun beach, one of those vast white sandy beaches on the south coast of Mull, it had been unusually hot and sunny even for Mull. In the far distance on the other side of the road we could see what looked like a pony and trap coming towards us which is exactly what it turned out to be, but sitting at the reigns of the trap was the unmistakable Harry Secombe. I thought it was hilarious but the girls were speechless with excitement, there were wide eyes and sharp intakes of breath! They’d never seen a famous person before. It felt like we were moving through a ‘Songs of Praise’ special on the road from Iona to Carsaig. This photo is of the road down to Inniemore Lodge where I was teaching.

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 I caught sight of this picture as I was searching rapidly through some pictures on google-images. I thought ‘That’s Scotland’ It reminded me of when I was teaching on Mull, at Pennyghael just off the road to Iona. The view south across the water to Jura had a clear light and pine trees too, much like this painting. Actually it wasn’t Scotland after all. It’s a painting called ‘Girl in a Landscape’ by an American artist, Fairfield Porter, who painted on Long Island and in Maine. Although I was wrong this time, I think we all have an inner hard-wiring for landscape recognition. When I was 18 I travelled from New York to Denver on a train. It took three days and, apart from the nights, I spent practically every minute at the window taking in the passing landscape. Of course it changed gradually from the green and wooded east, via Philadelphia and Chicago, a gently hilly Iowa and on across the plains of Nebraska to the Rocky Mountains. Almost twenty years later I followed the same route but by road (which parallels the railway) with my family and I was surprised at how much the passing landscape matched my memories of it so exactly. It got me thinking about how important the ‘interpretation’ of landscape must have been to our survival as a species. If you were in the jungle and a puma is hiding in a tree nearby, you need to be interpreting every rustle and shadow or you’ll be his dinner. Try holding your thumb up about four inches from your eye. How does it compare with whatever is twelve feet away? Would you say your thumb looks as big as a door? And yet you know your thumb is NOT as big as a door. If you were in the desert and saw a distant oasis, luckily your brain will interpret the tiny size you see it as, and you’ll understand that it’s big enough to be somewhere you might get a drink. You’ll also understand that ‘green’ might mean sustenance of some sort and you’ll understand that it will take you a certain amount of time to walk to it. I heard yesterday on the radio that to be in the countryside is important for our wellbeing. It gives very positive benefits to troubled people...and I’m thinking... 'did anyone ever think otherwise???’ I’d like to misquote Anthony Gormley who said about art that ‘We ignore the figure at our peril’ and say ‘We ignore landscape at our peril’.

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 I'm still working on Jane Seymour. What caught me (and catches me) most about Holbein's portraits are his hard edges and the colour blue he uses in so many portraits. I'm trying to marry the blues, the hard edges, the 'sfumato' painting he uses on faces AND a freer style of painting which I would natually use in my painting ordinarily. I want all these notions to sit together in one painting. It seems I am pushing forward with these techniques and ideas and then 'knocking' the paint-work back a bit. The difficulty is...how far does one go with the looser style of painting? How much do I match the paintwork back in once I've let loose with it?

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 Here\'s my version of Jane Seymour thus far. I\'m keeping as much control of her face as I can, as near as I can manage to Holbein (its very hard) but I\'m going to go whacky and experimental around the edges and on her dress with colour, texture and freedom. I told Simon this morning about the youngsters who think the Hamed Karzai painting is Darth Vader; he said 'You bring to a painting the World you know'.

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 A field vole has made his home under the bird feeder behind my shed. When he peeps his little twitching nose out of the undergrowth to have a look around and then darts out to grab the fallen seeds, its impossible not to see him as Beatrix Potter might have done. Sometimes he\'s quite brave and sits for a while, nibbling and washing...until something like a chaffinch comes along which is, by comparison, ENORMOUS! He turns tail and thats the last I see of him for an hour or two. Apparently field voles leave trails along their pathways to repel other voles...but the trails emit UV light which is visible to all the hunting birds...seems a little unfair! Tony, the manager at the cafe where I hang the political stuff says that, more than once, the youngsters have asked about the bottom picture in the triptych...'Is that Darth Vader?'...Doh!

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 So...Cherie Blair spares a man jail because of his religion...does that mean that if I thump a man and break his jaw I will go to prison if Cherie is the judge at my court case? Paul Woolley, in support of Cherie says in The Independent today that ‘Cherie Booth was taking into account Mr. Miah’s membership of a faith community. Evidence indicates that belonging to a community reduces the likelihood of reoffending’. Perhaps this suggests that a community as large as a country, any country, even the smallest country, where a person from one end of the country couldn’t possibly know, or feel accountable to, someone from the other end of the country, is too large. Surely we should all reduce our allegiances down to the size of a city-state at most and then we might all feel that we ‘belong’ to a community and therefore both accountable and responsible. The logical conclusion is that Cherie, in handing down this lenient non-sentence, has in one fell swoop negated all the years her husband was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain??!!!! Because it left so many of us in a position where we were unable to ‘belong’ to a community small enough for us to feel ourselves ‘members’, ‘accountable’ or even safe at the hands of our judges??? Phew...I feel better after that!

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 I have gone one stage further with this painting. You can look at stage three and see how it conforms to the ideas I've been talking about. There are probably two more layers after this one, and the last layer is the moment when the whole image comes together. Watercolour has a perfect logic behind it. You'll see it beautifully practiced in the work of John Sell Cotman. He was able to deal with those long stages of abstraction of shape and tone before his paintings co-alesced into a cohesive image. Stage two becomes more tricky. You have to decide where layer two must go and where it must not go...in other words...what shapes and areas do you 'reveal' with the next layer of paint. This is Claude Lorrain stage one. All I have done with this first layer of paint is \'reveal\' the lightest place. Every other area has \'tone\' and therefore needs to take some of this first layer. In class we've been looking at watercolour again. The counter-intuitive way of thinking needed is always a challenge even for my veteran students...and for myself too. I have to remind myself of the process of watercolour painting every time I use it. Look at this Claude Lorrain watercolour painting. Ask yourself about the shapes and positions of the lightest places. The point about watercolour is that you cannot 'paint' a light place, you can only 'reveal' it by painting around it. I am also going to post what I consider the first two stages of Claude Lorrain's watercolour might have looked like.

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 And now look at this equally marvellous head by Frank Auerbach, with equally subtle and complex tonal changes across the surface of the face.

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 I've been looking at this Holbein painting of Jane Seymour...for two reasons. Firstly I think Holbein was a master of 'edge' and 'edge' is one of my five fundamental elements of painting. Edges come both 'hard' and 'soft' and amazing examples of both exist on this painting. The egde between Jane and her background is a 'hard' edge. Either side of that edge the tones contrast enough for the edge to show clearly. You can see that Holbein even changed the background blue to contrast differently with the figure, on the left Jane's sleeve is lighter than the background but on the right it is the background which is lighter than the sleeve. Much much more subtle edges exist on Jane's face. It might look like it's one rather bland tone but close up you can see the softest change from one subtle tone to another all across her face. Her face is a collection of soft-edged close-toned shapes. My second reason for looking at this painting is in defernce to our history teacher. She told us that Henry had 'really loved' Jane Seymour; he had wanted so much to 'show her off' after the birth of their son that he insisted she get up and dressed to be presented to the court too soon after giving birth. She was more ill than Henry realised. She probably died of a haemorrhage about two weeks later and it was several years before Henry married again. He buried her in the tomb he'd been preparing for himself and so he is now buried there with her. I am (along with many others who have done so in the past) painting my own version, its more a case of 'Looking for Jane Seymour' rather than a straight copy. She was rumoured to have a 'calm and gentle demeanor', but most Holbein paintings give that feeling. Its that same feeling I'm looking for with my own version, plus the same complexities and subtleties with 'edge'.

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 I hardly dare say what I\'ve been given today, I\'m so grateful. I have a raven in my freezer which was found dead out on The Cranborne Chase. I\'m caught in that between-world where I can preserve it but not look at it, or look at it but not preserve it. I shall have to hope that the temp in my shed remains below zero for a couple of hours tomorrow (not unusual!) I've been to my local cafe thismorning. There's a space set aside for me to hang political stuff which I appreciate very much. The cafe ought to have a preservation order placed on it, its built like cave on the inside and painted orange; in fact it's like sitting in a tonsil, must have been designed in the 70s. I've put up the Hamed Karzai triptych. He presides over a country where half the population are covered up, invisible, and that same half of the population need two of themselves in order to witness a legal document or testify and be heard in a court of law. So I've decided anyone who presides over that kind of a country must only be half a person, and live only a half life.. I tried to stuff him fully under a burqa but then I realised we wouldn't know who he is so in the third piece he's half under the burqa. I've been so excited waiting for 'Sunday' on radio 4, Ed Stourton has moved in to the place of Roger Bolton. I really like Roger Bolton and have loved the presenting he's done but, after Nick Clarke (who prsented 'the world at one'and died of cancer in 2006) and who was the monarch of presenting, Ed Stourton comes a very close second. Ed Stourton is a complete gentleman who gets the absolute best out of his interviewees with quiet respect and not a single bit of ear-bashing. There was a very funny line thismorning when they were discussing the merits (or not) of lying. The interviewee said to Ed 'If you were my wife and you asked me 'Does this dress make me look fat' would I reply 'Absolutely not darling, it's your fat that makes you look fat'...?'

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 "There is a marvellous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still.." J.D. Salinger. Perhaps more extreme than necesary but I am constantly telling my students not to have a 'viewer' in mind as they paint. A 'viewer' might be dictating their painting to them rather than their own thoughts, desires and responses. A chunk of my job as their teacher is to swing their aspirations away from wanting to create something 'competent' to wanting to search their own souls to discover what it is they DO want to paint and then to give them some facility with various media to help them do just that. Today is a wonderful day, full of sunlight and birds on the bird table. I\'m in my shed laughing because I can always tell when the woodpecker visits the birdtable...I hear \'bangbangbang\' and there he is attacking the birdfat. The sparrows fling stuff everywhere and the greenfinches eat in a gentle and considered way, by far the best manners. I\'ve put some of Simon\'s bread out too and the rooks love that... Rook on the fence behind my shed.

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 I think Aunt Peggy and Uncle Hugh's marriage was very much a partnership of equals unusual at that time. There was a long driveway leading to where they lived and one time Kate and I were in the car with Aunt Peggy heading down the drive and Uncle Hugh was driving up the other way. There was more than enough time for them to avoid each other but instead they bumped into each other. Aunt Peggy got out of the car and said 'Hugh, you should have gone into the hedge', to which he replied 'Nonsense Peggy, you should have gone into the ditch'. Photographs are so evocative. I can remember the moment that the photo below was taken. I had asked my twin sister to take the picture and someone else to stand over to the right (of me) so that Novio would look around me at what was going on. Our own memories are the fabric of what we are, and having a photo to jog that memory is, I suppose, why we take them. I imagine someone set up the photo of Aunt Peggy and Uncle Hugh in the same way, and although I wasn't there I'm certainly glad to have the photo...I was very fond of Aunt Peggy (and Uncle Hugh too), she was funny, opinionated and keen to find out what the modern world was about into her nineties (when she died). My sister and I would be put on a plane at Heathrow and sent over during the summer holidays to stay with them from quite a young age (7yrs old I think). There was a lake to swim in and always horses to ride and the Dublin Horse Show to visit.

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 And now an indulgence, my favorite picture of me aged 17 with a horse called Novio...hmmmmm...he was lovely. Uncle Hugh and Aunt Peggy 1931 Here is one of the paintings from our recent study of Van Gogh and old boots. These were painted by Norah. Norah grew up in Ireland, and as a girl she was given a pony by my great aunt and Uncle which she says changed ger life. The pony was called Merrilegs. It was something she and I had no idea about until one day when I took in an old photo of my aunt and uncle on horses. My aunt had been top racing trainer in Ireland for four years running but had to do it in Uncle Hugh\'s name as women were not allowed to be trainers. Later I\'ll scan the photo of aunt Peggy and uncle Hugh and post it here. Norah\'s father had been the local doctor and the hunt doctor. They all hunted together. This photo was taken with my phone camera -excuse the quality.

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 Yesterday was not an easy day in my shed...everything went wrong. It was one of those days when the mood is \'why the hell did I think I could do this?\'. Howevever, it seems that yesterday was set up to support today. That doesn\'t mean one can be complacent. There\'s nothing to ensure that great things emerge today, its just that moments of \'possibility\' are recognisable where they definitely were not yesterday. Here is my shed in the snow this winter.

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 Here are four of them...then my camera battery ran out. I went over to Chris's today to watch the ravens. Every evening at about 5pm they head to a certain barn, Chris says it can be over 100 sometimes. They sort of saunter across the sky in twos and threes, grumbling and croaking at each other with an occasional display of dual acrobatics. They are the crucifixes of the sky, great black crosses but far too chatty to be really ominous. I've been working on these dream like paintings again.Thery are all based on drawings of real places but have taken on their own enigma. I think I'll call them the 'Nocta Lucca' set, I heard those words last night. Its difficult naming paintings, it doesn't always feel straight forward. One of my teachers was John Hoyland, he said that he used to call all his work 'untitled' with a reference number but he could never remember which was which when referring to them so he began to name in order to make reference. He said the names didn't mean anything, but its a little like naming your children. You wouldn't 'reference-number' your children, you wouldn't give them a name you didn't like, naming something is meaningful whether you intend it or not.

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 The first snowdrops are up behind my shed under the ash tree...always a good sign. I've been working on paintings with a very dream-like quality to them and its probably a reaction to the cold, dark,blanket grey of the skies at the moment. My edges are soft and my colours orange!

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 So today in class we were looking at ways of drawing with pencil. From the moment you walk into your first class in school, and in fact before then, its probable that you've been using line and almost exclusively line unless you've been encouraged to do otherwise. Today 'outline' was discouraged. Line was only encouraged as 'hatched' line. I asked for 'fluid' hatching, making large areas of shadow indicative of the subject they were looking at (old boots!). I asked them also to use an eraser to carve back into the hatched area to begin to sculpt the shapes of the boots. It became a conversation between the pencil and the eraser, gradually the pencil marks and shapes becoming darker and more detailed and the light places revealed with the eraser. Some great pieces were produced. At the moment there's a glitch uploading pictures to this blog, as soon as its sorted out I'll upload some of my students' work.

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 I’ve been teaching watercolour painting to adults and children for 25 years. It is both a lovely moment and a relief when my students begin to ‘see the light’. Watercolour is a challenge. To use it successfully you must switch your way of thinking to something which is so counter-intuitive as to seem outrageous initially but will eventually be the bedrock of your way of seeing in every medium you use. Once you are using it, it will affect every part of your life, a big claim for a seemingly unassuming medium. I have had some students walk out of a class in their frustration and inability to take on board the notion that with watercolour you can't paint a 'light' place, you have to 'reveal' a light place by painting around it. It means that you have to be as conscious of the shapes you do not paint as you are of the shapes you do paint.

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 I wrote to the paper today, sometimes they publish it sometimes they don't...as follows Sir: I hope and think that David Baddiel's film will be very interesting (Baddiel courts controversy with a film about 'Muslim Jew'. 'Race' is a non-description of anyone I contend. When I was last in Jordan I met a mother and daughter. The mother was telling me that her parents were a Jewish Zionist settler and a Muslim Palestinian boxer. They married in 1947 and were disowned by their respective families. In 1948 they were put in prison and then freed on condition they 'went away'. 'Went away' meant going east and for the wife to live as a Muslim. Presumably the mother and daughter I met may return to Israel under the law of return, they are both Jewish being daughters of Jewish mothers. Last September in an open exhibition I won a prize with money attached and one of the things I bought myself was a net book...The idea is that I have a line of banter via my website about the painting and teaching that I'm doing. Its in its nascent stages, there may be hiccoughs, but if you tune in here you might find enlightenment and there again you might not!

clare.shep@btinternet.com

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