Uffington Hare

The new picture, following on from the Questing Vole, shows a hare looking up at Lepus, the constellation of the hare, below Orion and pursued by Sirius (though you can't see them in this pic, just in case you were looking). I drew the picture then scanned it and coloured it using Paint Shop Pro. This is good for those deep, smooth colours, as you see; I'd made two starts at this picture using watercolour, and put them aside as it just wasn't the medium for the picture I had in mind. 

As several people asked if it was going to be available as a card, I thought I'd better get some printed up; the cards won't be ready for a few days yet, but I've just picked up some prints and they can be got here on Etsy

stained glass for narrowboats

So, Tony asked if I could paint his cratch board window, and I said, “Of course!” and then thought, but did not say “…well, at least I think so….”

And then I went away and did a bit of mugging up on the topic. And drew up a design. And ordered some paints. I used Pebeo Vitrail, a solvent-based glass paint that promises to be waterproof but advises against the use of dishwashers. I thought Tony’s boat would be safe from that. 

I sellotaped three bloody great pieces of paper onto the side of my boat, and drew up a template; there’s precious little room on board Eve for a drawing board like my old one. Then I cut out the template and stuck it to the back of the glass, and lined in the design using Pebeo Cerne outliner. This creates a black bead, something like the leaded strips you get between panels of stained glass, which is of course the intended effect.

As I was moored outside the Barge Inn at Honeystreet at the time, I had some interested spectators; one (whose name I didn’t catch) said “I’ve got a tattoo just like that!” and showed me. And so he did; it was a rising sun over the Uffington white horse, surmounted by his daughter’s name. 

“A bloke in the field here did it for me” he said. The field in question being the camping field next to the pub, where assorted tipis and old vans and buses were assembled ready to welcome in the equinox. “Quite like Stonehenge in the old days”, I remarked to Boat Teenager, who had been kept awake for most of the night by the band, and would have gone in to listen except that there was no-one else of her age around. We agreed, though, that the band, despite the billing, were not what we’d call psychedelic. I’d been hoping for something a bit Hawkwind at least. “Who?” asked Boat Teenager. I went back to my painting.

It was hard to get a smooth coverage of the larger areas- the green hill with the horse on it was particularly difficult- either the paint was too thick, and the brush strokes very much in evidence, or if I thinned it it was too thin.... I tried stippling it, which created a far better effect. I subsequently tried sponging, on the background to the wheat- I cut off pieces of washing up sponge and dabbed the dark brown paint on with it; this was an effective method.

a hare, of course!

there's a harvest mouse in there somewhere


...there it is!

on the complexity of the octopus

octopus, originally uploaded by Dru Marland.

The octopus, the octopus;
It has four times more arms than us
You think that's lots, as I once did?
It's still two fewer than the squid

the Cliftonwood rainbow

cliftonwood, originally uploaded by Dru Marland.

...a row of houses overlooking Bristol Harbour. I think this was the first terrace in Bristol to go multicoloured. Presumably, somebody once thought "I'll paint the house a cheerful colour" and then the neighbours saw it and thought "Oh, good idea..."

There's a newly built development just below here which was painted multicoloured from the start. Which seems a bit cheaty.

map reading for beginners

map reading for beginners, originally uploaded by Dru Marland.

This picture's kept me occupied for the last few days. It's intended as the cover for Deborah's next poetry collection, a work in progress. The picture incorporates several elements in her poems, and develops some of the ideas behind my Partrishow picture. There's also a big nod in the direction of Kathleen Jamie's poem 'Meadowsweet', because it seemed to work so well with the picture and is such a good poem, in its turn referencing a tradition that 'suggests that certain of the Gaelic women poets were buried face down'.

Partrishow

...a remote church in the Black Mountains, with the shrine of St Issui, and, in the valley below, a holy well. A good place, and I like going there. There's all sorts of things going on in the picture, but I'll leave them for you to find and put your own story on. (Click on the picture to see it large)

A picture for the year's turning. I've been thinking of how to do this picture for ages, and then just got stuck in and hoped for the best. There are bits of it I'm really happy with, and I'm also happy that I've started the new year with a new picture. Even though it meant I was very antisocial on New Year's Eve.

I've got some prints done, and they are available in my Etsy shop. There are two sizes, small (roughly A4) and large (roughly A3). 

There's a Fibonacci spiral in there somewhere, by the way!

The Oxen

 The Oxen

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
   "Now they are all on their knees,"
An elder said as we sat in a flock
   By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
   They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
   To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
   In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
   "Come; see the oxen kneel,

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
   Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom,
   Hoping it might be so.

Thomas Hardy

I love this poem; it fits my own feelings at Christmas quite well. I remember the sense of magic about the Christmas story, and feel its absence now I am both older and a lapsed Anglican (ex-Anglican? post-Anglican?); magic, for me, is now far more elusive, though still there sometimes in the corner of my eye.

So I wanted to do a picture to go with it. It was a bit of a rush to get it finished in time for Christmas Eve! We had a good day; House Teenager was busily either painting at her desk or learning Fairytale Of New York on the ukulele, and I was doing this.  The gold paint for the detailing on the dressing gown was a bit of an experiment, and I quite like it- you can't see the glow of the paint on this image, but it's there! House Teenager posed for the picture, as did Ted, Deborah's lively galoot of a collie.

the door claps to, the pane is blind with showers

Huddled over the heater, swathed in blankets and listening to the rain rattle on the roof. Were we really swimming in a Dartmoor river only ten days ago? 


Well, yes. We were. 

 Carpe diem, as they say. Which translates as, eat some fish every day.

easter hares

 

 With Easter upon us, the moon waxing towards full and the celandines in bloom, here's a timely picture. (I just re-uploaded it because I realised that the version I had online was the unfinished one, without the Uffington White Horse....)

Here's Deborah Harvey's poem.

Full Circle

In ancient China
the moon is made of figured silk,
woven with the pattern of galloping hares,
three conjoined by a single ear,
together whole.

An eternal circle
embroidered on bolts of cloth,
carried by camel through singing sands,
the booming dunes of wind-whipped
Xhiang Sha Wan,

where Silk Road
frays to quick oasis, and
wondering artists paint three hares
on sacred temple cavern walls.
The Buddha’s wheel

of life and death
rolls through Persia’s burning plains,
eclipses sere, salt-desert suns: a brazen tray
engraved with hares, a stamped,
Islamic copper coin.

Crossing rivers, bridging rifts
in hidden groves of moss and stone,
these three hares chased on Jewish tombs
and makeshift tabernacle roofs,
the blackened beams

of Dartmoor churches
at the edges of the earth, bear
a trinity of hares, three in one, the risen son,
beneath a moon that pins
the universal oceans.

butterflies

butterflies, originally uploaded by Dru Marland.

Here's a bit of butterfly brightness.


Brimstone, Comma, Marbled White
Common Blue (M), Common Blue (F), Meadow Brown
Holly Blue (M), Holly Blue (F), Peacock
Speckled Wood, Orange Tip (F), Orange Tip (M)
Red Admiral, Small copper (M), Small Tortoiseshell

...the butterflies feature in The Bristol Downs: A Natural History Year. I thought it wold be nice to make a collage of them, so I have. Is this a collage? Oh, you know.

the Canberra that went under the bridge

Canberra and suspension bridge, originally uploaded by Dru Marland.

Continuing my series of true, gen-yoo-wine and authentic pictures of Aeroplanes That Flew Under The Clifton Suspension Bridge, here is a Canberra B2 jet bomber of 101 Squadron RAF, doing just that, on a summer's morning in 1951.

Come to think of it, in default of any further information on that flight, I reckon it's probably the 60th anniversary.

Shocking to think that it was so long ago... when I was very young, in Lancashire, I used to watch English Electric Lightnings flying around above where we lived, out on the flatlands of Longton Moss. They glinted silvery in the sun. They were test flying, from Samlesbury.

English Electric also built the Canberra. When we drove into Preston, we used to pass a long factory building that said English Electric on the wall, and I got excited at the thought of the jet aeroplanes they were building inside. It was not for some years that I discovered the company also built fridges....

..funny business, the companies that got involved with aircraft building. Like Boulton-Paul, who built the rather disastrous Defiant, and who are (or were) better known for building garden sheds....

some tags: flight, flying, flew, under, beneath, Bristol, Avon Gorge, aircraft, aeroplanes, RAF

Three Hares

Full Circle

In ancient China
the moon is made of figured silk,
woven with the pattern of galloping hares,
three conjoined by a single ear,
together whole.

An eternal circle
embroidered on bolts of cloth,
carried by camel through singing sands,
the booming dunes of wind-whipped
Xhiang Sha Wan,

where Silk Road
frays to quick oasis, and
wondering artists paint three hares
on sacred temple cavern walls.
The Buddha’s wheel

of life and death
rolls through Persia’s burning plains,
eclipses sere, salt-desert suns: a brazen tray
engraved with hares, a stamped,
Islamic copper coin.

Crossing rivers, bridging rifts
in hidden groves of moss and stone,
these three hares chased on Jewish tombs
and makeshift tabernacle roofs,
the blackened beams

of Dartmoor churches
at the edges of the earth, bear
a trinity of hares, three in one, the risen son,
beneath a moon that pins
the universal oceans.

The poem is by Deborah Harvey. I did the picture because it's a hares time of year. Here are more trinities of hares.

heaven is a place

(something I wrote some years ago; I was reminded of it the other evening when we were out admiring the conkers...)

So the annual blitz on the conker trees is under way. Broken branches lie among the discarded husks all across the Downs, and Miserable Loony, who piles up dead branches for inscrutable reasons of his own, is looking more miserable than ever. It calls to mind the old saying, "A woman, a dog, and a walnut tree; the more you beat 'em, the better they be." This is the sort of thing trotted out by blokes with beards, over their tankards (always tankards) of real ale, who don't actually have women, but, hey. These men are probably also the only people left in Merrie England who actually play conkers these days. And experiment with vinegar and baking the in the oven to make them tougher.

So what does motivate these people who trog along with their Waitrose bags, the children stuffing them full of these inedible nuts, while Father imperils their young brains with ill-aimed hurlings of sticks, in attempts to dislodge more? -I think the idea of playing a game with them is just a front. We are impelled to do it, for the love of the thing. The beauty of conkers is more precious than that of pearls, because it is so transient. Take them home, and in a few days the marbled sheen has faded, the skin has begun to wrinkle, and that's that for another year. You can get strawberries all year round, if that sort of thing appeals to you; but conkers? -blink and you've missed them. I stood with my small daughter under one tree that was at the peak of fruitfulness, and the things were raining down around us. "It's heavened with conkers," she said. That was it. The nail had been hit, right on the head.

One autumn I was in Marseilles. The boulevards were lined with conker trees, and the gutters brimmed with conkers. They were entirely disregarded by the locals. My companions and I attracted some funny looks as we jubilantly stuffed our pockets. The French, you see. No poetry in their souls.

What of the squirrels, though? I see that they have taken to dashing around nibbling a bit off as many conkers as possible, thus rendering them useless to the discriminating gatherer. Presumably they will go around later, gathering them up and burying them for the winter. This is the sort of initiative that has got Grey Squirrels where they are today; all over the country. I used to shoot the damned things as vermin when I lived in Wales, but now I have surrendered to the inevitable.

And, when my daughter's conker collection has been laid aside and forgotten, I sneak them out in the dead of winter and scatter them for the squirrels. It's a sort of peace offering. And squirrels are useless at finding their own stashes.