three rabbits

 

Here's the latest picture. Style-wise, it's a nod back to pictures like the fox and the badger, and the cover for Dart, where the border is formed of foliage

Anyway. I've not really painted rabbits much before. Hares, yes, but not rabbits. So there we are. Maybe I should do three rabbits like the three hares...

Now then. The Traveller has been misbehaving lately, with water in the petrol. I think the water may have been in there for a while, but I got some contaminated fuel the other week and now the water level has reached the suction pipe and ...Something Had To Be Done.

So I took the filling hose off the top of the petrol tank, and syphoned out the liquid. I got a full demijohn of water, then another inch or two of water, then a load of flaky rubbery stuff that had been floating on top of the water but below the petrol, and then finally petrol. So that's one less thing to worry about! -When I drove to Crickhowell a fortnight back, the engine kept conking out at low revs, and I set off across the Severn Bridge in a snowstorm thinking "This is daft! Please keep going." Anyway, that particular problem is sorted....

mapping

Dart map, originally uploaded by Dru Marland.

Here's a map of Dartmoor in the 14th century, at the time of the Black Death. It's for Deborah Harvey's novel Dart, due to be published this year. It was fun to draw, once I'd worked out how to go about it- something vaguely in the style of a mediaeval map, and those brightly coloured postcard maps that you used to get in the 60s.

A useful tool for getting the perspective right was Google Earth, and a fun by-product of using Google Earth is goofing around on the flight simulator that's available in the tools options. Flying under the Saltash Bridge in an F16 is great fun, and one unattended by the risk of a knock at the door from the CAA. Very unmediaeval!

some wildlife pictures

card collection, originally uploaded by Dru Marland.

Another addition to my Etsy shop; it's a set of 6 large, flat card reproductions of my paintings:

• Moonlight bear
• Starling roost
• Fox in a hailstorm
• Three Hares
• Egret over the Severn
• Fox in the snow

The cards measure 21.5cm x 13.5cm

Some of these pictures appeared in Geraldine Taylor's 'The Case Of The Curious Crow', a book of adventures in wildlife around the Bristol area. The three hares are inspired by the 'tinners hares', that can be found in churches around Dartmoor.

The set costs £5. Which works out at 7p per creature illustrated, by my reckoning. And that's not even counting the slug.

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.