More evidence of spring.

Sunday was one of the best days so far this year. We had blue skies, mild temperatures and a noticeable lack of wind, rain and cold. 

My photographer friend and I decided it was time to take our cameras out for a bit of a photo session. I’m not sure why but we decided to go to the war memorial park. 

Even though the memorial is in the town and easily accessible, I’ve only visited a couple of times before. The war memorial stands at the top of a little hill just as you enter the town from where the views of the coastline are spectacular. For the first time I stopped in front of the memorial and took a good look at it. 

I don’t know exactly how many individual names are there, I didn’t think to work it out at the time; all I could think of was the apparent abundance of names for such a small town. The entire population of the town (men women and children) was no more than about 20,000 back then and the list of dead must have been between around 2000.  To me that seemed like a lot of dead men from one small town.  And then I began thinking how the wars go on. We are frequently told that thanks to the nuclear deterrent, we have all lived war free since the end of WW2; what a load of rubbish. People have been killed in conflict somewhere in the world every day since then. Somewhere in the world, men women and children are being killed in conflict right now. As I sit here in the comfort and safety of my own home, writing this, someone else, somewhere else, is dying in a war. And it hasn’t all happened in far off distant lands where we can pretend it’s nothing to do with us. Some of the worse conflicts have been right here in Europe, in Bosnia, in Kosovo, in Serbia to name but a few. All I could think as I stood in front of the memorial with that long list of names was how bloody pointless it all is. It never ends. 

Anyway, I dragged my thoughts away from the battlefield we wandered away from the memorial. I tried to put these morbid thoughts out of my mind and enjoy the rest of the day. 

Spring colour was everywhere, deep violet crocus, yellow daffodils, and that dusty yellow ochre of the catkins. The sky was blue and filled with birdsong. 

I spotted a chaffinch busy collecting feathers and twigs for nest building. I managed a couple of shots but they are poor quality because the bird stayed just out of camera zoom range. 

Clever bird, it was teasing me. The next little bird interested me because I couldn’t identify it. This fat bird sat high up in the tree where its colours were hard to distinguish making identification virtually impossible.

 Then came one of the biggest Great Tits I’ve ever seen, resplendent and puffing out its bright yellow chest. 

I’m not sure what it is about blackbirds and crows that fascinate me so much but I really like those big black birds. They have no fear, unlike the smaller song birds they don’t take off and fly away as soon as they see you. The blackbirds hold their ground; they stay put, sing even louder and ignore you. I’m pretty sure they could become quite tame in the right circumstances.

 From the memorial park to the pond is about a ten minute walk and that’s the direction our feet took us. It wasn’t planned, it just happened, we followed our feet.  I had put my camera away by the time we reached the pond but then I spotted this female mallard in the shallow water scooping up water and spiting it out. I’m not sure what she was doing but it was interesting enough for me to get the camera out again.

And to finish, I leave you with this, an owl sat on top of a pile of open books carved directly from the stump of a tree. This sits in front of the entrance to the local college. I’m guessing the tree needed to be felled for some reason, maybe disease, maybe it was in danger of falling, I don’t know the reason but what ever it was some creative person decided to invite a woodcarver to weave magic over the stump and this is the result. I think it’s a very fitting and innovative welcome to the college. 

Spring has arrived.

Spring has arrived.

I was so happy to finally put the paint and brushes back in the shed. By the time finished I’d had enough of emulsion paint for at least another year. After I finished the hall I went on to paint the new handrails on the stairs, then I decided to paint the skirting boards and door frame in the bathroom and then, I repainted all the walls and skirting boards in the kitchen. Once I started painting the kitchen I realised how discoloured it was and how much it desperately needed painting. Anyhow, now that it’s done, it looks so much better, nice and clean and bright and white. Those are not my paintings on the kitchen wall; the landscape is a print I bought from a shop. I saw it, fell in love with the view and promised myself I would go there one day. It’s a place called Riomaggiore which is a tiny medieval village high up on the cliffs above the coast of North West Italy. I bought the print and have kept it on my kitchen wall ever since to remind myself that one day….. I will go there.   The yellow rose on the kitchen wall is a photograph printed on canvas, it was taken by a friend of mine (who is an excellent photographer), she had it printed up on canvas and gave me for Christmas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riomaggiore

And as soon as the decorating paraphernalia was back in the shed, out came the canvas and acrylic paints. I finished off the portrait of Justin, my grandson. He is only 13 but he’s joined the army cadets and goes off to camp every month. He’s very proud of his uniform and made a special point of asking me to make sure I paint the red feathery thingy on his beret (sorry military people can’t remember what he called it).   

Once he was finished I planned my next couple of paintings. I need to do a snowscape of the hills for my daughter, that’s what the long canvas is for, and I plan on doing four small square and two small round canvases of bright yellow sunflowers. Today, I prepared all the canvases and made a start on the snowscape painting. 

Last week was mostly spent saving photos to my flickr account. I’ve finished saving everything from 2014 and I’m up to date with this years photos. Looking back at the flickr account I realise I actually saved every thing quite regularly until about the end of 2010 and then for some reason, I just stopped, and now I’m playing catch up. If you want to see my growing collection of literally thousands of photos they are here;

https://www.flickr.com/photos/forget-me-not5275/

The one time I did venture down to the harbour this week I spotted the inshaw lifeboat crew doing a training exercise and I saw the old dredger was back. That same dredger spends a couple of months here every year which I guess means our harbour is high maintenance.

And lastly…………Its spring, yep its official, my snowdrops are in full bloom which means its spring in my garden. Even if its not spring anywhere else, once the snowdrops bloom, its spring in my garden. Within a couple of weeks I’ll open up my old gardening blog.

I have already booked my grandson, (the one in the painting), to help me paint the garden fences. He’s coming over for the weekend on Friday 13^th and that’s when it will all kick off in my garden.  

Catch up for February 2014

Saturday, 22 February 2014

It’s been a long time, a month or more. The ‘Bobbi’ thing upset me more than I thought but I’m over that now, it was a valuable learning curve and obviously meant to be.
Since then I’ve thrown myself completely into painting. I’ve joined two local art societies and signed on for another term of classes at the college. Both art societies have exhibitions showcasing members artwork later in the year. In fact in total, if I can manage to get all the work done and keep up with every thing, I could have 6 local exhibition opportunities throughout this year. I’ve decided this has to be the year I take painting more seriously. I’m developing more of my own style; I’ve started concentrating of figure painting. I’m using some of my many photos as inspiration. This is the sort of thing I’m doing now, I know I’ve shown some of them before but I quite like seeing them all together, to me it shows some sort of progression. 

The first one is called Red Balloons and Umbrellas; 

Fun in the Sun;  
Jump for Joy;

Red Reflections;

This is what I’m working on now it’s called;
 ‘The painters Granddaughter’. 

I’m actually considering painting over this and starting again because now that I’ve started, I’m not at all sure about the composition. I’m thinking it may be better to miss out a lot of the background, simplify the painting, make the figure bigger and just have her stranding in the field of cabbages without all that other stuff going on in the background. I’m spending a couple of days thinking about it.

 I’m still going down south to see my mum regularly. She’s in her 80’s, generally speaking she has the constitution of an Ox but; she can be quite demanding and she drives my poor sister to distraction. I try to go every second month and my sister who lives in France tries to go in the months when I don’t go. That way at least the sister in England gets a bit of a break every month.
Hopefully I’ll be off to France again in April for my spring visit and this time, I hope to take mum with me for at least the first week. That should give the sister in England a proper break. Our situation is a reflection of the way people live these days. The only reason the care of mum falls on only one of three sisters is a matter of geography and nothing else. Mum plus the youngest sister live in the same village in England, I live in Scotland and the other sister lives in France. It all seems so unfair on the sister left to look after mum but I guess it must happen in a lot of families these days.
On a brighter note, and I still can’t believe my luck, while visiting mum last week, she suddenly said I could have her overlocking machine. WOW….. thanks mum, that’s fantastic. It’s a wonderful little machine but very modern and quite lightweight. I posted it to myself just before I left and it arrived perfectly intact a couple of days later. Quite apart for the value in dressmaking and general sewing, I’m already planning on doing some fabric art with the help of this little machine. I’m not at all sure when I’ll get time for fabric art but at least I know when the time does arrive, I have the equipment.

And while I’m on the subject of family……………what do you think of this?? 

Believe it or not this is my 12 year old grandson. He is so proud, he joined the cadets and he loves it. This is him in his very first uniform. I did have some reservations when I was told he wanted to join but; now that I’ve thought about it, joining the cadets is so much better than lots of other things lads of his age get involved in.

I think spring is almost here, I keep seeing little signs, lots of the trees are in bud and the snowdrops are up in the garden. Soon it will be time to get out there and tidy up the garden.

Every thing is still too wet to do anything out there but soon……..it will be time. I’m hoping the garden dries out sufficient for me to do what needs doing before I go off the France for a month. I made a strategic decision not to invest so much time and energy in the garden this year; I want to concentrate on painting. But every garden needs a little bit of TLC at the end of winter.
Well……………I think that’s it for now. I’ve been sat here tap tapping away for a while now and  think I’ve finally ran out of things to say, maybe I won’t leave it so long next time.