Caution: contains gruesomeness

I headed out along the riverbank yesterday. Now that the set of skyline paintings are all over bar the shouting, I'm immersing myself in the river to get ready for a change of palette, aesthetic and texture. I'm not literally immersing myself; I'm a lousy swimmer and the current is too strong. Whilst I was just wandering then stopping then wandering again, just getting the feel of the riverbank and clarifying how I want to treat it, something grim but compelling caught my eye. Its at the bottom of this post so if you don't like spiders, don't scroll down past the swan.

Anyway, an interlude to protect the squeamish. I'm thinking in terms of a relatively abstract approach, majoring on texture and reflection. You might mention Monet, but I'd prefer it if you didn't as I'm coming from a very different place and working towards a very different purpose. I've been wondering about a focal point and whether I need one or not (for crying out loud, this part of the Thames has no waterlilies!) Every time I settled down to study a promising part of the riverbank, one particular Mallard  would swim upstream and start messing about by the far bank where I was looking. Every time I moved upstream, so did he. Sometimes you have to give in and accept your subject is trying to tell you something, so I will shortly make sketches with and without a duck providing a focal point.

Next up, one of the local swans, your final warning.

Ok, here we have what appears at first glance to be some perfectly normal clusters of blossom. Look closer...

This is what you find... talk about camouflage. It even has a marking on its back to look like the stamen and pollen. Theres no web to speak of, so I wonder if it just lurks in the middle of the flower head and waits for a bee to land on it. The bee had no damage but wasn't moving so the spider must have injected it with something. Imagine it in human terms: you're in the supermarket - you think you're picking up a bag of pasta but actually...

It's the little things

I don't know about you, but the little things make me happy.

So do some of the bigger things...

Seriously, the goslings are almost the size of chickens already!

Apologies for the image quality, these were just grabbed with the phone

Spring: another progress report

As you may have gathered from my last post, I've got out and about over the last couple of days.

The paintings I'm working on incorporate a foundation made up of several layers of transparent paint and, working in oils, that means I can only put in a couple of hours a day. Hopefully that will change by Sunday when I'll start going in with opaque paint and a little wet-in-wet, and by then the last of the barrier paintings I mentioned before will have been finished so I can get a third one from my new series going. In fact, I think the last barrier painting is only about thirty seconds of work away from being done, but since it is in an area where the bare primer shows through I want to sleep on the decision and be sure as it will be irreversible. Correcting a mistake there would involve losing the sparseness and therefore fundamentally changing the balance of the painting. Since its a very complex painting - a view from inside a hedge - I really don't want to have to rework it for the sake of one rushed decision. I worked out that probably about 80% of my painting time is spent without even having a brush in my hand. I stand or sit there, nursing an empty cup of coffee, just looking and thinking. That ensures sections stay spontaneous and don't become over worked when I do paint them yet they also have sufficient consideration behind them. I do very much view a painting as the fossil of a thought process. So, waiting for paint to dry and with the next two compositions properly prepared and a third one just about there (I only have space to work on three paintings at a time), I have time on my hands. I don't want to approach another gallery right now as my best pieces have been bagsied so I can't spend time sending emails. I'm teaching myself linocutting as I mentioned earlier in the week but I don't want to spend all day carving. I can't gather material for the set of work after the set I'm working now as the trees aren't yet in leaf. I can't afford a train fare and the weather is too squally for cycling to London to be fun, so I've been walking and walking and walking.

Windsor Castle from the Thames path.

I followed the river up to Eton; I can't say how unchanged Canaletto's viewpoint is due to Private Property signs. The main buildings are the same but the gaps have been filled in. I discovered there has been a reshuffle amongst Eton's galleries which is good to know. Unfortunately the one I thought most likely to be helpful to me has gone, but a new one has opened up - although it could be the same one in a different building and with a different name. It is a gorgeous walk and some new views have been opened up which raise simple possibilities, but I will have to let them stew for a while - doing them as is would be cynical rather than professional.

Start bottom left and work clockwise: All the stages of leaf
development on one plant.

I also spent a few hours wandering the woods above Runnymede, seeing how spring in general and the bluebells in particular are getting on. The plants have finally got the idea! From a distance the woods have a new hint of green and everywhere everything is bursting. The bluebells' leaves are looking just about there now - no sign of the flowers but they won't be long. If you've never been to an English bluebell wood when they are in bloom you should put it on your bucket list - do it sooner rather than later though as we have been invaded by Spanish bluebells and the two species interbreed. In doing so, they lose their scent and the scent of a glade of bluebells is the stuff of legend.

Finally I headed up to the Air Force Memorial. Those of you who came here in the first few weeks of the blog will have read about it before. Quite apart from its purpose, it is an astounding space to move through. It is the first time I've been there in strong sun. I didn't realise the reason why the architect had made it point in that precise direction instead of a degree or two either way. Coming off from the main cloister are two curved arms that have a similar shape to wings. All the names on the walls of these wings are carved into window recesses. The sunlight rakes through tall thin windows and across the names, picking out the carving. The curve ensures that as the sun moves round another set of names is lit up.

It is just beautiful.

Its getting Springier and Springier

I love spring!

Buds are turning into leaves, anything that is green is a beautiful fresh, clean green and the animals have all gone a bit daft.

God's own colour chart: each step is slightly

paler than the step below as the ground has drained.

The ground is drying out enough to walk almost anywhere now, the bluebells are showing that they will be outrageous this year, and days are getting noticeably longer every day.

The plum trees are in bloom now, the first of the dandelions are out and there is other blossom too. I reckon we're probably less than a fortnight from starting the first batch of hedgerow wine.

Mmmm..... dandelion wine.

The thing that has really provoked this post though is the fact that yesterday I saw the daftest cormorant in the world. Highly skilled, but very daft. I was walking down the river bank towards Staines earlier and there it was, floating in the middle in the strongest part of the current, grappling with a fish it had caught. Only it wasn't an ordinary fish. It was an eel. The bird had clearly come to grips with the concept of width and diameter, it understood one end of the eel would fit in its beak well enough. It had no concept however of length. At no point did I see the entire eel. I did see at least two feet of it though. In other words, it was longer than the cormorant. The bird would swallow a few inches of it, choke it up again, drop it in the river, dive down, re-catch it and swallow again and again. Full marks for ambition and persistence, zero marks for common sense. It gave up in the end though, only to do that thing I've seen so many supposedly elegant river birds do when they've done something silly - herons, cormorants, swans, everything except ducks and geese - and that is to look round, puff out their chest, flick their heads a little and preen a little, as if to say "I meant to do that!"