Favourite books

Another favourite book, Expressive Drawing by Steven Aimone,  to post about today .... together with his interesting website. I especially like his photographs and the link given leads to this part of his website.

His book approaches drawing in a purely instinctive and intuitive way and he often suggests working very large which I find freeing and liberating.

The basic idea put forward in the book is that you begin with an abstract mark and then add another where you instinctively feel it should go and then another and so on and on until you feel you want to stop and the piece is complete and satisfying.

I have done several of the exercises shown in this book and found them to be very interesting. If nothing else, completing them has had me thinking hard about balance and line and quality of mark in my work.

In line with much that I seem to be doing at the moment, many of the exercises are to be completed in black (paint, pencil or charcoal) on white paper. I have some leisure time coming up and plan to try a few more.

Bluebells, a stile and a happy husband

In between showers this week, the countryside has been looking lovely. We had a visit from some very dear and long-standing friends from the US this week and took them out exploring.

We found several wonderful bluebell woods, of which this one near Royal Wootton Bassett was one of the most beautiful, though I don't know why photographs taken with my compact camera so often bleach out the colours.

Bluebells under hazel coppice

Then we drove home via Ashton Keynes where we walked through between the lovely Cotswold stone houses towards the church. On the path, as we came to the churchyard, we found this extraordinary stile ... or gate ... not sure what you'd call it really. I've never seen anything quite like it before. 

A happy husband with old friends
and an extraordinary stile

To pass through, you press down on the knob on the right and move it to one side. It's on a spring and takes the other side with it to give a very easy, person and dog-friendly passage through. If anyone can tell me what it's called, I be delighted to know.

We had a lovely afternoon.

That bluebell wood must be a colour inspiration if nothing else ....and what joy it is to spend time with friends you've known all your adult life. There's nothing quite like it for fun and joyous companionship and rekindling all those memories.

A line of Hills

The weather was fine and the garden called yesterday - so, no stitching in black and white occurred.

However, I did have time this morning to search out and revisit an exercise I'd had in my mind when I was doing my cutting and sticking earlier in the week.

Perhaps suggesting hills and a lake in the Highlands of Scotland ... or wherever you like ....

This was done in a weekend workshop with Sandra Meach up at Farncombe Manor a while back and involved several of my photographs manipulated and enhanced in Adobe Photoshop to render them in black and white. These were laser printed ahead of the workshop.

We were then asked to apply Brusho (the reason for laser printing as ink jet printing is not colour fast when wet) and tear and stick and add stitch.

Another useful and enjoyable exercise and I think it will be useful somewhere down the line as I evaluate things .....

Black and White paper

I've been playing with black and white again, cutting up squares of paper, moving the pieces apart and repositioning them. I have done similar exercises many times in the past but it now seems right to revisit them, following my recent explorations in black and white.

In the first few, I maintained the integrity of the squares....

Then I deliberately disrupted the integrity....

And last of all, I played with the shapes in a linear way, depicting something as I worked - perhaps the line of the Cotswold escarpment, with suggestions in some of the block-like shapes of Cotswold stone walls or of the mill chimneys near Stroud ...

Tomorrow, unless the weather is good and the garden calls, I plan to add stitch....





There are activities like this to be found in the excellent book, Finding Your Own Visual Language, by Jane Dunnewold, Claire Benn and Leslie Morgan.

This is a book I really enjoy dipping into from time to time for its stimulating and practical activities which seem able to be adapted to any subject matter.

Sudden Green

I was told by a friend the other day that the human eye can detect up to forty different greens but only twenty different reds. I don't know how true this is but I can well believe it. The Wiltshire countryside and our garden seem to have them all just now.

With the sudden green of spring around me, my post on green is organic in inspiration and mostly from my garden - with the exception of the first photograph.

This is a piece of work completed by my daughter for a school exam project in art when she was 16. It was based on a photograph she took of the greenhouse at Balmoral Castle in Scotland. One of my most treasured possessions, its colour made it seem so right for this post.

It contains blue-greens not found anywhere else at the moment, as all the vegetation is young and fresh.

In our garden, there are the  pale only-just-greens of newly furled fern leaves. So fleeting, they have a wonderful fragility about them.













Then there is the deep, dark green of the ivy on the old yew trees behind the house (darker and richer than this in reality) ...

and all of those 38 shades in between....















The surprising and sudden growth is dominating my thoughts and I haven't focused on much else. Even driving to an art group meeting this morning, I spotted this lovely simple green bench surrounded by fresh grass and daisies. How English and spring-like is that!

If you're not sure what this is all about, Julie B. Booth's threadborn blog will explain!

A taste of Green

Spring has sprung here in the UK with an extraordinary suddenness and a profusion of blossom and young green growth everywhere you look. This year, after the cold weather of March and April, it has all come at once - two months compressed into two weeks.

Our garden in the spring seems to do green better than any other colour, so here is a taste of green before tomorrow's main post. It is a photograph of a lovely country plant, Jack-by-the-Hedge, a plant of soft and gentle habit which gives succour to the Orange Tip butterfly. Both are now increasingly hard to find with the effect of pesticides. I was so pleased to find in in our garden. I shall watch out for the butterflies.

Jack-by-the-Hedge in the shade
beside a fence in our garden