Post holiday blues

The trouble with having a good holiday is that you don’t want to return to the humdrum of everyday life, work, the dreaded HW, etc.
In an effort to counter this growing feeling of malcontent, we went to one of our favourite places on Sunday, the Arundel Wetland centre. As those of you who visit my blog regularly will know I have a thing about an artist’s installation there known as an obscurer.
I have briefly explained what it is before but didn’t have any pics to illustrate my explanation. So this time I tried to take some, not an easy task in the pitch black inside a structure that resembles a tepee, (my apologies to the artist).





Anyway the structure sits in the middle if the reed beds, which this visit were at full height. At the top of the installation is a hole and inside is a mirror, which reflects the surrounding reed beds and as the sun moves in front of the clouds a moving picture slowly forms on the floor in front of you. It’s pitch black inside so you have to let your eyes adjust before you see something. It’s a very basic form of watching a video, but this is real time and you can hear the rustling of the rushes and the occasional passer by (whom I was preying would not be tempted to come in and spoil my reverie.)



I tried several times to capture a photo of the reeds, but eventually gave up and hit on the idea of drawing them in the dark. It was a wonderfully therapeutic experience, I tried to follow the flow of the reeds as they moved, and by the very little light that was admitted I looked, just occasionally, to see if I was staying within the circle of the reflected image.



When I’d been in there about 15 minutes I decided to come out into the world again, as a mother and toddler were on their way in, and found a quiet seat to record my feelings. It really was a lovely experience, I can totally recommended it to anyone who lives nearby.

We’d gone into the centre early, as usual, and by about 11.0 it was filling up so I decided to wander back to the sanctuary of our camper, but not before I’d taken a couple of mandatory textile/pattern shots.


This lovely waterlillly was past flowering but left this wonderful seed haed behind.


This female pheasant was so close to me it would have been rude not to take a pic of her lovely feathers.

Once back in my portable studio I set about following up on the piece I’m working on for my C&G, hmmm!!!! Yes I have restarted the course after about a 6-month gap and am determined to finish by Xmas. There I’ve made the commitment in public, so I will have to follow through.



This piece is my attempt to be a little less constrained in my approach to my work, but when I looked at it the next day I vowed that this would be the last time I tried to follow this route.

I will blog the assignment later this week when I’ve collated the WIP, and also assessed whether I’m on the right track (for me) or not, and you'll be able to see this sketch book page in context.

Time for my OH

Belated Post 4

As part of the fair holiday plans it was time for me to take a back seat, (and get down to some creative stuff) on Monday, while my OH went round the Washington Wild Fowl Trust. It’s a very nice relaxing place to be first thing in the morning before the school children arrive, so I did manage to stick around long enough sketch a couple of birds, before I retired to the van for some art therapy.







I really liked the patterns and the colours on the red breasted geese, good job they had these illustrations, as my photos were useless. The Bewick swans were preening and they were moving their necks at the most amazing angles so it was really hard to try and catch any position at all.



As for the Ringed Teals their colours and patterns would make a great design source. You may notice an escapee puffin sketch (above) and I’m sorry to say that this and the Shag were all I could manage on the day we went to the Farne Islands, it was too windy and cold to have a sketch book out for long, Hmmm!!! Very, very poor excuse!!

Anyway I spent the afternoon happily working on my journal, that I had prepared bfore leaving home, so here's a few WIP pages.

Front cover,a melted wax exercise from Traci Bautista's book.


These 2 pages were centred on rubbings done at the Lindisfarne Centre, meant for children to play with , I suspect!





I just used WC's and any bits I found or packaging etc. as I didn't take that much with me, it was a good discipline exercise.

And these are some puffin experiments that I did from my photos and a PC. I also made some crude printing blocks with cardboard.




Just the outlines drawn on velum



At the end of the day we decided to move on down towards Shirley, who I’d arranged to meet up with before I left home. She had told us that there were some nesting Avocets near a petro-chemical site, so we headed off in the direction of Hartlepool.



As we’re both Southerners, born and bred, my OH and I haven’t had much experience of heavy industrial plants in our neck of the woods. It came as a bit of a shock then when we arrived at a sandy beach outside Hartlepool with this group of buildings in the distance.



As we got closer the Avocet site we met this bizarre line up over the brow of a hill, as the sign on the gate said it was a salvage company I can only assume these old ladies had gone there to die!!

We finally found the hide that the company had erected to view the birds and while we waited for the morning we took the opportunity to try out some night shots.



I must admit it did feel a bit like being in the middle of some awful Sci-fi movie being so close to all this industrial power with it’s occasional rank smells and strange noises emitting from the chimneys, as whatever it was puffed out at irregular intervals.

But it was worth it, my OH did get his sighting of the Avocets and a seal colony for good measure, so it has to be said that the vast amount of land these places occupy does become a nature reserve, by the simple lack of disterbance by people.

Second Sunday

I’m going to show off a bit before I continue with my holiday blog and show you this pic of our first harvest from the garden. I hope it makes your mouth water, because it certainly did mine when my OH brought them into the kitchen!! And the taste was to die for.

Post 3 of the delayed holiday postings.

On Sunday we paid a visit to Hadrian’s wall. For those who don’t know it as well as we do in the UK, it was built by the Romans in about AD 122 at the time of their occupation of Britain, to keep out the invaders from the North. The place we chose to go was called Housesteads Fort, which is owned by the NT, and is the best preserved Roman Fort in Europe.

Needless to say the fort is situated on top of a hill and on the day we went the wind was howling, making it feel like the bleakest site on earth.





This pic shows the way they put in pillars under the floor of the grain store to create ventilation to stop the grain from getting damp. I thought it was for the under floor heating, but that was only used in the fort Commander’s extremely large courtyard house.

The most interesting thing I saw were the latrines complete with washing bowls in tact and then this account of how the sanitation worked. Quite ingenious I thought!! But for those of a delicate nature you may want to move on down the page past the NT explanation!





We also visited another NT site that day (we do like to get our money’s worth out of the membership), and this was a lovely river walk called the Allen Banks and Steward Gorge.






The Summer House

One of the things I found was this brilliant idea for an out door book, giving the history of the site, in the Summer House. It certainly gave me food for thought for a different approach to bookmaking.





As we walked through a more open part of the woodland my OH pointed out these beautiful wild pansies, they’re much smaller than the domestic variety, but exquisite in close up. I even had time to have a go at sketching the shape and record the correct colour, as I knew the camera would have trouble with the purple, that was till rain stopped play and I realised that I had a wet backside from sitting on the grass.



About half way along the walk I notice this suspension bridge and although we didn’t have to cross it, I had to have a go. It did feel pretty unnerving at first but once I realised it was safe I actually decided to take a pic of the river, not bad for a vertigo sufferer!!

Second half

This is the second of the five holiday posts that I couldn’t put up on line while I was away.





We’ve now moved into the second half of our 2-week trip to Northumberland and on the second Saturday we visited another National Trust property in the area, called Wallington. The house itself was built in 1688 and is a typical square building that has one reception room leading onto another round a central hall. Its jewel in the crown is the hall that is decorated with scenes of notable moments in the history of Northumbria.They are in the wonderfully romantic style of the Pre-Raphaelites, which you may have guessed is a favorite period of mine.

As usual no photos allowed in an NT property, which is always highly frustrating, especially as they no longer print many PC’s and the guidebooks are now £5.00!





I did take quite a few pics outside in the enormous grounds, which are apparently never closed. One of the things that caught my eye were these brilliant griffin heads, they look almost comic in a horrendous way.

There is the most wonderful walled garden there that I instantly fell in love with, as the planting is so well done, it leads you from one area to another just as if you were moving from room to room in a house. One of the areas that attracted me was a water garden that had this delightful small horse ornament with small ferns growing around the head. I was so inspired I decided to do a quick pen and ink sketch of it.





To one side in the walled garden there was a very large ornate glasshouse, that had been constructed in the early 1900’s by the same company that made Kew Garden’s houses at that time. It was filled with tender flowering and exotic plants and as the rain had started again it was a great haven of peace, warmth and light. I was so impressed I made my OH promise to make me a miniature copy in his newly acquired greenhouse.





I just had to take a couple of shots of the wonderful colours.





I was also very keen on the beautiful ornate ironwork that held up the roof, there must be a linocut in there somewhere!!





And for the final 2 shots of the day I found this amazing bark on a fallen tree and this lovely thistle in the walled garden.



Just in case you thought I’d forgotten all about my good intentions of doing some creative R&R, I did manage a longer sketch, in the walled garden, of this planter in a circular ornamental area. My OH was conveniently watching some grey wagtails that had young in another part of the garden.

Relaxing in the park

In an effort to unwind after a very busy Saturday we decided to go to a local country house park in Sussex. For those of you who know this area it’s Petworth Park. Our prime objective was to see the deer herd that lives in the park and see if we could get some shots of them.

I also hoped that I might be able to get the sketchbook out at last and do a few doodles!

As luck would have it the sun came out after we’d had our lunch in our roving restaurant, cunningly disguised as a VW camper and we trudged off down the hill. I had my oversized tripod and emergency fishing bag housing the new camera and 2 lenses, couldn’t afford a bag and a new lens!

We found the deer enjoying this fleeting appearance of the sun and I watched transfixed, as this beautiful little pair looked for all world as if they were having a kiss. Unfortunately I managed to have the camera on the wrong focusing setting from the day before, will I never learn to check? And I was so excited I managed to focus on an area behind the deer, but who cares? I’ll remember this shot for the special moment it was.



I did manage to get my sketch book out and was just trying to find my way round the view in front of me and the shapes of the deer when this dirty great black cloud rolled in and brought with it an enormous hail storm, so bad it stung our faces on the way back to the van.



Still the day’s pics and some doodles gave me enough information to work this little sketch at home yesterday. I still need to work on the shapes of the deer, but was quite pleased with how the landscape came out, as I had to learn some new texture techniques with the WC, so all round it was a useful and relaxing day.