Shadows

Jack the dog walking through the hedgerow

I was watching Jack’s shadow walking in a meadow when the rest of us were all over the pavement. It took a while to get some photos, passing traffic kept hiding the subject.

Walking on water?

Making test prints on the hottest day of the year isn’t a good idea. I wanted to know if the little dots looked like a road surface, so I began inking quite early. This hasn’t captured the idea I saw while walking, but it’s OK.

Climate

Exhibition poster with sun and fog among the words

Art & Poetry won’t change anything. There again, the opportunity to look at everything from a different perspective might affect future behaviour.

Pembrokeshire Green Party is reviving slowly. West Wales has many people who are doing their best to not cause harm to their surroundings. Joining a political movement doesn’t appeal to most of us. It’s good to know there are others who would never support right wing policies. Hopefully this short exhibition will inspire someone to clean a river, stop building houses with leaky roofs, maybe remove all the obstacles to living well.

Pembrokeshire is also home to some narrow minded bigots. They will say climate change isn’t real. There can’t be any pollution here and the sun shines constantly. It does, it’s shining right now, behind some clouds. Everyone is entitled to their opinion but they are also entitled to look outside occasionally and observe the world. The planet evolves, the temperature changes. Arguing about whether humans have damaged the environment is less important than thinking about how to live without making everything worse.

Test prints

Jack Frost monoprints
Linocut of seven black cats

A couple of printing sessions that were more chaotic than usual. Missing pliers meant that I couldn’t get the lid off a blue ink tube. Some leftover black from the previous day seemed a good option. Later, I found another foil-wrapped leftover, a mixture of blue and white.

If Jack Frost has trapped the sun in a block of ice, then that would be the only light source. My first plan was to have a cool grey bluish sky with a bright yellow sun shining through the ice. Now I like the black background better. It still needs some tweaking…

Jack Frost

Sun trapped in ice

Made a start on a linocut, Jack Frost with the sun trapped in a block of ice. Or is it? Anyway, the repetitive action of cutting small lines isn’t good for the shoulder wound so I’m staying away from the lino today.

Cups, plates and bowls

Tidying some space around the house. The last chimney improvements added a fine layer of dust to this dinner set that has been sitting around for years. Might inspire some still life drawings, or some pasta sauces that will be good in the wider bowls in the corner.

Hidden Circles

Knitted yellow circles in red squares
Red and yellow stripes
All an illusion

Knitted stripes, or ridges of two rows each. Using dark and light yarns and knit or purl stitches, an illusion of a circle in a square. This is the easiest pattern in an article about illusory knitting, but I like it anyway.

Front and back views

Cameras never lie, mine won’t show the red and yellow stripes in the way they’re visible to me.

Sunset

Watercolour of a sunset at Freshwater East

I thought I’d make a quick splashy sunset picture. It took longer than intended. Some of the layers reminded me of making a lithograph.

Beginning the sunset

The photos I worked from were taken while smoke blew across from a recycling fire. I didn’t notice the black clouds at the time.

Spring Equinox

A little mindless biro drawing with added shadows
Other versions of the sketch

I tried to draw a larger version of my little doodle, it looked too stagnant. Instead, I enlarged the biro drawing by 283%. Much better.

Drawing transferred onto lino

I didn’t plan to make this print, the doodle happened over breakfast. The sun’s face will have a beard made of flames, sparks, leaves, feathers, petals and whatever else comes up.