Well. So where have I been. All over the place, pulled through a hedge backwards (I have the drawings to prove it) and then to the sea, with pictures to prove that, too. It would be nice to say that I’ve been following a caravan of camels through the silk routes, bartering in bazaars, or flying a magic carpet over Norweigan granite, but Norfolk will have to do. Hey, it’s got windmills. What more do you want? A kiss-me-quick hat and economic renovation?
First to the hedges. This is really two blog posts rolled together expertly for your blithe delectations. I went for a walk on a very unsalubrious morning a couple of weeks ago, and the hedges had just been chopped by big machinery – their natural patterns throttled and twisted from the very force of it, but still apparent beneath the massacre. Half of it was black fairy-tale, half of it the promise of Spring beneath structured branch. I took a series of photographs, now pinned to my workspace board, and I’m drawing hard, hoping to finish off with a series of proper pictures based on this idea. Two I have finished:
and two of the photograps from which the series will be based.
Then, whilst running with that at the back of my head, I took myself off from the Herefordshire countryside to the sea. I love the sea, but it’s a treat – a place I don’t know like the back of my hand – a place which when I dream about feels like flying, rather than the comfort of the usual, but it has an odd comfort to it, all of it’s own – that knowledge that we are very small, and forces beyond us move us along in ways that aren’t really controllable, though we try. But we’re pushed from behind in the crook of our back, regardless.
So. All those ‘big’ things, and yet they’re echoed in the small visual things, too. I think the carefully engineered windmills are beautiful, fragile things – the patterns in the sea are so big, so vast that they make me want to weep, and the pebbles, buried in the sand, or patterned by spray are small paradigms of this vast and gorgeous loveliness. And then some lichen, reminding me of Herefordshire, and found by a particularly stolid and porridgey bit of cement step.
You are too talented.