Despite (or maybe because of) everything happening in the big world, my small world has felt like a sanctuary this month – I’m currently working on a series of paintings on board and paper with the working title: “Spring Cannot be Cancelled”, a series of partly abstracted still life paintings of plants & flowers from…
Tag: Nature writing
Just when I thought I was finished reading theory …
… my desk is once again filled with philosophical texts. It might be hard to find a common theme in the stack of books in front of me, but I guess they all in some sense could fit on a shelf labelled “philosophy of life” – or maybe: getting old (with grace) is the least…
Can or can’t see the word for the trees …
“Trees” (1913) I think that I shall never seeA poem lovely as a tree. A tree whose hungry mouth is prestAgainst the earth’s sweet flowing breast; A tree that looks at God all day,And lifts her leafy arms to pray; A tree that may in Summer wearA nest of robins in her hair; Upon whose…
Sunday poem on a Saturday
Lighthouse Keeping – Seas pleat winds keen fogs deepen ships lean no doubt, and the lighthouse keeper keeps a light for those left out. It is intimate and remote both for the keeper and those afloat. Kay Ryan (from my sketchbook)
Roses; epilogue
My rose text is done. Strange how one can work for weeks on a text which ends up at 567 words. But that’s how it is. For me, anyway. I have written this text on commission, it’s going into an exhibition catalogue. The text is written to a series of large-scale rose-drawings, pencil drawings in…
Roses
reading up & sketching down; roses in art (cont.) Virgin Mary and Jesus is, one could be tempted to say, a standard motif in Western art. However, most portraits depict the virgin looking at her child. In this picture, by British/Austrian Marianne Stokes, Mary looks up and out, as if to introduce her young child…
The Sound of a City
I have been here two times befor, and still find NY to be a fantastic city! But still, I am tempted to side with Thoreau: I think that [people who live in the city] deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago. For an art-lover NY is full of wonderful surprises –…
Sea-change
How to write about nature in a way that makes the reader feel the landscape as if she was there; wandering through it … absorbed, possessed – ? Here is Jean Sprackland: Countless times I’ve seen the shore hewn and hammered, scattered with whole tree trunks, steel pipes, oil drums, concrete fence posts, dead sheep….
A talent for concealment and revelation
A breeze was blowing, and I could smell salt, seaweed, and sun-bleached shore. I knew, once again, that I’d found home. –Sue Hubbell, Waiting for Aphrodite I never tire of the coast because it’s never the same twice. The tides and the weather change its physical shape, and they bring different things to look at….
Fern studies
A visual diary – my visual diary – is, like any other diary, mainly a recollection of ordinary things; fragments of everyday life, normal oddities. When out and about I’m not looking for the outstanding or exceptional, but for the extraordinary within the ordinary. Like for example a fern unrolling a young frond. There are…
sub rosa 