Belated dragons and snakes
News. The real news. Golden snakes.
I missed last week because I went for a short walk with my husband which lasted six hours and it wasn’t a terribly good week and I was too tired. It was a good walk though, along the Thames near Bampton; I recently joined a gallery in Bampton so it seemed relevant.
I saw two herons flying about making a noise like a pterodactyl. If you ever doubt that birds evolved from dinosaurs you just have to closely inspect a heron, so I assume they sound similar too. I saw three kingfishers, one a cliché of electric blue, and later, two moving more causally, chatting as they went. As the walk wore on and the moon rose over the stubbled fields, we saw deer in the twilight, and heard owls and the soft flittering of bats. I saw a hare in those moonlit fields and it looked not unlike something I would draw. If I hadn’t been absolutely starving it would’ve been quite perfect.
My husband asks me what news I have to share that is so terribly important that I should be cross he made me miss writing my newsletter and actually, I do have news because I won a prize, which I’m pretty sure means I’m allowed to introduce myself an Deborah Champion, award winning artist from now on.
I’m not really a competent human so I was genuinely confused to get an email headed ‘your competition entry’ because I could not remember entering a competition; I was so happy to be selected for the exhibition I completely forgot about the prize aspect. Sadly I was unable to make the preview because Ironbridge is four hours away by public transport (that’s an eight hour round trip) though I did have a jolly time imagining taking the grand prize of a printing press home on a train. Obviously I knew I hadn’t won the press, but I wasn’t told exactly what I had won; having been in a similar situation before I dared not get my hopes up for fear of them being crushed by an enormous and hideous Winnie-the-Pooh. Though at least this time the Pooh bear would come with career enhancing prestige.
In fact, I was delighted to find I had won the Ironbridge pub prize that suits my personality very well; it reminds me of how happy I was to find Abingdon is dotted with drunken artists when I moved here (apparently it’s a brewery house mark meant to imply brewing is an art, but I saw it as meaning Abingdon is a welcoming place for drunk artists). You can read about my and my dragon and all the other competition winners here. The exhibition is still running and it well worth a look in if you’re passing by. Well done everyone!
Of course, my husband doesn’t consider any of this important news. Not compared to volegate, anyway. Tell them about the rodents, he says. That’s what they want to hear.
The actual Important News
My son been seeing a mouse in the house, which seemed odd because they’ve always been happy living in a garage, but on hearing rustling the fridge was pulled out to reveal a little nest. Confusingly the resident was not a mouse but a vole. Voles eat roots and leaves and do not, to my understanding, live in houses. Brambly hedge is well and cute in the garden but I don’t remember Jill Barklem illustrating cut throughs of the back of my fridge (actually I would really like to see that though). Believing our new resident to be lost, we ushered her out the back door, which settled the drama for at least a day before we started to see more small animals scurrying about. They were very small. Perhaps the vole had babies; it was hard to tell because they were also extremely fast.
They were small and fast and they were shrews, and I know this because it turns out shrews are absolutely mad for huffing on peanut butter. I thought they ate worms and insects, but then I thought voles don’t live under fridges so what do I know? Anyway, the humane trap was baited with peanut butter which is the shrew equivalent of crack and we caught three within an hour despite wondering if it would be best to let them stay given the number of insects that live in old houses. Still they are gone now, hopefully living their tiny lives in the stable block over the road.
The best thing about the whole escapade is if you google ‘why there is a shrew in the house’ you will invariably find your way onto a pest control site and they will dramatically try and sell you their services by claiming that shrews are dangerous. I mean, they are quite aggressive.. if you’re a small insect. But shrews are about two inches long and scared of humans so I (by which I mean my husband) had no problems relocating them. Anyway, if you are looking for a small mammal that shouldn’t be living in a house then my house is apparently the place to come. I do not know what this says about me.
Workings
I’ve almost been productive this week. I’ve been trying to find the perfect coloured paper to print my adder print in gold so it would look really shiny, but all the papers I have found are too light, too thin or too.. sucky. They seem to suck all the shine out of my very expensive metallic ink, so this week I decided to just.. print my own, or rather, screenprint the white paper a better colour. Because I like to make my life as difficult as possible, I didn’t hit upon this excellent plant till I had already printed two layers of snake on the white paper, so I had to make a mask to protect the red ink layers, but look at this magnificence.
I mean I think it’s magnificent; you might not. Some people are just wrong like that. I’ll get to list that next week went the ink is dry.
I think thats all this week; hopefully I’ll not miss another week lest my readers be bereft of shrew based antics (we all know thats the news you are here for, if not the Pooh’s)
Brilliant! Shrews and voles are better than rats!!
Congratulations on winning the prize, what a lovely print too.