Beltane
Probably the first batch of dragon related May Day ramblings.
Isn’t blossom tricky? One moment it looks like this:
The next minute, it seems, that plum blossom is ancient history, and the garden is all rabbits* and apple blossom. What it doesn’t look like is this:
That’s the key block to my winter skies print I started at the beginning of the year, which I have laid to rest (temporarily) because I can’t bare to be printing grey skies and lapwings when they are now blue and full of swallows. It doesn’t help that the flock of redwings had the absolute audacity to be the wrong size and will need to be recarved, probably at a time when I have forgotten what its like to carve redwings.
Here’s some other things I’ve done; I have been to Dartmoor. Here’s a hedgehog
And here’s Wistman’s wood, because you can’t actually tell the hedgehog was in Devon (Clovelly, to be precise)
I’ve spent the rest of March walking about the ridgeway looking for hares. I don’t have any pictures, because all the hares close to me were moving away very fast, and all the hares very far away were in a field that was almost exactly the same colour as a hare, the grass being long enough to hide a hare completely. It’s been a good year for hare spotting, though, if you have good binoculars and an almost psychic affinity for largomorphs (they are good at hiding).
In the studio, I’ve been doing very unphotogenic things; reprinting old works to restock the shop (the lucky fish and hares are back in stock) and experimenting with the mystical art of lino etching, which has, as is the way with learning new techniques, produced some extremely ugly test prints. I’ve also been working on some dragons, as a sort of reward for suffering through the other stuff.
Dragons are a good thing to draw, because no one really knows what they look like, so no one can tell you you’ve done it wrong. For instance, if your flock of dragons looks unusually large, you can claim they are merely unusually large dragons, and you meant it, and you have a perfect working grasp of perspective, thanks very much.
Here’s how far I’ve got, I’ll let you guess the type of dragon in the comments.
Some people think of me as a nature artist, which is fair enough given my recent output, but I also really like dragons and pattern based design. It might be a result of not being an actual person, but a collection of cats in a bag all going in different directions masquerading as a human. To me though, dragons make sense.
The dragon has long been a symbol of the energy in the land, and I am interested in the land, and its energies, and at this time, the start of the summer, is when we really begin to feel these energies, the serpent’s breath. Also, I recently learnt from the Mabinogion that there was a dragon or two under Oxford which delighted me no end; we really need more dragons. There are far too many people here.
I also just really wanted a quick project, thats easy to carve, which will not be giving me any grief, because I wanted to experiment with combining linocut and screenprint and the simpler the better when working with experimental things. I will screenprint the background later this week, printing gods willing and bag cats allowing.
*There are three sizes of rabbit, the big ones, the smaller ones, and the really small ones. There are a few too many, too be honest, though one less than last week because I saw a buzzard flying off with one of the very small bunnies the other day. Which is sad but thats what you get for eating all my geraniums.