Larch roses and small deer

Parallel lives, cheating at art and a giant rhizome

In the woodland, the soft green leaves of the bluebells are taking hold like a wild fire. No trace one week, a small hopefulness the following and now- leaves everywhere, gathering strength and sunbeams. I’m in a bad mood and I’m tired. Printing has been going well, I’ve nothing to complain about; it took a while to set up, to get the colours right, but the colour is just what I want, and I should feel pleased. Instead I feel drained. The last ebb of February kicks my bones and leaves me washed out. I look at a small white flower, an anenome, first of the year. There’s no sense giving up now, we’re almost through. The living is going to get easy, any moment now. Just hold on. Two more weeks, maybe.

The owl is still in her mutant furby phase. I tried really hard to finish her this week, before March began, mostly because I didn’t want to write ‘finish owl print’ in my bullet journal yet again. Things drag on and I want to be more productive, to have something to show you, but I must be patient and wait for ink to dry. Through my exhaustion I ponder why I always seem to choose the hardest route. There are plenty of artists that print in one colour, which must be a lot easier. Why don’t I just print in one colour? My wrist hurts. I hurt it last week, and then again repeatedly with every layer. It wouldn’t hurt so much if I just printed in black.

Why am I an artist anyway? I have a Dphil. I could’ve got a proper job, earnt proper money. I could’ve retired by now. That would, I mused, give hypothetical me plenty of free time to make prints. I smile at the thought. In my parallel life, I would still be making prints, it’s inevitable. I am compelled to.

I meander along looking for celandine but find tiny cow parsley leaves, and make myself feel better by deciding ways hypothetical Deborah’s life is impoverished compared to mine, despite having more money. She’s eaten too much junk food and she’s missed her son growing up and she needs more exercise and all that time in front of a computer has done her eyesight no good at all. Yes, I think, it’s much better to be me.

One layer to go and looking incredibly ugly.

Number one. The Larch.

I walk here early in spring to look for larch roses. Curious things larch roses, the female flower of the larch. Curious things, larches, really. I was told, at school, evergreen trees have needles so they don’t have to drop them, yet here is the larch, a tree with needles, dropping them every autumn. I looked up why once, and the book said there was an answer, but it was too complex to tell. I’m suspicious there isn’t an answer.

Sapless and brittle, the larches are festooned old cones and it looks too early for them to flower. As I walk I imagine a single larch growing in the pine forests- does it feel out of place? Do the other trees tell it is ill, that it is wrong to drop needles, to experience life so differently? Do they urge it to try and be ‘normal’? Of course, we should not transpose human emotions, one’s own out of placeness,  on to trees. We cannot know how it feels to be a tree, to sink roots into soft loam and push up shoots, to connect underground through mycelial networks. We can never know, but I have fun trying, much like I have fun trying to find the larch roses.

I see a spot of red, high; I have to pull on the branch to see it, I can’t take a photo, but it is there, and I know the endless winter will relent.

Sketching

What would happen if we stopped with the rules?  Ones the ones we impose on ourselves, and others?

to me, it is not art

I’ve heard it about great paintings, about my paintings, when they don’t like the subject matter. You might not like peanut butter sandwiches but paintings of them are still art. A photo can be art, but I was told a portrait working from a photo reference was not, even if it was taken by the artist; I don’t understand why. Most working artists will use photo references because making art is hard enough already.

Art is the process, not the product. You don’t get to say what is or isn’t art, only the maker can. It doesn’t mean it’s good art, or the world owes it an audience, but it still gets to be made, to exist. You don’t have to like it, but why try and strip it of its worth? To make it a lesser thing, saying, it is not art, trying to turn it into something it’s ok to destroy.

The little deer is sleeping on the lawn; he often does these days, now he is old enough to be left alone. He was always less shy than his mother, who only rests in the cover of the hedge. I’m happy he has feels the garden is safe, but I do worry that he needs to learn to fear humans more. We’re not trustworthy, after all. I leave the house to fetch some sage; he looks, but he does not move. I say hello. When I return moments later, he has vanished.

When I worked in an art shop, the patrons would put a lot of emphasis on painting from life; painting from photos was easy, cheating, soulless. I could just as easily told them painting from life was easy- it’s just there, right in front of you! Try painting from imagination. Take a thought and make it real, that’s proper art (I did not say this, as it is not true. It is equally ridiculous). These are rules other people assigned to art, and we must take care not to them on as our own.

It’s a lot easier to draw a landscape, or some apples, or a portrait from life, than animals, who move a lot. These days I can take reference photos, but historically people like me used dead things. My art teacher said the masters had remarkable observational skills because there weren’t cameras which is true, but I’m also pretty sure they also had a lot of dead things. Dead things smell bad and there are many other disadvantages, so photographs are a lot better, but there’s guilt because of these insidious beliefs that using photographs is ‘cheating’, that accurate drawings have no feeling. I like to watch animals to get a ‘feel’ of them and rarely use a sole photo as a reference- what would the point be? The photo already exists. I use photos, memory, imagination, observations and dead things and if I’m very lucky, and have deer sleeping in my garden, sketches from life. They are all legitimate. Making things easier isn’t a crime; as I said, it’s  hard enough as it is.

Dead things. Only one of the reed buntings was dead. It got taken by a sparrow hawk while I was watching.

Good things

Have you seen the fruit of a lophophora cactus? It is remarkable (yes, it legal to own peyote cacti in the U.K) look at that colour. Would you think that existed in nature? It’s so pink it looks like tube colour, and I nearly always mix my colours because tube colour doesn’t exist in nature. Here’s a print of lophophora williamsii I made last year, which is legal to own in all countries if you want to Buy it

Tacca integrifolia or bat plant, is another exotic plant that doesn’t grow well in this country, so obviously I’m obsessed with it and ordered some bulbs (they are technically rhizomes) from J Parkers. I’ve always had excellent bulbs from them but one of the three was mouldy and shrivelled, and they have sent me this absolute unit, this veritable pineapple as a replacement- look at it!

It’s twice the size of any I’ve seen. I probably won’t ever mention tacca again because the chances are I will kill them but I can’t help but have hope that the pineapple will overcome the soggy gloom of U.K. weather. Wish me luck.

Honestly, that face.