Mostly just art

A snake, some watery reeds and a oakapples

I should clean the windows ready for the house inspection, but that would interfere with my pretending to be a Disney Princess, as the bluetits will stop coming up to the window and tapping on it. I like to pretend that they are going to make me a dress, but they are really just stealing little insects that make their homes there, or are stuck in webs. Really, it would be cruel to deprive them of this sustenance in nesting season. There are many good reasons to avoid cleaning windows, and only one reason to clean them, and do we really need to be able to see out of them in summer when they are open all the time?

Gratuitous cow parsley

Most of housework is just maintenance, the wiping of countertops and shuffling of things from one place to another to make the appearance of homeostasis. You can work all day and everything looks pretty much the same unless you inspect the dust very carefully; much of life is like this. In many ways, adulthood is realising we are all Sisyphus, tired from pushing rocks which immediately slip right down to the bottom of the hill.

When I moved here, I imagined far less of a constant desperation about the state of my garden and more sitting calmly by the riverside painting, or going to town and wandering around art galleries. The harsh truth is when you are self employed, you feel very guilty about taking any time off in work hours, and weekends are taken up with family time,  which means I barely ever make time for such activities.

I took a video of me painting with the cuckoo cuckooing in the background but it turns out it was actually a video of my boots and me dropping the phone so you get this

On Friday, having been propelled into the heigh of summer in the space of three days and anticipating the return of autumn by Sunday, I got up early and did my chores, swam 2000 metres and then walked to the river close to leisure centre intent on finding some cuckoos and making a terrible pictures. By my reckoning I could get home by 2, work until 10, and this fit in a full days work.

It doesn’t matter the picture I made was terrible; I found my cuckoo, and life at the waterside is idyllic, the leisure craft pootling past and the cacophony of birds, the dappled light, the water lilies, the willows reaching down into the great grey green greasy waters*. In many ways, you learn more from a bad picture than a good one. In this instance, Daler’s cheapest gouache are absolute pants- really bad quality. I mean they were cheap, and I wasn’t expecting them to be good, but the point of gouache is to be opaque in I did expect them to at least try and fill the brief..

Art that I think is good is generally the sort of thing I do a lot of, and art make that I think is terrible is out of my comfort zone. I always thought my sketchbook would be loose scribble landscapes, and I don’t know why because I tend to enjoy doing close up detailed pictures of one thing. One tree, one animal, detail, no bigger picture. It’s probably because I am no good at loose landscapes that I admire them so; if I was knocking out Kurt Jackson style paintings, I’d probably expect my sketchbook to be full of neat and detailed drawings of animals. Which it is, actually. The other sketchbook, anyway. Like this guy:

Whenever I try to do the landscape pictures I enjoy looking at, I start to get fixated on one little detail; I have a bad landscape with a branch with really good moss on. It could be I need more practice, or it could be I need to accept that I’m a details person, details are valid, sometimes we need to zoom in and forget about the bigger picture. It’s hard to know which is the right answer though, it’s all a question of balance.

I forgot last week to put in the only art picture I had, which is fine because it’s not like the purpose of this newsletter is to encourage people to support me by buying art or anything. Anyway, here’s a picture of some oak apples:

And a photo of some more I found, seems to be a good year for them.

*it was idyllic, until I tried to catch the bus home- despite the busses coming about every 7 minutes I still had to wait for about half an hour in the sun, got a bit sunburnt and had to pay £1.80 to spend 10 minutes in a bus with no air conditioning. I was late starting work because I had to lie in the hammock and cool off.