Originally posted on May 2, 2019 @ 10:24 pm
Painting in Words - I was once asked if I wrote from experience or from imagination - I replied both: my writing is inspired by nature, art, and memories of real events, times and places, coloured by imagination - vivid pictures painted in words - sometimes somewhat hesitantly expressed as ekphrastic prose, poems or as haiku ...
Artists Inspired by Nature - S R Badmin RWS RE AIA FSIA (1906-1989)
I don’t know the title of this painting but it’s a lovely pastoral picture painted I guess sometime in the late 1940s early 50s. The cows appear to be red and white which helps date the picture perhaps to before 1950, as black and white Friesian cows didn’t become popular until then. It is most likely somewhere in the south of Britain - like the South Downs. Like many of his paintings of rural life there’s a lot going on. I think it depicts a time of change in agriculture as there are both horses and tractors working with a traditional hayrick in the mid-centre of the painting while in another field there seems to be a tractor and baler.
Reading Time: 6 minutesHave you ever been to Polperro - well it’s blue - very blue. Not just the Persian Blue seas around and the Duck Egg Blue sky, as oft described by writers, but the ‘doors and sashes, hand rails, too of it’s white painted houses gleam with an intense Blue - Polperro Blue’
Continue reading Painting Polperro Blue
Apart from birds, nature and the Countryside, my other big passion has been horses. At one time I ran a small livery yard and thoroughbred stud. And also ran a few native ponies on the New Forest , courtesy of a distant cousin who was a Verderer.
Originally posted on March 9, 2019 @ 2:47 pm
The Magic of Birdsong: A fine fresh morning - the sun streaming through the bedroom window - slightly open, the red and white gingham curtains moving gently in the morning air - dust motes caught for a moment - faerie dust, shining like tiny golden stars; the incessant chatter of House Sparrow and the garbled chuckling, whistling and mimicry of Starling from the cottage eaves and chimney pots; Green Woodpecker laughing from the nearby Ash; And Cuckoo calling from the copse across the fields - a Messiaen symphony. The scent of early spring - apple blossom and garden flowers in the warming sun. A heady romance. A childhood memory as real now as it was then - For this moment at least I am transported - there in the trees and fields around - what is that if not magic ... the magic of birdsong.
Originally posted on March 9, 2019 @ 2:47 pm
A pale cerulean-blue sky – crisscrossed with misty white vapour trails of planes - a modern art canvas; paint casually, thrown from the artists brush; white clouds tinged salmon-pink hanging over the blue-grey mountains; just before sunrise – white wreaths of mist lingering over the fields and valley wood mirroring the vapour trails above. A lone Buzzard calls ...
Originally posted on March 9, 2019 @ 2:47 pm
via Belonging and Landscape – when I first read Richard Jefferies — Moments of Place by Rebecca Welshman Moments of Place[…] There were grass-grown tumuli on the hills to which of old I used to walk, sit down at the foot of one of them, and think. Some warrior had been interred there in the ante-historic times. The sun of the summer morning shone on the dome of sward, and the air came softly up from the wheat below, the tips of the grasses swayed as it passed sighing faintly, it ceased, and the bees hummed by to the thyme and heathbells. I became absorbed in the glory of the day, the sunshine, the sweet air, the yellowing corn turning from its sappy green to summer’s noon of gold, the lark’s song like a waterfall in the sky. I felt at that moment that I was like the spirit of the man whose body was interred in the tumulus; I could understand and feel his existence the same as my own. He was as real to me two thousand years after interment as those I had seen in the body. The abstract personality of the dead seemed as existent as thought. As my thought could slip back the twenty centuries in a moment to the forest-days when he hurled the spear, or shot with the bow, hunting the deer, and could return again as swiftly to this moment, so his spirit could endure from then till now, and the time was nothing […]
halcyon days —Artist Credit The Featured Image is of ‘The Wittenham Clumps’ by Paul Nash. He was passionately drawn to places in the landscape with ancient, mystical connections such as the Avebury stone circle and The Wittenham Clumps, and painted them many times
ancient mounds and hills
instinct with spirit
Originally posted on March 6, 2019 @ 10:05 pm
Leo Paul Robert (1851-1923) - was the most highly regarded Swiss ornithological artist at the turn of the century. But he only established a reputation as a landscape painter and painter of birds later in his career.
Continue reading Artists Inspired by Nature – Leo Paul Robert
Originally posted on March 6, 2019 @ 10:05 pm
A Carousel of Birds ...
My chief delight is in nature, and when I look at a picture it is to find something about nature in it, especially some expression of the feeling produced in us by nature, which is, to me, the most important thing in life ... Adapted from W H Hudson - 'Afoot in England’ - 1909
Originally posted on March 9, 2019 @ 2:47 pm
The art card is probably the most important category in antique postcards. Think of these cards as 3 1/2" x 5 1/2" original high quality prints, which they are, instead of as postcards. Artists could make extra income by selling postcard prints of their work. This booming market drew the very best artists, creating a wealth of quality material unmatched in the art world.
Originally posted on March 6, 2019 @ 10:05 pm
SIGNS OF SPRING
Rebecca Welshman
Jefferies’ field notebooks are full of references to the passing seasons. Each year he carefully noted the first signs of spring and summer and found happiness in the visible tokens of the seasons as they returned. As he wrote in The Open Air “I knew the very dates of them all—the reddening elm, the arum, the hawthorn leaf, the celandine, the may; the yellow iris of the waters, the heath of the hillside. The time of the nightingale—the place to hear the first note.”
via Signs of Spring
Originally posted on March 9, 2019 @ 2:47 pm
A Song for May - This post is a mashup of anecdote, memoir, and selected prose from Richard Jefferies and W H Hudson, illustrated with seasonal atmospheric soundscapes. Join me for a day, if you will in a celebration of nature’s symphony ...
Originally posted on March 9, 2019 @ 2:47 pm
Lying lazy in a meadow by a stream home to sheep ‘n’ cows and wagtail yellow buttercups dance in the meadow grass so high above kestrel hover a flit of swallow ... wild rainbow cast the summer breeze ‘cross grasses mix’d an artists palette red gold ‘n’ green finches twitter ‘n’ tweeze ...
