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
Hugh Brandon-Cox (1917 - 2004) - This post about the Artist, Writer and Explorer, is one of a series of short biographies about artists and writers inspired by Nature and the Countryside and whose works have fostered my own love of the Countryside - especially Birds.
Continue reading Artists Inspired by Nature – Hugh Brandon-Cox
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.
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 […]
grasses sway
over ancient mounds and hills -
the clash of steel
The Story of My Heart 1883
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
Notes: The original post which formed the basis of a brief article first published in the Crabbet Heritage Magazine - August 2019. The picture is a pencil drawing of an Arab Mare and Foal, from 1898 which I have had restored and now hangs in pride of place on my landing picture gallery.
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 ...
A Year in Haiku - In the evening light the hills glow golden brown; a Barn Owl hunts the woodland edge, picked out in the last rays of the setting sun - the sky to the west a faint wash of blue tinged with orange-pink. Yet it is still not-quite-dark. The Super Moon, rising over the hedgerow trees, splinters in their branches; throwing short spooky shadows across silver-washed fields; a shooting star - fizzes - a firework across the winter-spring sky ...
Eric Ennion (1900 — 1981) was born on 7th June 1900 at Kettering in Northamptonshire, the son of a country doctor. In 1904 the family moved to Burwell on the edge of the Cambridgeshire fens where, after studying medicine at Caius College and St Mary's Hospital, he joined his father's practice in 1926.
Another post in my series of short biographies about artists and writers inspired by Nature and the Countryside: Allen W. Seaby (1867-1953), watercolorist, woodcut artist, author, and illustrator.
Allen Seaby was born in London on May 25, 1867, the son of a cabinet maker and carpenter. He studied color woodcut with Frank Morley Fletcher, a pioneer in England of woodblock color printing by Japanese methods, at the School of Art, Reading University. Seaby joined the staff of the University of Reading in 1899 where he became professor of fine art and later head of the art department.
Continue reading Artists Inspired by Nature – Allen W. Seaby
Looking out the kitchen window the first snow of winter on the mountains, black twigged hedges casting frosted white shadows, that stay all day, across the fields; a hunting Sparrowhawk flips over a nearby hedge disturbing a flock of Fieldfare, their gun-metal blue heads shining in the afternoon winter sun as they rise as one circling the field before settling back on the hedge.
