... "of grace and beauty" in bolted purple sprouting broccoli. B allowed two plants to go wild, knowing how much I love to see flowering veg, and they really are beautiful. Of course this sketch doesn't show the colours - deep purple, bright yellow and green set against a bright blue spring sky, but the elegance of those S shapes! In the foreground is one escaping through the netting, and just behind it where the net has been pulled back for new planting is the one I sketched.
This is a skip standing outside the building where I work my day-job. It's a bit of a wistful thing for me; the glory of the colours (I had to do nothing to enhance or change the photo), the shapes and characters I see in its worn surface and the downward movement from rain and rust all make me long for an 8-foot linen canvas, stretched tight as a drum, with pots of paint and huge brushes, just as the old days in my studio at Chelsea. I love drawing with a passion, and it has been forever the smallest, tonal exhibits in an art gallery which pull me in (I'll never forget being blown away by a Francesca Woodman exhibition of tiny photographs in Artist Rooms - at Tate London, I think) - but every so often when I see something like this rugged skip, the old tug at the heartstrings for large scale, muscular painting comes back for just a moment.
Happy Easter! A weekend of tasty food: Molly came to stay on Friday until Sunday morning and made hot cross buns with B which were out of this world. The weather took an unexpected turn for the better and it felt as though summer was arriving, so on Sunday evening B and I had our first barbecue of the season - Easter fell so early this year it wasn't quite as warm as usual for an Easter BBQ once the sun began to dip, but it was great to be outdoors, and fun.
(And yes, I did notice how the barbecue grill 'speaks to' last week's images!) I know I do this every year, but - ice patterns! They are stunning. These ones formed on the same glass tabletop in the garden as those of December 2021 - but this time, on the underside of the glass, the top only having a mist of frost. The top photo was taken through that mist and is lovely in its own right - the photo below was after I poured a jug of cold water over the tabletop to dissolve it, and the patterns can be seen clearly. Incidentally, I discovered while writing this entry that older links on some posts aren't working. I guess it is related to when I switched from using the dot-co-dot-uk address to the Weebly one, due to high hosting costs. I'm not sure if I can fix the links, so apologies for that. Nonetheless, I am so grateful to Weebly and Square for providing this space for free.
The January chill set in right on time this week, bringing beautiful displays of ice patterns - this one was on my car window. This was thankfully on the outside, but there was also a bit of frosting inside, too - the car has been letting in water which is pooling in the rear passenger footwell (we think it may be something to do with the sun roof drain hoses).
I wish everybody a wonderful 2024, and hope 2023's problems reach a peaceful conclusion. It's been a rocky ride since 2019 when Covid first struck, and the whole world can also definitely do without the blatant acts of terrorism, greed and war which have ensued. Every year at about this time our little neighbourhood gathers to clear fallen leaves from the grass in our communal circle of trees. We wait until the leaves are almost completely down and get together on a Sunday afternoon to get busy filling compostable bags by the dozen for collection by the council and call it the 'annual leafathon'. It's a sure sign that autumn in almost over and we are at the gates of winter; today was the day. This is an illustration I made in 2019 in my Binky McKee capacity.
I actually missed the event for the first time in years. I woke up feeling poorly, but nonetheless I got dressed up in warm clothes and boots ready to go outside and help, but felt so rough B advised me not to. I acknowledged I wasn't up to it. Some kind of virus has been doing the rounds at work for about 2 weeks now, some people testing positive for covid, others with the same symptoms testing negative; I guess I had caught whatever it was, as I have had a head cold or something all week (I took two covid tests which showed negative). It's possible I was washed out and really tired. I just stood like a rather sad figure at the window watching B out there with the neighbours, all being very jolly and covered in leaves. I have no updates yet on my materials or tests for small scale works at the moment (had to wait for pay day to order Golden medium) so I thought I would share my favourite photos of the end of season garden. I can't really describe in words why these two photos give me so much joy; they should, and are, fails on every level: the photos are almost accidental, and the plants have gone to seed which gardeners don't approve of at all. But, the colours, the beauty, the atmosphere, the weird depth of field - and, you have to ask, why would anyone want to take a photo of this, never mind love it beyond all carefully composed and thought-out photos? Phones are brilliant for capturing all the stuff you wouldn't normally see: spontaneity, wabi sabi, unplanned snaps of the eternal optimism of plants that against all the odds they will prevail in a messy section of the garden. These picture a spirit world which I love.
As an indirect result of the Edinburgh Festival it has been such a hectic summer that I had to take a month-long break from my blogs as there simply was not the time to work and continue as normal. Two sets of house guests, the garden in full production, day job gone crazy, plus commitments nearly every evening for weeks and weekends on end have left me with a lot of catching-up to do. A back-dated post I didn't get around to at the time plus this synopsis should pretty much cover it, though ... Of all the wonderful fruits and veg the garden has provided us with this year, it's probably a bit strange that what interests me most is the weird stuff: Top row: Nasturtiums in curly tangles with strong tendrils and seeds Bolted lettuce 'That's shallot' (dad joke) - wow, but these shallots are tasty Middle row: Bolted rocket plants Bolted calibrese - delightful Voynich weirdity Sexy savoy Bottom row: Who knew rocket flowers were so delicate and pretty Ugly beetroot, utterly delicious baked (we did have round ones as well) A corner of the garden with things gone mad in pots The Edinburgh Assembly Rooms in George Street were turned over for festival events, so 695 chairs they didn't require for that time were sent to us for recovering. I am proud to say I sewed up every chair back except for about 20!
Top row: The chairs arrive at our workshops and begin to get stripped, these are just a few - the rest are in containers Middle row: There is a passageway through to the tools as recovering begins, work in progress draped in polythene, seats without their backs lined up Bottom row: Proud to say these are all my own work: sewing, fitting and assembling the chairs A container bursting with finished chairs The Assembly Room showing our chairs - isn't it grand? The team completed the job in record time well ahead of schedule - hard work, fast, neat and efficient. Quality. That's all for now, hopefully normal blogging will resume as the calm of autumn approaches. Outside in the garden, beside the barbecue and next to the bench where we sit whilst making delicious food, this plank of wood rests on an old chair frame. The strange markings on it have been rousing my curiosity for a while. This morning the light was so even it was a good opportunity to photograph them I'm not sure how the markings got there; the first photo I know shows stains where small pots of vegetable seedlings had rested for a while. The circles I think I must have drawn absent-mindedly at some point. I don't remember doing it, but I always carry pencils in the pocket of my work trousers for marking up templates. I noticed the other day when we were out there that they are exactly the same dimensions as the foot of a wine glass. This tree must have appeared from my pencil without even thinking as I chatted to B as he barbecued away. This wonderful piece of calligraphy is cut into the plank, it must have been used as a rest for sawing at some point. It's actually a lovely piece of timber with some stories to tell, and actually relates in a strange way to the little paintings I wrote about a couple of weeks ago - probably the reason I suddenly started paying attention to it. It's strange how the mind often completely does its own thing in the background, then pops it all to the front and ideas begin to blossom.
An unexpected accidental coming together in the garden: a wind-damaged plant apparently emerging from a fossil. It looks like a weird bulb and gives me ideas for a drawing.
The fossil is a ceramic ammonite, I made loads of them years ago from a I made by pressing a real fossil into soft clay and biscuit-firing it. I used to make a lot of moulds for sprigs etc when I still had a pottery shed and kiln where I lived in Perthshire. I use these stoneware ammonites together with ceramic 'pebbles' filled with molten glass as decorations, but somehow a few of these ammonites have become scattered across the patio which I like because it looks so natural and random. I found this adorable thing in the garden today - a seedling growing naturally in a snail's shell. If I was still making ceramics I would make some pots like this for bonsai type plants.
I have a collection of such precious things found outside in various places, such as a tiny bird skull and weird shaped roots, but I guess this one isn't very durable so it's still in the garden sheltering beneath a rhubarb leaf. The photo I posted last weekend of the shadow cast by a wrought iron table in our garden interested me so much I couldn't resist drawing it: the tilt and strange perspective, shadows on the patio, and lichen patterns wandering across stony textures proved irresistible to my mind. The table is one I designed for my shop back in the '90s, a prototype for the Provençal range of dining furniture hand-forged by Stan Pike which became a best seller for the business (and also got ripped off by someone photographing the window display, and copies turned up later in Prague). I didn't have the prototype powder-coated, and it wasn't designed to be outside so mine has rusted in the garden, expressed by the brown colour in the drawing above. The finished dining sets were available finished in a clear coat to show the beauty of the natural metal, or in customised funky colours to suit clients' interior design specs.
It felt strangely familiar when I was drawing its shadow, and I thought it would be interesting to show my original artist's impression of the design for the forge, but unfortunately I couldn't find it in time before posting today - if I come across it I'll post it next week. Recently I have been noticing the way things talk to one another, especially when they are not related but an accidental link somehow matches them together. Here is a juxtaposition of a wonderful shadow cast by our round table in the garden and a sewing test on a scrap of upholstery material from work. I always test with wavy lines - well, it's more fun than a straight line, isn't it? and I spotted an oval in this one similar to the table's shadow, with echoes of the verticals and curlicues in the photo. And before I go, here is an update on the alfalfa progress this week - look at them go! We're going to eat them soon, so I quickly took this pic before they're all gone.
I returned to work this week, but last week I reluctantly had to take time off work due to sickness. I had all the symptoms of Covid: a terrible productive cough, headache, lost senses of taste and smell, general fatigue, fever, aching bones, and felt like I had pneumonia again - but tested negative for Covid three times, so I guess it was just a lergy which has been sharing freely at work. I felt so dreadful I couldn't believe it wasn't Covid, but I suppose it just goes to show there are other nasty bugs. After a week in bed sleeping it off I began to feel better. Not well enough to have any brilliant new ideas, but well enough to be able to work on my iPad in my sick-bed; I got through a lot of Binky pattern-making, and played around with some of the motifs I had been tracing from my drawings, together with recent Polynesian navigation sticks drawings and boat shapes.
It may look like a digression from the Neruda's boats and my Dad's drawings themes, but this photo I took 4 weeks ago on the picnic bench in the early morning frosts outside the workshops look like lobsters, and I think I might work them into drawings to fit in with the boat themes and the Fife coastal fishing villages close by to where I live. They may eventually fit into the boats project.
It was only last month when I photographed this, but what a change in the daylight those weeks have blessed us with - we are now in early spring, and I am now driving in daylight in the mornings. |
Welcome to my work journal - a weekly update on drawings, work in progress, doodles and day-dreaming.
I changed the website address a few months ago, so some older links on previous posts are broken. If you click one of those and it takes you to a strange page, simply replace the .co.uk after the heatherelizawalker. with weebly.com and it will work again. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
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As well as the work you see here, I illustrate under the name of Binky McKee (my mother's maiden name was McKee, Binky was every single one of my great grandmother's many cats!)
If you would like to visit my Binky website, please click the picture above. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Dissolving PeopleA symbol on the footpath outside a local primary school gradually disappearing as the image breaks up and wears away until eventually it is obliterated by leaves and barely discernible. Photographed at intervals of several months between February 2021 and November 2022, oldest at the top.
(My shoes look so new in the first pic, and note the transition to new phone in the last photo). <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
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April 2024
(Sorry the archives don't nest!)
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A 2013 work book, still very much in use Please note all images on this website are ©Heather Eliza Walker 2013 - 2020, and may not be used or reproduced without prior consent. |