Blue Skies

Split Beech K Howell 2012 Pastel on Paper 14cm x 21 cm

      Catching my breath. I'm working on Other Things right now, but this tree caught my eye. It's remarkable. I enjoyed the shapes it gave the sky and the push/pull nature of the split trunk.
     Spring seems to be the right time for messing with new ideas, trying things out and playing. I'm preparing a few canvases as well as boards for variety and have spent more time than I care to quantify looking for the extra staples I'm sure I had. I've decided I like the look of nails better anyway, even if it's labour intensive because I hate shopping that much (Except for shoelaces, paint and books. Obviously.).
     It's a strange relief after preparing work for exhibition and dealing with it as product to go back to the raw material and start from scratch with the vaguest notion of what might happen this time. Like packing a bag for a journey and leaving, without actually buying a ticket anywhere, just thumbing a lift and hoping you don't get picked up by a psychopath. So where am I going? Well, I'll have something to show for myself sometime soon. In the meanwhile, this tree. Call it continuity.

Getting There Or Wandering?

Every venture is a journey. When naming this blog, I was thinking of my aversion to paths. I don't always know where I'm going when I set out. And I had Robert Frost on the brain. The way, in "The Road Not Taken", the traveler looks down one road as far as he can, where it disappears into the undergrowth. With a path, you can be quite sure that you will get Somewhere. Granted, you can't see the destination, and you might miss marvelous things by choosing one path over another. But unless the path is liberally scattered with corpses in varying stages of decay, it's safe to assume that travelers before you have gotten There; maybe back again. So it's off the path that intriguing discoveries are waiting to be made. Perhaps this is justification for wandering. I'd like to take Robert Frost's traveler and shake him a little. What? Two roads? Look around you! Embrace the Undergrowth!

So, getting there. A physical walk, a piece of work, life in general.
I'm doing a lot of path-gazing. From the undergrowth of course. Where I've wandered.

I plan to post about drawing and painting outside, and hopefully link to other artists whose practice is based in the landscape. In preparation for an upcoming project, I'll be gathering my thoughts on my creative process; how experience, perception, memory and energy find a physical vehicle. How by analysing and developing what is realised, I learn from the relentless repetition of the cycle.  It would be great to have some dialogue on interpretations of our relationship with the landscape. Hopefully, we'll get Somewhere.