Printing Conkers

A lino block of conkers.

Warning: heavy autumnal themes and sighing.

You might guess that I would be making autumnal images. You probably share my enthusiasm for the flame colours, gauzy mists, bracing chills and mellow sunlight.

The season results in all sorts of eye-catching things lying about. You won't get many I-Spy points for the cuboids and cylinders of straw arranged in every other field or stacked like castles. You might get more for the occasional field striped orange with pumpkin production.

If you're a habitual collector, the natural world's annual, gentle shake-up will keep you busy. Leaves rattle at the roadside, acorns and pinecones pepper the woodland floor. Dry sticks clatter alarmingly and the hedges are sprinkled liberally with berries.

On a trip across or around any park, I'm preoccupied with looking out for conkers. They might be in their full shell; they might be gleaming unshelled in the grass. They might be perfectly round, dried and wrinkly or dome-shaped with a flat base. The empty shells might still be bright white on the inside or turning to a leather brown.

My conkers pattern.

Collecting is one thing but then there's the game. It combines careful selection and preparation with chaotic whacking and smashing.

I've covered this in a post two years ago and got a bit lost in methods of boiling and varnishing. Shortly afterwards, at the last outdoor party of the year, I put it all to the test. Really, there was no scientific conclusion. The ricochets, the shards and the perfecting of knots took over and it was all good fun.

So I may not be an expert but I'm not far from the people who are. This Sunday the World Conker Championships will take place near Peterborough.

I revisited some drawings and made a lino block. It's fine on its own (see above) but it was intended for repetition (see left). In recent years I haven't done as much relief printing as drawing, so this was a good return to the form, along with another pattern that I might show before long.

Edward Bawden's famous wallpaper designs had an influence. I hope that it has a complexity that breaks the chequerboard grid up a bit.

Printing a lino block with a fade multiple times on a page is a skill that I have not attained. The pattern is made from several individual prints with slight variations in texture.

Now I need to get outside before the rain shows Autumn's other face. Have some squashes to finish.

Bonus pumpkins!

England & Sonnets

PART ONE:  Today is St. George's Day!

In honour of my national day, here are seven birds in formation.  The formation happens to be that of the Heptarchy - the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England.  With the exception of the bittern in East Anglia, I don't think the birds shown are strongly connected with the region where I put them.

This is something that I've meant to do for a while:  get to grips with gouache; fill a page with colour; be a bit more graphic.  The draft came out a bit more 1980s and less mid-century.


PART TWO:  Today is Shakespeare's Birthday!

This morning I was talking with friends about sonnets.  I'm not sure that I even studied them at school, let alone learned any, and I never remember the rules.  I looked it up and had a bash, to explain the form by using it.  I'm quite pleased with how my silly sonnet about sonnets came out.


Suppose you wish to set your thoughts in words
But find yourself in need of more than prose.
Love and the dance of poetry go like curds
And whey, deep down each lover surely knows.

But how to find expression that will speak
Your thoughts aloud but also show your skill?
Perhaps you find a soppy rhyme too weak
And haiku's strictures just too quick to fill.

You may in free verse jazzy patterns wind;
Post-modern collage from the phonebook paste;
Stream consciousness unburdening your mind;
But all this may be too loose for your taste.

In sonnets' tidy dance it suits to gird;
Just long and short enough your love to word.

Write me a sonnet!  Correct me about regional birds!  Happy St. George's Day!

Moss

Here is one of my rare nature moments, from a few years ago, at university.

I was experimenting with texture in screenprinting.  I wanted to build dense prints from layers of simple strokes and flecks.

This piece was intended to be a subtle evocation of damp, velvety mosses on a wall.  The staff were not at all sure what I was trying to achieve with this variety of blobs and smudges.  I put it down as another instance of me having some atavistic feeling in my head that doesn't translate into reality.

My five-layered screenprint of moss.

Moss, lichen, heather and grasses have two associations for me.  The first is homely and human:  a part of nature that sits, semi-cultivated, in a human environment, the subject of diligent but leisurely botanical study; knowledgeable but twee.  I see shafts of dusty sunlight in the country gardener's shed in an Edwardian children's book.

The second is primal and timeless:  windy, prehistoric or post-apocalyptic heath and fenland, silent but for a few marsh birds or the sound of a Jute being scalped in a bog; ancient buildings fallen to ruin and repopulated by unassuming but patient plantlife.

Most of the time I need to make pictures relatively quickly.  In my case, that leads to a lot of little people, buildings and boats.  But I could enjoy spending weeks in a print room, making backgrounds, surrounded by pots of honesty and heads of pampas grass, studying the leaf-structure of heathers and hebes...  and drawing them with a more refined series of blobs and streaks.

New Forest - Work In Progress

My favourite bit of non-town to head to is the part of the New Forest between Lyndhurst and Beaulieu.  The fastest I've ever managed the cycle ride to Lyndhurst was 39 minutes - although that may have been the time when I set out around 4am on a Saturday and went over the Millbrook and Redbridge flyovers.  Sometimes I come back on the Hythe ferry.

Drawing near Lyndhurst.

I love simply riding steadily on the roads.  Beaulieu Road undulates consistently (though generally downhill) as it runs south from Lyndhurst.  I love the open skies of the heathland, the fine sand between rows of heather and the medieval feel of the low pine groves.  It's Medieval and yet somehow Californian.

For me, it's a surprise to be in such a quiet place, even with groups of cyclists and classic car drivers, and pylons and the Fawley oil refinery usually visible.  I love the occasional trig points and burial mounds, opposite ends of the timeline of human activity.

Demo for a piece based on the New Forest.

I'm trying to put a piece together about it all.  My work is usually about busy details, not vast space, so it's a challenge to evoke the enigmatic silence, the wide sky and the warm colours of gorse and heather.

Ibstone, Bucks

I spent the weekend in High Wycombe for a wedding.  The reception was a few miles out at Ibstone.  On Saturday morning Adam and I explored the bluebell-filled woods, but it wasn't until the next day that I went further into the village and saw the standing stone that gives the settlement its name.  I've read now that it was Hibba's historic boundary stone between Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire.

Between breakfast and checking out, I hadn't time to go as far as the church, but here's a sketchbook page from my brief exploration.  Here you will find:

• The standing stone (twice) and detail of its lichen,
• The perfect cricket pitch with its square, nets, club house and rusting roller,
• Local flora, trees and gorse in the tussocky ground around the stone,
• The row of communication:  telephone box (disused, but a notice about planned renovation says that "It will be beautiful"), post box, noticeboards, bus stop and telegraph pole,
• Play equipment and benches dedicated to villagers of long standing,
• Cottages and houses with hedges, gates and an Airedale,
• The Fox Country Inn,
• The red kite that circled above, and a couple of gliders.

Andy and Jess's wedding was heaps of fun:  singable hymns, classic cars, a hog roast, extensive cheese board, chocolate fountains and raucous dancing.  The couple are on the road now and we all wish them every kind of happiness.