Nature's Calendar

 On the BBC Springwatch programme at Easter there was a request to look out for five things and record the dates they occur on the Nature's Calendar website, all with a view to finding out if Spring is happening earlier every year. Things like this really  make me focus so I wanted to join in. Along with the five specified items are a host of other events to record. If you're UK based it is valuable data and will continue with data for Autumn too so it's not too late to sign up.

I definitely think Spring is happening that bit earlier here. I've already noted the early return of the swallows and blackcaps to the garden and we've had our first moth trap of the year which produced a couple of moths which are not normally on the wing until mid May. Bluebells are already out and today I spotted garlic mustard and cuckoo flower in the lane at the end of the garden. It may all be down to this wonderful burst of warmth we are enjoying. I love this time of year when things almost seem to grow while you're looking at them and the note taking made me think about the breeding birds that come to Elegug Stacks, on the cliffs outside of Pembroke. I wondered how many of them were already in place so tonight we drove down after dinner to see what was happening.

 Well, this is what is happening. I've seen these cliffs crammed with many more birds than this so perhaps it is early days but the guillemots are out in force and pushing each other on and off ledges in their bids for territory or just enough space to cling on to! The noise was pretty loud and it was a beautiful warm and clear evening so you could hear them long before you could see them.

 Guillemots are birds that stay on the wing all their lives, with the only exception when they stay on land  being during the breeding season and I was surprised to read that they are an amber species. When you see such plentiful numbers it is hard to comprehend their decline over the past thirty years, during our own lifetime.

 It was a gorgeous evening and we walked a couple of miles along the cliff top seeing absolutely no-one else. As the noise of the guillemots receded there was another call I could not identify. I saw a group of four or five birds in the distance which I thought were crows but the call was all wrong. As I got closer I realised it was a small group of choughs, clearly identified by their red beaks and legs. In the hazy light I could not get a clear photo of them but we stood and watched their antics for a while before heading home. They are not a bird you see every day so it was pretty special to get a good look at them.

And then, to top off the evening, as we drove home over the bridge by the millpond to Carew Castle I saw some gorgeous reflections. That millpond was literally still and like glass so I had to pull up and take a look. I hope you're enjoying this Spring as much as I am.Take note of what's happening. Make every day count.

Viability

 Life is busy but pleasantly so. I am engrossed in lots of projects and ideas and enjoying the beautiful sunshine that Britain is having this week. After a wet start to Easter it has just got hotter and hotter and feels like we've bypassed Spring and moved straight into summer. I even saw my first Orange Tip Butterfly today, at a least a couple of weeks early, so maybe this is the portent of good weather to come?

It was the sunshine that prompted me to get up to the shed this afternoon, planning to get on with a painting project, but whilst waiting for the gesso to dry on my canvas I started to focus on the old cool box under the table. I stored some cyanotype solution in there after last summer's workshop and I started to wonder about its viability.

I mixed it at least a year ago but it has been in the dark so I thought it would be worth investigating. Naturally, the painting plan suddenly got relegated to manyana and I got the bottle of solution out of the coolbox and quickly set up a little box contraption I use to exclude the light. I coated some cartridge paper and set it to dry while I suddenly had to think of what to use in the print. I walked three feet from the door and picked the heads off some daffs and pressed them into service. As ever, my usual haphazard way of working.......

 I knew the sun was strong enough but when exposed to the light it did not go the usual dark grey colour so timing it right was difficult,  but after a hydrogen peroxide rinse I had a couple of sharp daffodil prints, picking up the folds and ridges quite well. I think these might look good as cards.

 This print of a restio shows the odd colour it went once released from the frame. I quite like the effect but went on to rinse it out and it got sharper. It is evident that the solution has lost some of its potency by the puddling on the paper above (but that could also be down to my slap dash application). The main thing is that there is still some life in the solution so long after it was made up. I find that quite exciting for future ideas.

 Of course I'm then trying to take full advantage of the hot weather while I can and had to use up all of the solution I had left, so I picked up a piece of paper that had been painted with tea and had rusty things placed on it. Now it was not a good rust print and the solution was getting decidedly weak by this point but I started to think about over printing onto rusted paper or fabric, or rusting first and then cyanotyping selectively over it. With a full strength solution and a structured plan I think some great results could be achieved.

In the coolbox I found the two solutions required to make the full solution already made up so I could mix them now and start that plan...... but I don't want to do that if this glorious weather is a bit of a blip.Better to wait until late May or June when it is more consistent. I also cyanotyped some fabric to complete the process but that did not take well so I intend to try it again with fresher stuff . It was a great afternoon just playing, with the only downside that my hands turned blue because I thought it was a weakened solution and did not put my gloves on early enough in the process. In my enthusiasm I forget the most basic of things. Still, it will wash off and fade....eventually. C'est la vie.

Make your mind up time

 I have been following the campaign to vote for our 'national bird' here in the UK and the shortlist of the final ten has just been announced. Please take a look here at the contenders. Running parallel to the General Election we'll be given the results on the morning after May 7th. I can summon more enthusiasm for an avian election  than a political one at the present time! My favourite bird changes with the season but I love them all so I don't want to influence your vote in any way ...........                

   
 Naturally, once I'd put my cross on the virtual page I had to get the White Album off the shelves and play the above  a few times with the result that I then had that 'ear worm' for the rest of the day. I could not stop singing it!

There's a wonderful poem by John Clare about the blackbird that contains the lines :
'The blackbird is a bonny bird, I love his mourning suit, And song in the Spring meadows heard, As mellow as the flute' . For his song alone he gets my vote.

So excited about the eclipse tomorrow morning and we're told it will be clear and bright here and we should get a high chance of it. I hope so. I was watching Stargazing Live last night on the BBC and then had to go out and look for Jupiter and its moons. The sky was alive with stars. So beautiful. Only Europe as such will see the eclipse tomorrow but miss it and it won't be coming around again until something like 2034. For those that don't get the opportunity to experience it  I might post another Beatles song. Perhaps the lovely George (always my favourite) singing 'Here Comes the Sun'?

Pushing on

 My key objective this year was to improve my drawing, and I have been doing exactly that, pushing myself to overcome the lack of confidence that I know has held me back from sharing my endeavours. I can draw and draw well but I can still hear that art teacher when I was 14  telling me that 'left handers cannot draw and you are no exception'. My common sense side tells me this is rubbish but I suspect I would not be the first person to still be carrying the baggage of negative teachers' comments around with me many years after they were spoken.

I am lucky to have made a great friend locally in artist Maggie Brown, who runs fabulous residential painting holidays here in Pembrokeshire . She sees my left handed-ness as a positive asset and has a confidence in my ability that I am humbled by. She has dragged me out sketching in the landscape and last week I even attended a three day painting course with well known local artist David Tress, something I had to overcome my fear of drawing in front of others to do. I'm not sure yet whether I want to be a painter, but I do want to be a printmaker who draws better and I have already learned so much from these two wonderful artists.

Both have made me want to go out into the landscape with new eyes and I am now being far more observant. On a clearer day I am going back to the top of Foel Eryr which I climbed yesterday. It is a bronze age burial mound from roughly 2000BC that is one of the higher spots on the Preselis, site of the bluestones used at Stonehenge. It was cold in the wind yesterday and it was not the day to linger  at the cairn on the top. The views all around were not bad but on a better day could be fabulous.

I know that I don't want to slavishly draw the view but I do want to return and capture the essence of the place. I feel as if my eyes are suddenly open and I am seeing everything differently. I am also beginning to feel differently about my drawing and I'm really loving using different media and approaches. If I could find that art teacher again I'd show them how wrong they were!

Throstle, Mistle and Crampball

 Every day, as I sit in my living room, I can spend ages just staring into my garden, procrastinating and putting off things on my 'to do' list. This old ash tree takes up a large space just outside the window and I watch it change with the seasons, loving the shadows it creates as the sun moves around. Ash are not recognised for their massive benefits to wildlife. There are many trees that are better for encouraging birds etc into the garden but this one is a good 60 to 70 feet tall and has been around long enough for it to get cloaked in ivy ..... concealing ivy......

 In truth I didn't realise it was concealing anything at all until a couple of weeks ago, just after I'd completed the annual garden birdwatch for the RSPB. During the watching period I was really pleased to see a Song Thrush as they are a particular favourite of mine. We see the occasional single bird but not on a daily basis. Then I noticed I was seeing it every day, and one day, noticed two in the ash tree. Over a period of days it dawned on me that this pair were doing something as they frequently attacked any other bird that deigned to alight on the branches.

Now this tree is frequented by a crow family and a pair of jays but these thrushes dive bombed everything fearlessly. Given the time of year I had to check as it did not seem right that they were breeding surely. Then, after a bit of quick research it dawned on me that these were not Song Thrushes but Mistle Thrushes. Never quite seeing the difference between the two before it suddenly became obvious that they were a bit larger than the norm and marked slightly different.. The mistle thrush is also an earlier breeder, sometimes before the end of February it seems, often choosing the fork of a tall tree for its large untidy nest. At this time of year cover is scarce and mistle thrushes nests are highly vulnerable from raids by crows etc but this pair are not afraid of our resident corvids at all. Not surprisingly the birds are very wary and one seems to be on guard but when I see both of them together I question whether there is a nest or not. If there is, they're not brooding eggs all of the time, and if there are fledgelings around they're not always protecting them either. I shall be keeping a vigilant watch with my binoculars in hand as I am fascinated by the whole process.

 It has made me search out some printing plates that I made at the tail end of last year. The one above was my attempt at a collagraph of a Song Thrush but it was too small and too detailed. My friend Sue gave me sound advice afterwards as I had stupidly used carborundum to get the dark spots and it was too fiddly. I should have cut the darks from the surface of my card, so I am going to go back to this idea and try again. Similarly, when I was revisiting this, I found a drypoint plate that I had etched last year too.

 I made a couple of prints of this plastic plate but it they were a bit wishy washy inkwise so I discarded them. Now I can't find the prints which is a shame because I think it would be interesting to draw into them and liven them up. So, time to make a new collagraph plate and revisit the drypoint I think. I have an idea running around in my head about working with the phrase 'Fine Feathers Make Fine Birds' and combining the images. Trouble is, my head is full of other things too so don't hold your breath.....

 The other things taking up my thinking time include getting the house and garden ready for an estate agent's valuation. We're in the throes of deciding whether now is the time to move or not and I suppose the valuation will give us a direction one way or another, but we need to get some garden issues resolved first. Last October, I awoke one morning to  heifers trampling all over my garden and frantically trying to get out through my closed gates onto the road. It was an alarming experience to find 70 cows licking your back door, bellowing and leaning against your car, rocking it from side to side! Luckily, a local farmer responded to a telephone call for help at 7.30 in the morning and came up and moved them away for us with his herdsman. They belonged to a local lady farmer who rented nearby fields for her animals. We were left with a muddy mess, and, when we got hold of her, a tearful lady farmer telling us how sorry she was but life is too short to get angry isn't it? Nature is resilient and the garden has bounced back but it is pretty rutted thorughout and needs rollering, something she is going to get done with a tractor very soon.

As we are fighting off rabbits and mole visitations too at present  I go out to survey the territory every now and again, keeping my fingers crossed that there's no more damage to contend with. It was on one of these forays yesterday that I noticed these queer protruberances.

Now I guessed it was a fungus of some sort but when I touched it (with a stick, just in case...) I found it was solid and very hard. I don't need to tell you how I described it to the other half I'm sure, but I was amused when I looked it up and found it was called 'Crampball'. Apparently, these inedible, hard lumps grow almost exclusively on dead ash stumps. The name comes from an old belief that they might prevent night cramp if placed in your bed; another name, King Alfred's cakes is more descriptive since they look just like burnt cakes (amongst other things) They live a long time and release their spores at night after a year's growth. The book I read said they are very hard to dislodge from the tree but I have no intention of trying it as they are quite intriguing and something new to me.

Finally, here's a poor photo of another regular visitor at present. He's without a mate every time I see him but he's having a whale of a time nibbling the buds on our trees. I think he's made light work of the damson and plum trees but he is such a beauty we don't mind. By the time I grab the camera he has disappeared so this was taken through glass whilst sat looking out at that ash tree one day. So the wheel comes full circle.

I shall keep my eye on that Mistle Thrush nest and if there are any developments I shall be so excited, I shall have to post about it again!

Following a map

 Ever since starting this blog I've thrown in the odd post about maps. I've always been a bit obsessed with them and know I'm not alone so it's great to keep finding artists who feel the same and find different ways to express their fascination.

A couple of weeks ago I spent the weekend back home in the West Country and we caught the opening  of an exhibition by Jeremy Gardiner at the Victoria Art Gallery in Bath. The spread above comes from an article about it in the latest Artist and Illustrator's magazine but nothing does justice to the work like seeing it in front of you. I first came across Jeremy's work a few years ago in an exhibition in Dorchester with artist Amanda Wallwork, both influenced by the Dorset coastline and the archaeology of the area. Last year a monograph of his work was published and I trawl through it regularly for a fix. The paintings are wonderful but I am drawn to his monoprints more than anything. The exhibition has about 20 or so of them adorning the walls, framed in a long landscape format and layered with details of map contours, fossil finds and geological faults. Out of my price range, but I can dream. They were an inspiration to see and really made me think about scale. A fabulous exhibition to visit  and on a sunny day in Bath, it was perfect.

 Only a week or two earlier  I came across the work of Barbara Macfarlane. She is also working with maps. Check her work out on her page at the Rebecca Hossack Gallery or visit her website. It's worth looking at a video she's posted there which shows her working practice and talks about the map paintings and their creation on massive sheets of Khadi paper. I've checked it out and think she must must be working on sheets called 'Atlas' size. How appropriate.

And whenever I travel home to Bristol, I muse about moving back there and taking advantage of the resources and facilities that are available in the big city.... and not down here in the sticks! I always check out the print workshops at Spike Island and I noticed they are hosting a talk - albeit not until July - from Liz Miller, a printmaker working with cartography to map musical scores amongst other ideas. Fascinating stuff  and her website is full of beautifully drawn and etched images. I'm putting a date in the diary now to visit home turf that weekend. If you're drawn to maps do take a look at all three of these artists and tell me what you think. I am keen to know how maps affect others and who else uses them in their work, and how.

Winter walk

Winter has been strange so far. One day it is cold and dry, the next ,wet and windy. Day after day seems to alternate between these two states. Average temperatures are apparently low for this time of year,somedays struggling to climb into low single figures. It started with a heavy frost today but dawned bright and sharp. Despite a long list of things we needed to do this morning, we headed 40 minutes drive  up north of the county to Newport. It's one of the places in Pembrokeshire that has lots of second homes so it's usually quiet in the off season and it has different habitats to explore. The sea becomes a tidal estuary flowing into reedbeds and we took our binoculars with us, lucky enough to see little egrets, herons,sanderlings and curlews.

We walked from the large beach at Traeth Mawr, around the estuary and onto the beach at the Parrog. In reality it's all one massive stretch of sand with the estuary cutting through the centre of it. The water was crystal clear and running beautifully. The sun was out all day and where you could feel it on your face, it was really warm. At one point it felt quite like Spring. Really. I am not exaggerating, I promise. Just wanted to share the beauty of it all.