Arts et Métiers

I think the triptych is almost finished now, though I'm advised that, to reinforce its Madeira theme, it wants a strelitzia flower.  We'll see.  The motivation for doing it was far from artistic: the wall where it hangs was disfigured by a couple of ugly blanking plates installed zealously by the sparky when we had the conservatory built.  I bought the canvases without measuring first, so am lucky that they fit the space so well.

Our art group exhibits once in a while at a charity drop-in centre in Edenbridge. and we've each been asked to do a little 10x8" canvas for a separate exhibition in aid of the centre.  Once I'd fiddled a bit with the triptych at last Thursday's class, I knocked out a little piece based on a contre-jour view of the church at Burton Agnes against a February sky.  As a general rule, if a piece isn't starting to come right within 45 minutes, it ain't going to.  The more I fiddle with details, the worse the result.  Or that's my excuse for the rough and ready piece below.  I used some blues that I use rarely: cobalt and indanthrene, knocked back with a trace of cadmium orange.  I also used indanthrene with a spot of burnt umber to make the grey for the masonry.

Is there anything more pathetic than a bloke with a cold?  I had my second annual flu jab last Thursday, and I started sneezing and streaming on the way back from Brighton on Friday.  So I'm feeling proper sorry for myself.  I think it's a bit better today.

Not so our local bird life.  I could see that there was something lying on the grass out the back this morning, and it turned out to be a dead blackbird.  It wasn't obvious what it had died of, but I admit to not having inspected it too closely when I shovelled it away behind the hedge.  Perhaps it been sampling the copious fungi that are growing in the garden.

Elsewhere in the garden, things aren't too bad.  I'm not sure whether we'll get a crop of leeks, since they have been badly infested with blackfly.  I'll give them another squirt of dilute washing up liquid presently, and hope that any we do get to eat will not have an interesting note of Fairy liquid.  I've dismantled and put away the irrigation system, which has done its job for the year.  The grass is long again, so I suppose I/we shall have to tackle that the next time it's dry enough.  That's always a problem hereabouts as we move into autumn.  Our clay soil is the culprit, though the no longer leaky pond can't have helped in the past.  We've had a good show of cyclamen flowers from plants liberated from Jane's garden when she moved - at her invitation, I hasten to add!  We have a few flowers on the nasturtiums that have self-sown from last year, and the fuchsia cuttings are flowering well.  Not so the stock plants, which are only now putting out a bud or two.  But, to be fair, I have not exactly nurtured them, just stripped them of promising shoots and left them to get on with it.  I am fittingly repaid.