New painting, "Caw and Clatter"

This is part of a series using gestural large brushstrokes in blackboard paint, with oil colour overlaid with painting knives.  It's partly inspired by the sounds made by corvidae and other birds in and around the trees in autumn.   
The painting is available via the Tarpey Gallery.

Apple Day Preparations...

Apple Day (I)

oil on canvas, 5th October 2011

First of a new series celebrating Apple Day, officially October 21st, but will be on Saturday 22nd here in Cromford, much better for families to join in with apple pressing, games and general apple-based mayhem! 

This event  highlights the need to protect older trees and orchards as both habitats and

producers of heritage or heirloom apples and encourage the growing of less widely

known varieties .

The local independent bookshop, Scarthin Books, has supported Apple Day with

its own celebrations including apple pressing outside on the Promenade at Cromford

for some years.  This year for the first time they are inviting local artists to display their

work there a la Rive Gauche!
Any sales I make will include a 20% donation to

Common Ground.

A few more relevant links are...

orangepippin


The Orchard Network (UK)

a is for apple, a V & A Museum art page

List of Apple Day events in the UK

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_apple_cultivars

...and the painting is on sale here:

etsy link 
(now sold)

"You've just let yourself go, haven't you?" - exploring local textures

Lately I'm feeling very much that I'm missing so much that is right under my nose and that it's high time I attended to it!   






Here what attracts me is partly the whitewash intention/ eventual, inevitable failure; 
the flaky brick and greenish mortar looking more cavelike than modern.


Also the interplay of human with other aspects of nature.  It seems so inherently poetic.

There are some great Flickr groups on this topic, the "Best Textures" one, for example.  
I enjoyed searching with terms like "peeling", "flaky", "blistered" , "abraded" "rusty" and even "mouldy"!  Not forgetting "palimpsest". 

Other flickr groups celebrating weathered and time-affected materials include "The Rust Bucket" "Wonders of Oxidation"and, especially exciting to me, "Old, Abandoned Houses", and "Rural Decay".