what is this picture about?
At the beginning of February the trees are bare and the wind blows cold but out in the hedges the birds are busy calling each other and foraging for food. They are easier to spot at this time of year with the naked eye as there is less foliage in which to hide. While out on a walk along The Clarendon Way I was pleased to see a brambling; a pretty bird about the size of a chaffinch and often mistaken for one.Its squeaky cheeping call blended in with the melodious songs of other, invisible hedge dwellers. There are between 45,000 and 1,800,000 ramblings resident in the UK over the winter, but this was the first year I had properly seen one and learned how to identify it.
a difficult month
I often find this a difficult month to summon up creativity. I am often cold and tired, fed up with the barren landscape and dark nights. It can be an effort to trudge to the studio. When I feel like that I sometimes try doing things that are different. In this mixed media picture I wanted to include elements of the season; the winter bird, the snowdrops, the contrasting sounds of so much feathery life largely hidden in the bare branches and the snowdrops forming drifts along the banks and gardens in our village and the surrounding countryside. Perhaps you, like me, find the first sight of these beautiful flowers gives you a beat of delight as they are among the first signs that new life, sunlight and warmth are on their way back.
I enjoyed sourcing fragments of old music manuscript with songs that would have been sung in drawing rooms a hundred years ago. I was using a song that I had heard sung by a close friend, and just tore small fragments, like the interrupted sounds of the brambling. The blue and white Cornish china jug comes in the colours of a bright winter day; bright white clouds and a clear blue and the checked table cloth was created using masking tape and exploring the effects of overlaid colours.
It’s all in the weave
In the same month I visited the Silk Mill at Whitchurch, where I was fascinated to see the process whereby silk was spun and woven into beautiful fabrics; often used for TV period dramas, particularly based on the works of Jane Austen, whose 200 anniversary was celebrated last year, and who was buried under a modest memorial stone in nearby Winchester Cathedral, which doesn’t even mention that she was a writer.
There were clever computer programmes that allowed you to select colours and weaves and created cloth designs of your own choosing that brought the ancient museum up to date; and I was enjoying making similar but analogue reproductions in this work.
The painting is done in bright acrylic paint and it is framed in a contrasting white ‘floater’ frame, which means the canvas is centred inside a frame but with an area of empty space between its edges and the plain white wood surround.