Call of the Wild Soul - Take 1

I'm just back from the fabulous Call of the Wild Soul art retreat at Croydon Hall on Exmoor. The retreat is the inspiration of Erin Faith Allen and was just amazing. My only regret is that it was only possible to take classes from 3 of the 4 wonderful teachers there. I have decided to write a separate post for each class starting with day one when I took Madelyn Mulvaney's Persisting Soul class, which was based on photography rather than painting. It was a relaxed and gentle day with words of wisdom interspersed with exercises in pairs and a post lunch photo walk.

During the first exercise we were looking and embracing and releasing and went out into the slightly damp and misty garden to take photos.

 

I also used the opportunity to take some of the wonderful moss covered tree trunks in the garden.

 

Back in the classroom we looked at examples of manifestos and began to brainstorm some ideas for our own - here is mine which I finished on my return home.

 

After a delicious lunch (would certainly recommend the food at Croydon Hall) we went on a photo walk. There was so much to capture even though we went a relatively short way. This is just a small sample of the photos I took

 

The second theme of the day  was journeys and destinations and my workshop partner and I took various  photos around the house and garden.

In between all the other activities we also played around with vintage Polaroid film which produced pictures with a soft light and interesting striped effects. I can remember these from my parents Polaroid owning days when striped photos were not seen as an interesting, artistic or desirable outcome, rather the reverse! Still finding it hard to get my head around this!

Finally we did the self portrait section of the class. Each choosing how we would like the other to photograph us and then choosing  a feature  of the other to shoot. my partner chose to have a photo just of her foot with adorning anklet and I chose to take a photo of her amazing eyes.

Finally I chose to have a head and shoulders portrait wearing one of my favourite pink scarfs from Marrakech( have photoshopped the results a bit!) whereas my partner chose to take a picture of my hair.

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It really was a fabulous day - big thanks to Maddy and all the other wild souls!

A Little Painting ...............

Back home for a couple of days between French holiday and the Somerset art retreat and have realized that what with all the pack and unpacking, son packing for university and general stuff do do after a holiday I am not going to get a blog post written about France anytime soon. So instead, and with the upcoming art retreat in mind, I thought I’d share with you some of the painting I have been doing over the last few weeks. 

The inspiration is Mati Rose McDonough’s book Daring Adventures in Paint.  Mati takes you through a series of lessons and techniques, each building on the last, until in the final lesson you can use all the techniques in the book. I think it works very well as a guide and like most good things you can take from it what you need, adapting the techniques to your preferences and tastes.

 

So far I have done three pictures all of which are new departures for me, building on the techniques in the book. I would welcome your comments. 

Back after the art retreat so excited about it!

Liberate your Art Postcard Swap

I got really excited by the postcard swap as soon as I read about it on Kat’s blog. The timing was perfect I was planning to have some postcards printed anyway as a way of showcasing some of my photos. An offer I couldn't refuse from MOO dropped into my inbox - I was away! Post cards arrived I choose a variety and posted them of to Kat in plenty of time -  mistake  - I didn’t make  note of the cards I choose so I have no idea which of my pictures are out there! 

They could include this picture

Or this one 

Or any of these

I didn’t realise this would be a problem until cards started arriving and some people put the ones they had sent on the FB page as well. Good idea! I thought,  especially as no one seems to have received any of my cards. Rather a problem for me in practice thought.

Getting other artists cards through the post was just great. First to arrive was this beautiful portrait from Dana in Michigan,

soon to be followed by this slightly surreal wooly mammoth from Katrin in Germany.

Next came this beautiful flower from Stephanie

 

and this textured flower from Phoenix and finally ( apart from Kat’s lovely card) this building in San Juan in Puerto Rico from Cheryl - memories of Westside Story abound. (sorry these 2 are on the same photo I am having some technical problems!)

In all a beautiful and varied selection of art to pin on my notice board in my study / studio 

I hope to be able  to visit and leave comments on others blogs during the blog hop, but am off to France on Friday and will have limited internet access - please forgove me if I don't get to you.

Finally please, please, please if you did get one of my cards - get in touch I would love to hear from you

The Friday Five - Poems

I love poetry though I don’t spend anything like as much time as I would like reading it. So it was interesting that when I thought of choosing five of my favorite poems for this blog post my heart went straight back to a little anthology called ‘a Pageant of Modern Verse’ that I studied at school for my ‘O’ levels. There were just so many great poems in this small volume and even looking just a this book it was hard to choose only five poems.

When I consider my choices I think what comes across is the sense of rhythm  and the wonderful use of language used by these five very different poets. I hope you enjoy my selection and it would be great if you could post about your favorite poets in the comments section

The List

1. ‘Journey of the Magi’ T.S. Eliot
2. ‘Tarantella’ Hilaire Belloc
3. ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’ W.B. Yeats
4. ‘On the Coast of Coromandel’ Observe Sitwell
5. ‘Snake’ D.H. Lawrence 

The Detail

The first

"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The was deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter."
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires gong out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty, and charging high prices.:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

The second

Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?
And the tedding and the spreading
Of the straw for a bedding,
And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees,
And the wine that tasted of tar?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
(Under the vine of the dark veranda)?
Do you remember an Inn, Miranda,
Do you remember an Inn?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
Who hadn't got a penny,
And who weren't paying any,
And the hammer at the doors and the din?
And the hip! hop! hap!
Of the clap
Of the hands to the swirl and the twirl
Of the girl gone chancing,
Glancing,
Dancing,
Backing and advancing,
Snapping of the clapper to the spin
Out and in--
And the ting, tong, tang of the guitar!
Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?

Never more;
Miranda,
Never more.
Only the high peaks hoar;
And Aragon a torrent at the door.
No sound
In the walls of the halls where falls
The tread
Of the feet of the dead to the ground,
No sound:
But the boom
Of the far waterfall like doom. 

The third

The fourth

On the coast of Coromandel, 

Dance they to the tune of Handel;

Chorally, that coral coast

Correlates the bone to ghost,

Till word and limb and note seem one,

Blending, binding act to tone.

All day long they point the sandal

On the coast of Coromandel.

Lemon-yellow legs all bare

Pirouette to peruqued air

From the first green shoots of morn,

Cool as northern hunting-horn,

Till the nightly tropic wind

With its rough-tongued, grating rind

Shatters the frail spires of spice.

Imaged in the lawns of rice

(Mirror-flat and mirror green

is that lovely water’s sheen)

Saraband and rigadoon

Dance they through the purring noon,

While the lacquered waves expand

Golden dragons on the sand —

Dragons that must, steaming, die

From the hot sun’s agony —

When elephants, of royal blood,

Plod to bed through lilied mud,

Then evening, sweet as any mango,

Bids them do a gay fandango,

Minuet, jig or gavotte.

How they hate the turkey-trot,

The nautch-dance and the Highland fling.

Just as they will never sing

Any music save by Handel

On the coast of Coromandel!

The Fifth

A snake came to my water-trough

On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat, 

To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before
me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of
the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
i o And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste.
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.

Taormina, 1923

Hope you enjoyed the selection - don't forget to share your favourites in the comments section!