The sunlight was so bright yesterday morning that I had to pull the blind down to be able to work. But I was unexpectedly distracted and mesmerised by the scene it created - the flying and flitting silhouettes of sparrows (there's a birdfeeder on the other side of the window.) It's often the simplest things that I find the most charming - couldn't resist a clumsy attempt to capture their movements in a video.
Been a while since I last posted one of these 'But is it art?' numbers. Just looked it up, nearly four years - proof that I really am crap at keeping series ideas going.
Then I found something in the garden and I thought... yes... "But is it art?"
So here it is.
Just a lovely big old stone with some lovely big old snails stuck to it, bedded down for the Winter. I'm just in awe of how particularly beautifully and perfectly they blend into one - it's as if they're part of it, growing out from it.
I took all these photos at the same time but love the way the different angles bring out completely different colours and shades in both the stone and the snails.
The stone is now safely tucked away again with the snails still intact in the hope that they'll survive the cold, as I am stupidly fond of snails - and stones.
....on an 8ft square canvas, on my way to The Big Fuck Off Picture! Night, ash, flames, ship, sparks, smoke, heat, the excitement of danger, the thrill of lost control... or whatever you want it to be.
But it would be a lie, and I'm a crap liar!
...Take photo of randomly paint-smeared drawing board, crop pic in Photoshop, change to negative. (S'not cheating, is it?)
The small slab of wood that I just use as a coaster for my water pot when I'm working has evolved into a kind of 'paint stain palimpsest' (and try saying that whilst eating a Strawberry Chewit):
Any idea what this is on my garden fence? The drunken daubings of a novice graffiti artist, perhaps? Amazingly, and I hope you won't feel repulsed at this (I'm having a nature-geek moment), but it's the trail of dried slime left there by some slugs who have clearly been getting frisky during the night. I know... the words 'frisky' and 'slug' don't really go together, perhaps I should have said 'horny'? - but that doesn't sound quite right either...
The great grey/leopard slug (Limax Maximus) has quite a spectacular and complex mating ritual which involves much, well, I suppose you'd call it foreplay, as these humble but apparently very well-endowed hermaphrodites slowly circle and lick eachother for hours before doing the deed, closely entwined and suspended from a trail of slime (I wish there was a better word for that).
Catching the light in the way you can perhaps see it here, this evidence of their nocturnal dance is full of beautiful rainbow colours, like the surface of a pool of oil. In fact, now dry and completely unslimy, it resembles a fine layer of mother-of-pearl. They might have made a mess of the fence but I can't help but see pictures in it and appropriately enough, perhaps, they seem a bit saucy to me. I bet you'll never look at a slug in quite the same way again.
Several months’ worth of accidental paint spills and splatters on the white-glossed bench where I work.This is how it looks today.Next week it will be slightly different from this, and last week it was too.Eventually it may end up as one big mess of brown, just like when you keep rolling varied colours of plasticine together and everything merges.But today the hues are looking pretty vivid.
And here is my water pot, with its layers of accidental embellishment from every time I wipe a paint-loaded brush against its edge.I’m sure if I consciously tried to decorate ceramics like this, I couldn’t achieve this effect.Next week more trickles and drips in different colours will join these - the look is transient.
I just think it's all rather beautiful. It makes me glad I'm so messy...
