Bonehill and Honeybags

I've been out walking a lot. Walking is a meditation, a soul soothing, a chance to put thoughts in order, or a chance to put them aside.

For me, the walking, the intimate knowing of the land, and just as importantly, the naming of the land, the poetry of place that enables you to lay a map out in your head, is something I've been obsessed with since childhood.

 

When I was 10 or 11, and first allowed to ride out on a borrowed pony alone, I spent hours carefully copying out sections of the Ordnance survey map, marking bridlepaths and greenways, learning the names of the crossroads  and the tracks, keeping these tiny maps first in the inner pocket of my tatty old jacket, and then, when they disintegrated from use, I kept them in my head.

This fascination with names and mapping continued on - always reading stories about historical routes around our land. A book called 'The Driftway' by Penelope Lively captured my imagination when I was about 10, and by the time I was 14, I had found myself a copy of 'The Old Straight Track' by Alfred Watkins. I studied local maps, learned place names, walked and rode old drovers paths, step after step after step, each footfall taking me deeper backwards into the past as I imagined all the feet that had trod that path before me.

This last couple of weeks I've been wandering over Bonehill Rocks, where I met a pair of Ravens, and on over Chinkwell Tor and Honeybags. Each hill has it's own character, it's own spirit of place. Though perhaps here, at Bonehill, there are many. Everywhere you turn, there are faces in the rocks.

 

 

 

I was tempted to paint them, to draw the characters out of the rocks

 

 

but Brian Froud does it so much better than me:

 

 

Instead, I played around a little with some rock studies,

 

trying to capture  the cold wintery light.

Winter Blessings

'Blessed Bee'

Lots of new work this week, as I desperately create for the Artisan Fair in Chagford on Saturday! All these are available as A5 prints, and the originals will come to the fair to sell.

 'The Holly and The Ivy'

 'Bless This Land of My Soul'

'Wise Women'

Made into lovely cards on recycled brown paper.

Cards are £2 each or 5 for £8

Meanwhile I continue to walk this land, finding new treasures and small beauties each time.

These large beauties are my boys, waiting for hay on this iron hard morning.

The small boys, across the valley are growing up, cheeky and playful.

And the view across the valley, ever changing yet remaining constant. This land is home.

Advent arrives.

 December is upon us, and in our house that means homemade advent calendars. The children all have stitched calendars with tiny pockets, and each year I fill them with sugared almonds. This year though, in the last week of November, I had a brainwave for the Wolf Boy. He likes sweets, but more than anything else in the whole world, he loves crisps. We don't have them often in our house - I'm a meanie when it comes to junk food, and E numbers in particular. But the Wolf Boy would sell his soul for a packet of crisps. He even once licked the underneath of his sister's foot, just to be given a single crisp.

So instead of pockets of sugared almonds, I searched out 24 different packets of crisps, and we pegged them, numbered 1 to 24, across the kitchen. His face, when he came down stairs on the first morning of December, was a picture. He was blown away. He has spent the last 6 days obsessing over them, listing the flavours and rating them in order of preference. Imagining what the flavours he has never tried will taste like......

Meanwhile, I have been working like crazy, trying to get some work ready for our Christmas Fair:

Do come along if you are in the Chagford area on Saturday the 15th. We have some fabulous artists. As well as myself, there will be work from Angharad Barlow, Strawberry Fayre, Rima Staines, Olivia Jenkinson, Purposeful Prints, Sarah Halsey and lots of wonderful cakes (including gluten and dairy free). 

It's a perfect day to come and finish your christmas shopping - not only is Chagford full of lovely shops, but Wonderworks is also on at the Jubilee Hall. 

New prints and stickers have arrived, and they are just gorgeous! Some are listed in my Etsy shop, and all will be at the fair with me. I've also been working on some little seasonal paintings too.

'May Your Light Burn Always Bright'

'Orion Hare'

There are more in progress, and other goodies, all I hope to finish in time for the fair!

As well as all this, I also wanted to spread the Christmas Cheer and am having a little Facebook giveaway and 'Last Posting Date' sale at my Etsy shop. From now until 10pm UK time on Sunday, there is a 20% discount on everything in my Etsy shop, just in time to be packaged up and catch the last international posting day, which is Monday the 10th. To receive the discount, just enter the code CHRISTMAS2012 at the Etsy checkout.

Even better , I am giving away a goody bag containing the items pictured below - a choice of A4 print from the shop, a clutch of the lovely new cards, and some sticker samples. In order to enter the draw, you need to go to my Facebook page HERE, click on the giveaway post and 'like' it and then share to your page.

Good Luck, and Thankyou :)

This land that I love......

Mostly, I have been walking.

In the sleet,

the driving rain,

the blustery winds

and the brief windows of clear icy light between the storms.

Even at night.

I have been nightwalking often as autumn turned to winter. Last week's full moon rendered the moors as bright as day, and a sharp frost made the ground twinkle underfoot in the flickering midnight light.

We have watched the stars, and the stones, and slowly, slowly an immense collaborative project between Steve and me is unfolding.

There is new work, but it goes slowly too. Above is a painting of the Leigh Bridge Crossing.

Below is the painting that I am currently working on :

'The Woods Maiden and her King'

I'll stop there for now, and save the Christmas news for the next post! (In a day or two, I promise)

 Rain, rain and more rain. That's all there is to say about August. What a washout for the school holidays. Everytime I ride my horse, I get soaked through :(

Instead, I have been huddled in my cosy studio, listening to the rain drumming on the roof, painting away at summery landscape sketches.

I'm offering them for sale here for a few days, as they are, before I frame them up and take them to the gallery. They are both A4 ink and watercolour.

Prints will be available by later today too (£14 each)

 'Below Langaford Bridge'

£ 60 (unframed)

'Walland Hill'

£75

Local Landscapes Week 6

Meldon   15/2/12

Local landscapes Week 4

Cranbrook Castle from Weeke Down  23/1/12

Watercolour

I've found myself fascinated by winter trees recently, in particular the way that massed winter trees look, so I've been playing around a lot with ways to capture this. Interestingly, the top watercolour took all of 10 minutes to do (and most of that was waiting for the paint to dry) while this stylised version below took about 3 hours, and was probably at least my fourth attempt at it!

Landscapes week 3

 Frosty Morning at Higher Weddicott  17/1/12

Watercolour and ink

Phew, finally caught myself up to the right week!

A May Day Weekend

These past three weeks have been idyllic for the children. The school holidays have passed in a hazy blur of sun-stretched days and lingering, smoke scented evenings.

We have spent hours traipsing through the gorse and heather with the ponies, or perched on sun baked rocks, dipping our toes in the icy river.


Evenings spent laughing beside an open fire, eating half charred sausages, washed down with red wine and the last of the elderflower champagne, or simply lying silently on the hill to watch the sun sink behind the ancient granite backbone of Dartmoor.
I envy the children their simplicity. I wish that I could remain with them inside this perfect bubble, shielded from the tangled emotions of grief and anger which I am struggling to lay to rest at the moment.
Instead I hover between these two worlds in the final days of spring, feeling as if I am in transition. It is hard to remember that the year is still young, the wheel is only just turning to summer.


Today dawns hot and still, and the sky feels heavy, as if it is pressing down on us.The wind - dried, sun bleached moors beneath our feet, are finally springing to life, as tightly curled bracken fronds erupt from the dry earth. The close cropped turf is soft, and muffles the ponies unshod hooves, and we leave no trace on this thirsty land. Thick clouds of black mayflies fill the air, slow and ponderous, legs dangling clumsily beneath them, drifting lazily in the shimmering air.
Even the children are silent, disinclined to find themselves with a mouthful of mayfly, and save for the rhythmic creak of old leather saddles and the chinking of bridles as ponies toss their heads, there is not a sound.
And yet, in this oppressive silence, senses feel heightened. Bees drone, and the air quivers around us. The owl daughter comments that the distant tors look as if they are hovering over a pan of boiling water, and she is right. I can see, and feel, and hear the air vibrating around us. It is as if we are caught in a bubble, disconnected from the world beyond, a little pocket of space and time, waiting for something to happen.

As we reach the crest of the hill, a pair of Ravens circle lazily overhead, and from the hollow beneath the rocks a fox breaks cover. It pauses to stare at us, and then trots urgently on across the hill. Not scared, but as if it has business to attend to. And there we stand, four riders on the beacon, as the first clap of thunder comes.

Instead of releasing the tension, it increases it - ponies and children are nervous and jittery , and we break from the hilltop and fly for home, down the steep and overgrown hillside, prancing and skittering on the stony sheep paths. The sky is dark and heavy, and the thunder rumbles around us, never quite overhead, promising rain, but not delivering it.
Home safe, we all still feel the pull of the storm, the excitement and fear, the portentousness of the day. It is a public holiday, a day of celebration, a prince's wedding day. In our small village we have a choice of two ways to spend the evening. In the village hall, an anarchic punk band and a joyful gypsy/Klezmer band are playing, an antidote to the solemnity of the day. This sounds tempting, but realistically, we have a handful of extra children, and at the tail end of the month my purse is empty, so we choose the other option. Astoundingly, the parish council has decided to light the beacon tonight, in honour of the Royal Wedding. Of course, in these modern times, village officials wouldn't dream of celebrating the pagan Beltaine, but in a strange echo of years past, a huge bonfire has been built on the ancient beacon above our village, that same beacon that we had ridden over earlier in the day. In the dusk people made their way up the steep hill in ones and twos, a small gathering of people from the village below and the surrounding farms, who had walked across the hills in the gloom. And the fire was lit, there on the beacon, as it must have been lit hundreds of times before. To celebrate in times of peace, and as a warning in times of trouble. There is something so very primal about fire, and this one, this great beacon glowing across the moors, was wild, and celebratory, and a fitting climax to an expectant day.