Painting the hedgerows

Mid-may and the verges are spattered with Queen Anne’s Lace and sundry other wild pretties, overlooked by copious clouds of foaming hawthorn, which we must not pick and never, ever bring into the house, for fear of bad luck.

Even the ancient, warty Wrekin is softened with the flush of new green growth.

I have aways loved the sight of a narrow country road cutting through the landscape and forging onwards to an invisible end, softly edged by tumbling greenery, blurring the hard edges so that the road, for all its visual dominance, never entirely wins. And here is my own tumbledown cottage, hiding behind the greenery. If you look carefully, further down the lane you can see the lilac tree by the gate of Jean-and-Brian-next-door, 

This is a motif that comes out in my own work again and again, as I reinterpret and simply the landscape around me, most recently in these miniature hills, an edition of two. It is also a firm control of the messy chaos of wool, taming the fibres into a solidly outlined  object.

And there is the contrast again, in this large still life I painted last Sunday, with the hard plaster wall being softened and almost overwhelmed by the exuberance of the paint, depicting Fumitory and Honesty spilling out and escaping the confines of the white ceramic jug.

Here is a return to my early painting days of thirty years ago. A letting go of control, a ‘let’s see what happens if I do this’ and being content with using just a few loose, broad brushstrokes to do the visual heavy lifting of the background.

I cannot express how exhilarated and exhausted I was, by the time I put my brush down and thought ‘that’s it’.