The Fairways

Feeling a little bewildered.

I decided to take a dog walk over the golf course to see what birds I could see, I thought it might be something to occupy me while I walked.

Feeling a little hacked off by rejections, struggling to get paid and a flat feeling because of considerably more time in the cooler cracking rocks, I was actually looking forward to looking at what birds I could see.

The answer to that is not many, as there were 3 very noisey 2 stroke motor bikes going round and round. All the birds had disapeared. The noise of the motor bikes was so invasive carving up an oval shaped race track in the wet grass. These were not what my dad would have described as ‘iberdy oiykes’ skipping off school tearing up on dirt bikes. These were men with full leathers, helmets and powerful trials bikes going round and round and round.

The noise was constant and became overwhelming, my dog was barking at them in a kind of King Canute and the tide way, his barking was such a tiny noise. Bizzarly I was listening to ‘Stairway to Heaven’ on my head-phones and the version I had downloaded just earlier had these unfamiliar percusion sounds in the background. A kind of shermanic rattling of merakas or something, slightly disconcerting, in a song I knew so well.

I noticed them at the bit where the tempo starts to pick up and he says ‘ Yes there are two paths you can go by, But there is still time to change the road your on’!

Several high reving 2 stroke engines, a dog barking and the shermaic rattling was bewildering, as I walked I was unable to locate myself in any kind of mappable world I knew, I was a little lost boy in a deconstructed world were I didnt know the rules anymore and the water was too deep for my feet to touch the floor.

Now the waters have subsided and things begin to settle down I have enjoyed walking ‘Over the Golf Course’. I have my country park back, at least for a while.

The ground seems to be recovering it’s still very muddy but somehow tracks, lines and pathways seem to show themselves more than usuall.

I can see plenty of 4×4 tracks all over the place criss crossing the whole site, particularly to the corner where the horse lives. I can also see motor bike tracks carving lines all over place. There is also a public footpath which wears a line along the ground.

But there seems to be other tracks! These seem to often peter out or dwindle to nothing. But they run quite some distances and not so obviously leading to exits, or stables etc. I am sure I have not found them all yet and I keep wondering if they are motor bike tracks that are older and more worn in? I dont think they are they are wobbly in places. The only explanation I have come up with is that the sheep while they were there had sort of traversing routes they used to navigate the area. I noticed a couple of tracks leading to a clump of trees which still had snags of wool all around the bottom? As if they were kind of scratching posts.

I also saw a small bird in the meadow and thought that bird does not seem concerned as I walked past on the ground only several feet away. I really looked at it and thought is it just a sparrow it seems to like the ground a lot for a sparrow. When I got home I identified it as a reed bunting!

It is still just possible to identify the putting greens, partly they apear to have a different colour grass and the surounding earthworks and plateaus give them away.

Plenty Brook

Plenty Brook is the stream that comes down from the woods down to the sea, through the Golf Course. I call it the ‘Brook of Plenty’. I has a history of flooding the town here. So it is managed in extreme weather like now, by ground works and lakes etc on the golf course here. I thought I would just have a mooch around the area I call the swamp to see the effect of the winter rain fall.

The Brook of Plenty has filled the Swamp quite a bit as the photos show.

I believe one of the primary roles of an artist is to record……so I felt I had to record the effect of the wet winter by doing some drawings!

Me drawing woh, not unusual but in this way…..very unusual.

So I started drawing the effects of the weather on local villages near where I live. I have taken photos and done dome of these ‘Digital Drawings’ on my tablet.

To see my new drawings follow the link below.

https://picasaweb.google.com/111377910421998389140…

I hope to carry on with my own programme of recording ‘The Wet Winter’. But got to get back in the cooler now for a push on those mosaics. I did leave a bar in of chocolate in there for the fairies to come over night and make them for me, but sadley that hasn’t worked, so it looks like I’ll have to make them then.

The Sheep have gone.

In the run up to xmas I noticed that the sheep have gone from the golf course!

I have walked over there again 2-3 times now since noticing this. There are a conciderble amount of damaged and fallen trees due to the recent winds. Several things I particularly noticed were:

How much like a golf course it looked like. The sheep have munched the grass right down revealing all the bumps, hazards and bunkers etc. They had softly erroded into the general landscape before but seem stark now.

Another thing was electric fences kept the sheep in and one small corner was fenced off and has not been grazed on at all, and is completly wild ….a meadow.

The swamp is completely under water and is a resevoir now. The Brook of Plenty deeper than I have ever seen it.

But the most amazing thing is the graffiti in the subway: So much new graffiti and odd graffiti. Rather free form kind of a bit ‘fine art’ for graffiti. Eliza seems to quitened down and someone called Lone – Loner – Lonersz has become prolific. But still somehow building on the strange style of Eliza’s.

I spent a lot of the dog walk wondering what I could do in this graffiti areana?

It would not be trad graffiti for sure….but everything about graffiti ticks my boxes. I thought how ‘street art’ in a wider sence had become quite sophisticated with illusionistic pavement drawings, the use of stencils taking this kind of guerilla underground art to new places.

How much effort am I prepared to put in? I realised that these graffiti artists do actually make quite an effort on the larger pieces as they use paint and rollers to prepare and block out large flat areas.

It’s the relationship with cave paintings that interests me. Primeval and raw, yet skillfull and sometimes delicate. About identity within a community? Showing the viewer some kind of shared symbolism. Both a little bewildering.

Regrets and Dispointments:

As this blog was started to track the changing use of this space I thought I would ride my bike through it, just to keep an eye on whats happening there.

I can no longer walk my dog there any more due the addition of the 100’s of sheep, which is a real shame as I did enjoy it. I had all sorts of plans to create some kind of related art interventions or series of drawings even paintings……

Sadly I never did any of that, I created a few maps….Now I never go there now and its a regret that I didn’t try a bit harder while access was so free. So I thought I’d check it out on my bike instead, just to keep this blog ticking over occasionaly……and who knows one day I might find time to make work inspired by it!

Plenty of sheep and several damaged trees due to the recent high winds.

But what really did surprise me was the graffiti in the adjasecent subway. As I had not seen it for quite a while I was surprised to see how much of this was renewed. A constant update of new graffiti I had not noticed before as I saw it so regularly.

The entrances to the subway have also been specially treated unlike ever before. Seeing it reminded me of a phone call I had months and months ago from a guy who wanted to work with me on an animation with schools and what did I want to work on to make this film? I said graffiti as I had been looking at this graffiti here at the on this blog, and my own work was totaly pre-occupied with lettering at the time….still is to a degree.

At the time I was working on a commission to permanently display a poem.

I went on to spend six weeks on my knees carving a poem into slate in a ruined abbey. Kneeling position was rather apt.

Please click on the link below to see the work on the poem at Strata Florida Abbey in mid wales.

http://rob-turner.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/strata-fl…

Again I am working combining text and images on commissions…so text is actually something I am interested in. And if I think about it now I remember that the graffiti animation project seems to have evapourated! and I’m a bit gutted, I would have really enjoyed that. I regret that I never seem able to find time that I can explore things I want to.

The fact is I need to work harder on making time to explore interests, and not expect to get paid for doing doing it either!

I am over 50 and interested in graffiti…..!

Below is a video showing the poem ‘Strata Florida’ in Welsh. mosaic inlaid into slate at Strata Florida Abbey.

Not graffiti and not exactly calligraphy either. The lettering was based on the poets own handwriting and whats legible and practical to carve……the result an informal mainly cursive script.