The Birds:
The relationship to man and birds is very different to man and dog. There is a hedge in our back garden where countless sparrows live. I watch them they are busy zipping off, coming back and zipping off again. Birds live their lives under our noses yet they go unnoticed a lot of the time. They are gateways into nature’s world, once you start watching them and listening to them there seems to be a threshold that you cross to…….. Somewhere….. a daydream place!
I have four birds in this mosaic to make and I have completed two, and found myself creating the landscape behind for these birds. Fields and hills, nice countryside for them, daydream places again. I remember probably the only time when the entrance door to my workshop was open at the same time as the back door, and a pigeon flew straight through in flash of a second. I never ever have both doors open at the same time as it creates a draft which blows all my papers off the table and makes the brown kraft paper stored on the wall in a roll flap vigorously, so I very rarely open both together. This was so surprising I kept thinking about birds and omens, not that believe in them but you could understand why something like that could mean something if you wanted it to? In Guatemala the currency is called the quetzal after the bird. The tail feathers of which were used as money way back in Mayan times….and the Solomon Islands also used red hummingbird feathers as money! I can’t see how that would work, but love anything that radically changes capitalism…..Again my friend Joseph Beuys wanted to influence future politics and remove money and change the understanding of capital to create dignity money?
‘Everybody’s dignity is exchanged as a commodity, the so called salary dependency. To show that money should shift to a democratic regulator of everybody’s work, creativity and dignity. So I would call this kind of understanding of money, the dignity money, the ability money of people’.
If anyone can get a handle on what this actually means then you’re a better man than me Gunger Din. But society without money……wow…. it takes an eccentric artist to try to realize it. Politians I’ve not heard any of those entertaining the concept.
Two more birds to make.
Stop Press
My client has just this second phoned me asking about installation…….I suggested after the winter…whats the rush it took over two years to get here. But I might have to install three mosaics before Xmas. This when I agreed to do another job in the lead up to Xmas at the Sir Harold Hillier Gardens……. Doh.
As I may have mentioned earlier the designs for these mosaics were inspired by the Ecological Report written about the development site with guidelines for the developer as what to plant and what type of habitats to create to encourage wildlife and biodiversity on the new site.
What I wondered was…..would I be able to work with something I designed over two years ago? Interestingly it does not seem a problem……After a bit of a struggle I am now well into the third mosaic, something like 8 weeks in the cooler now, but interested and wanting to make this one.
In fact I have other work distractions tomorrow which prevent me from working. Which is anoying. What seems to happen is a ‘little world’ slips over me and I only want to stay in it, ever smaller and smaller and the thought of steping out of it is a drag and unwelcome.
BUT I KNOW FROM EXPERIENCE, this little world is unhealthy its sucks you in like something from Star Trek. So I deliberatly said yes to another job which will be starting soon, so I dont spiral into Omega Centuauri or some horse head vortex gallaxy, but that little mosaic world wants to stay insular!
The Bronze Age Burial Mounds if I remeber will be covered over and be part of a Primary School playing field. I think these burial mounds were on the Whitelands Farm somewhere.
Dont it make a difference when you get paid…….8 weeks; a little prompting and reminding and then another small payment from a one day event 6 weeks ago, both went in on the same day.
Booked a holiday yay….
See….. now this is what happens, too much time in the cooler things start going funny!
As I mentioned my friend who has defected to the east…he tells me the ‘old people’ in the east where he is are all getting ready for winter, living in sync with seasons and nature, harvesting stuff and preserving food and that…..bending like willows in the breeze and adapting. He says the ‘new people’ in the west have forgotten all this stuff and one day might have to re-learn it all again. You lot in the west there will be just turning up your heating and supressing nature and trying to dominate it.
I remeber Joseph Beuys again and his thoughts on western man and I’m in the cooler there rolling all this around my mind.
As a ‘new person’ in the privelaged west I feel like I am watching naughty children in the playground, most times I join in and enjoy playing, and then sometimes I say actually ‘that is naughty’. In the end the headmaster bursts on the scene, and we all have march off
in disgrace and wait outside his office and miss the rest of play time.
So maybe then the ‘new people’ have lost the piece of paper with the rules on, rubbed out the lines on the blackboard, can’t find the lid to the jig-saw box and can’t make the puzzle fit back together again and need the teacher to come along and mend it all and make things alright.
So in those quite moments walking home from school on my own I think, I don’t believe the teachers ever coming back, So what’s my next step now then?
The Last on Foxes:
Made all my foxes now and the last word on foxes from my very good friend who describes himself as having ‘defected to the east’.
The east European foxes he describes are ‘whoppers’ that raid hen houses and abduct chickens, eat sheep etc. Villagers are constantly in a war of attricion against them. Large dogs are brought into households to defend their livestock etc…and foxes are shot on sight!
Here; Red Coats, Horns and a load of horses charging through your cucumber frames is a Fox hunt and we get cross about that, as we dont quite have the same context for foxes as we get our chickens from the supermarket.
But all in all Foxes appear to be a bit of a wind up…And good on em I say, canny dudes wherever they roam.
So I have now moved onto Whitelands Farm: and written ‘Bronze age Burial Mounds’
I tried to order one particular colour tile called ontario from a new supplier and it was x3 the price he quoted me in a conversation 2 weeks ago and it would take a week to get to me …..or he suggested I come and pick them up, then I would get them sooner.
What! and pay another £20 petrol to pick em up…its a no brainer stay with my expensive but very nice existing supplier.
Way back at the steering committee stage I presented a choice of designs and I just thought it would help me with with this new mosaic if I had a look at my other design for this farm. I was amazed to see I had put objects inside the buildings, like spades and tractors. I had put human and animal footprints around the place to indicate life going on there…..it was a bit weird…..the series which were chosen are less wierd.
Back to cracking rocks then.
Foxey Leys Copse
Finished: and swept up. Cut and stacked up in trays ready to go.
Just that I got five more to make!
So I am about to start on my third one.
Is it easier to work on a painting you already started as opposed to starting a new one. I feel a bit like this. So hard to get the momentum going again.
I enjoyed making the Copse with Foxes, I see copses on maps, I see them driving in my car all over the place. Where I live there are no copses everything is a ‘wood’ however small, even a line of trees is a wood round here. There is one called ‘Convicts Wood’ which would be fun to focus on. (I made a kingfisher and photographed it in this convicts wood once and there was a Robin in there who kept checking me out while I was photgraphing. I would like to work in there…
But alas I have to move on and my next mosaic will be ‘Whitelands Farm’. Which no longer exists. So my mosaic of it will be the last record of it. There will be fields in this mosaic which are in danger of being boring…. so I will have to see what happens there and how to deal with them.!
So hard to start it though.
Might have a cup of tea first!
