the end of summer

BIms and I have been walking at Morston twice in the last couple of days.

Bayfield, although beautiful, has a lot of flies at the moment; I find them really annoying.

on Friday I had an appointment with my nearest bit of coast, a collaborative project with Coast to Coast to Coast, the hand sewn poetry journal I’ve had a poem published in twice.

lots of poets whose work has been in any of the five issues went to their bit of coast and wrote two to four lines which will be used by Maria Isakova Bennett for an installation during her residency in Aldeborough’s Lookout

an unbelievable sea of cars was parked at Morston on Friday morning – the seal trips doing fantastic business on perhaps the last day of a lot of people’s holiday. we walked along past all the boats motoring up and down the channel, and out onto the saltmarsh.

we went again this morning as the weather is still perfect, and for Bims it’s great at high tide – the area she can run in is limited, and she can have a great time sploshing around on the edges of the tide. she’s wary of deep water – although she did fall in a big creek this morning and got nice and wet all over. and she meets people and other dogs in a neutral situation where there’s plenty of room.

although it was warm she had the opportunity to cool off

and pose while sailing boats cruised up and down, and all the birds were perfectly safe from her

we haven’t been there much but I think in future will make more use of it.

I haven’t done any painting this August, the writing has taken over a bit, but I have been making up some big canvases, reusing stretchers, and this painting started in 2002, has resurfaced.

it already has some areas of very thick oil paint which have cracked

and interesting textures over the foundation size of rabbit skin glue

I have had it up in the studio for a couple of weeks while i thought about it/avoided it

today I got myself together and decided that it would be less intimidating flat on the table

and like that it proved much better for gestural mark-making

pushing the brush around with thick oil paint

and working over the old surface with limited colours.

a bit of scratching back through with the palette knife

thinking about fields of sunflowers and constellations and sun/moon

and long grass and blue reflected sky at Morston

so here we are. 46′ x 60″ or 116 x 152 cm. now I can let more colours and textures get into my head for some more big paintings. tomorrow we have a demo of working with pastels in the village hall – I’m sure that will help as we are to have a go ourselves.

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