Re-Henge: Dragon Roots - SOLD

Dragon Roots, ink on paper, 29 x 29 cm

The serpentine roots of the Avebury beeches, last seen in Henge, led me to imagine a mythical creature dozing on the bank. Has it become one with the trees and the earth, or is it just very well camoflaged?

Henge

Henge, oil on canvas, 50 x 50 cm

What is a henge? In short, it is a prehistoric ring bank and ditch, with the ditch on the inside. The word is a backformation from Stonehenge - which doesn't actually have a henge! It's all a bit confusing, but what is certain is that the large earthwork that encircles Avebury (village and stone circles) is called a henge.

Devil's Den, or, The Resting Place - SOLD

Devil's Den, oil on linen canvas, 46 x 38 cm

The Devil's Den is a reconstructed (c. 1921) dolmen (neolithic) near Marlborough in Wiltshire. As far as I can tell, it is the closest such monument to where I live (there seems to be a shortage of suitable stone in Hampshire; certainly the chalk and flint in the immediate vicinity would make very poor building material). Dolmens, which look like stone tables, are actually the structural remains of burial chambers that were once covered in earth. Most have three or more uprights; this has two, but one of them rests on a third, recumbent stone. The stones are sarsens, which are blocks of sandstone created by glacial flow. They are plentiful in that area (which is not far from Avebury and Stonehenge).

I have visited the Devil's Den before, with sketching equipment, but this time I took my painting gear. It was a gloriously, unseasonably, hot and sunny day. I spent maybe two and a half hours on site and completed the picture in the studio, where I empasised the darks (which have a tendency to get lost on site) and the reflected colour on the stones.

Included in the group exhibition, Traces of Prehistory (Artikinesis).

Devil's Den

oil on linen canvas, 46 x 38 cm

£160 - SOLD

Savernake Beech

Molotow acrylic marker pens on paper, A4 (29.7x21cm)

There are many wonderful old trees in Savernake Forest in Wiltshire. Oaks tend to dominate the selection (they do get impressively old and gnarled), but there are other trees as well, including many beech trees. I encountered this particular example when I visited the forest earlier this month, and this picture is worked up from a photograph I took then (it was a bit cold for lengthy studies).

This is an exercise in the use of limited tone: black, white, and a middle tone (grey).  I used three Molotow acrylic paint marker pen colours for the drawing, deliberately keeping each shade separate and distinct. (I used a fourth colour for my signature).

It looks a bit like a lino print to me, albeit a rather complex one with two printing plates. I like cutting lino (and wood) to make a plate, but have limited patience with the printing process itself and have yet to master the art of registration (printing multiple plates / colours accurately to build up layers). This was rather simpler to do, and very nearly as satisfying.

Savernake BeechMolotow acrylic marker pens on paper, A4 (29.7x21cm)
£50

Wiltshire Blue

Coming down off the ridgeway in Wiltshire in June, this caught my eye - I don't know what the crop was, but it was decidedly bluer than anything else growing in the fields. The receding stripes echoed the clouds in the upper part of the sky agreeably and I knew it would make a good painting.

This is rather a quick painting, so there could well be a better one to be made.

Anyway, I took a photograph back in June and used my ancient iMac to display it today, thus circumventing the printer (which needs ink).

Blue Stripey Field
Oil on linen canvas, 30 x 30 cm

Hackpen - Commission - SOLD

Today, I went back to Hackpen, parked in the car park near the horse, walked along The Ridgeway a bit and then down to the spot I'd identified on Wednesday (slightly further along the path than the place I made Wednesday's sketch at, so that the Field Barn - as described on the ever-useful Ordnance Survey map - fitted in front of the hill, not to the side. I sat in the field margin and painted the hill.

There was a fellow with a remote control aircraft, or something, just down the path. I didn't see what was making the buzzing mechanical drone, so I'm not sure. It wasn't annoying, though, and when he came to say hello, we had a delightful conversation.

He told me that the three clumps of trees on the hill (the leftmost is partially hidden behind the central one in my picture; I don't think that the clump above the white horse counts) were planted for the purpose of rearing and shooting game.

Coincidentally, I surprised a pheasant on my walk back up to the Ridgeway. It - with its sudden explosion of movement and loud whirring wing strokes - rather surprised me, too.

Oil on canvas, 30 x 60 cm

Hackpen Hill

There are at least two hills in Southern England called "Hackpen". The latter part of the name - pen - is likely to be from the Celtic for hill. I'm not sure what Hack means; I'm resisting the urge to link it to the word for a "horse for ordinary riding".

One Hackpen Hill is in Oxfordshire, near Wantage, and has a Devil's Punchbowl at its foot. It is not far from the Uffington White Horse (a hill figure, possibly the best known and almost certainly the oldest white horse carved into a British hillside).

The other is in Wiltshire, near Marlborough, and is not very far from a dolmen called the Devil's Den. It has a white horse all of its own (quite a few Wiltshire hills do). This white horse (known variously as the Hackpen, Broad Hinton or Winterbourne Bassett White Horse) is probably 19th Century.

The two are curiously similar, in superficial tems, and roughly equidistant from me, but it was the Wiltshire Hackpen that I visited yesterday, with a view to painting it. I took a walk around the White Horse and decided that a panoramic format would be useful (the sketch shown above was made in two parts as my sketchbook page turned out to be too short). Unfortunately, the sun didn't shine on my photographs from what I considered to be the best location, so I may have to return...

Possibly with paint.

EDIT: Two days later...

Bedwyn (The Tree in the Yellow Field)

We were on our way to visit the Crofton Beam Engine near Great Bedwyn when I saw this tree. It looked fabulous against the yellow field. It still looked fabulous when we returned the same way, so I stopped the car and went to take some reference photographs.

It's taken me a few months to get around to painting it, and it went through a few stages over the last week ...

Avebury Sheep

Way back in 2007, when my daughter was still learning to walk (it must have been spring), I took her to Avebury, with her pushchair. I also took an old-school 35mm SLR loaded with monochrome film.

My photographs weren't all what you'd call stunning; in fact, the source for this painting was a little underwhelming, technically. I think I got the exposure wrong. But the composition worked, I thought; and I loved the two lambs sheltering in the lee of the stone. And there was enough information to make a painting... if you ignored the fact that there were no colours.

So I made the colours up. Based on what I remembered, and what I knew...

I remembered that the stones were reddish. I looked them up: they are sarsens. Sarsens are sandstone (which explains some of the weathering). Sandstone varies quite a lot in colour, but does tend towards the red and the yellow.

This post has been republished with an improved photograph of a slightly improved painting (I have darkened the shadows on and around the foreground lambs).

Oil on canvas, 55 x 46 cm
27 December 2012
For sale