Artist in a big grey village along the Tamar Valley. ThingDave, 2grow'd kids, 2dogs, tired eyes and eternal optimism. With Marine House At Beer Gallery, Devon.
Percy's Chair
The chair's 13 years gone, the boot too and Percy's been gone over 25 years but I still miss him. Dogs! So many gone on ahead but I hope they come back to collect us, bright eyes shining in reunion, tails slapping on the bedstead, as we depart for the green fields
All is quiet in the fading heat of the day save the self-soothing murmuring of doves in warm oaks, the distant burr of a tractor, and an old dog in the yard, happily barking his wild and empty threats at the indifferent local rabbits .
"All night under the moon
Plovers are flying
Over the dreaming meadows of silvery light,
Over the meadows of June
Calling and crying,
Wandering voices of love in the hush of the night..."
Wilfred Gibson
Painting :'Plovers At Ladley'
Love of land: green as the fields he played in, tall as the copses he loved in, long as his summer days toil, brief as the autumn ache-limbed rainsheltered in his barn, dark as the winter he died and deep as the worms who sang him sweetly home.
Gone To Earth. Prints available !
Make haste, Len, get the kettle on, she's home ...
Off The Bus, now available as part of a postcard set of 6 Marchy images from Henry at Rather Good Art ๐
Whimple Farm
The moon winks through a gap in the curtains. The fire in the grate crackles and pops, punctuate by the hoot and holler of owls and foxes without, who all night long remind you, by the bright hearth, that you're never really alone the further you get from other folk.
As workworn, he's returning
Where a welcome light's burning
And a song drifts to meet him through the open front door,
His dogs race to greet him
With their love they complete him,
At his little grey home on the Moor.
Love of land: green as the fields he played in, tall as the copses he loved in, long as his summer days toil, brief as the autumn ache-limbed rainsheltered in his barn, dark as the winter he died and deep as the worms who sang him sweetly home. Gone To Earth.
Well my little dears
I only knows a little bit from Enid in the shop
She says he drives the library van and he's known for his shallots
Well her's gone mazed on picklin' or somesuch bleddy tripe
And he's been seen 'deliverin' books' in the middle of the night!
Telling The Bees
An hour over the lovely land, sun on the back of your neck and your feet treading the grasses, earth and small stones. Above and around you, the cry of gulls and the bleating of sheep who gaze amongst the glare of summer green, and then suddenly there you are at the ocean's edge.
Attend him, jackdaw, blackbird, crow,
This strange old farmer here below
Singing, thinks his sky holds friends,
And in this to his duty bends.
Tis his Charity within his fields,
To happily share what Nature's yields.
Calling The Birds
No 3 in a series 'Only The Wanderer' : The Adventurers.
'And did she care where she was heading,
Beneath the night's bright benison,
No, not a jot,
'I'm told I'm treading
The primrose path', laughed Alyson '
Love of land: green as the fields he played in, tall as the copses he loved in, long as his summer days toil, brief as the autumn ache-limbed rainsheltered in his barn, dark as the winter he died and deep as the worms who sang him sweetly home.
Gone To Earth.
Prints available.
Last week of the show Distant Hills at Marine House At Beer. 30 paintings including this rosy nocturne
Night Birds At Stanbear
Here we are at Autumn equinox How quickly do those foxgloved eves pass!
...When I get to my own country
I shall lie down and sleep;
I shall watch in the valleys
The long flocks of sheep.
And then I shall dream, for ever and all,
A good dream and deep.
Hilaire Belloc
Evening Sun, The Coombe
Good night all ๐
Fields Of Dreams, one of 29 new paintings for my September solo show 'Distant Hills' at Marine House At Beer .
Now there's peaceful..
Bathsheba: he with his dogs and gun, her with her beauty and her endless moonbathing, a soldier's leave cut short by a jealous king who'd steal his treasure. Blues in the night.
Rooms of lemon yellow light.
And across those long walls, the shadow birds in flight and leaves that sway in gentle motion. Along the path, the waxy scent of laurel flowers in warm morning sun. This place he whistling walks out from and gladly comes home to.
House In The Fields
Terriers Towser and Jack,
Each dog has the other ones back,
With the hens they are gentle,
With the sheep sentimental
But they'll not cut a rambler much slack..
Two Dogs, Branstowe
A distant sea but closer, childhood's memory...hot sun, and then cool shade, a galvanised barn full of the sweet stink of warm sacking, tractor oil and poultry crates, feathers and shit and the sharp smell of wild chamomile daisies trodden in a workaday yard
Sevenstones
Bluster and rain here and the asters and dahlias putting on a brave face in the garden. September has come in like a grizzly bear in Gunnislake.
Beech Wood, Bray now at Marine House At Beer
'Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoon;
This way, and that, she peers and sees
Silver fruit upon silver trees..'
Walter de la Mare
Good morning, February's indulging himself with grey and damp outside here in Gunnislake so sending you a bright moment..All's Right With The World. Have a good day! ๐
Oakhill : one of 32 new paintings in my exhibition 'Home', opening at Marine House At Beer in Devon next Saturday 11th, exploring themes of the Land, Heart and Homestead ๐
The Evening Visitor: Old Couple With Fox .
Acrylic on board and just finished. I hear vodka calling me in a calculatedly misleading choir boy's treble .. or is that a double?
Path To Rokesby Wood
Did you visit here at all or when you were in dream?
Do you remember well the path or does it seem
To dissolve into memory's ever drifting stream
Of somewhere that, when you were someone else,
You feel you must have been?
"Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields....."
Christopher Marlowe
The Shepherd.
Lord Radley's At Home and the neighbours will shudder and pull tight their curtains tonight. On the warm pink air, squeals from a drunken string quartet, shrieks from the shrubbery, catcalls from the gables, screaming peacocks and the interminable popping of a gunnery of corks.
Firstborn on the farm, delight of her father, doubt of her mother til she saw her husband's joy. Bathed in the scullery sink, playing about the yard, happy to wait on a brother, joyful, the hope of her redknuckled parents, transfigured by her love of their land.
Farmgirl, 2022
So much early working life was spent avoiding the same, roaming/loafing about the fields and moors with dogs in a wastrel's idyll. Ironically I've too much work now to loiter and I realise I'm now living vicariously through all these happy wasters who roam round in the paintings