DREAMT ABOUT HEDGEROWS LAST NIGHT.

Lanes and Stiles to explore

We have landed in Cricklade, Wiltshire.  

A delightful place full of equally delightful people. The place is a beguiling mix of Saxon walls, innumerable footpaths and small estates of homes. A neighbour pops round with tulips the day after we move in!  

Another with a bottle of wine.

There are great things waiting to be discovered, within the small housing estates and the attendant buildings and gardens, tracks that run past barns, farms and desultory chicken coops.

Vortex-like plants and hedges

 

Sprinkled around: small estates of homes

Each day I take Rosie for a walk and come back loaded with ideas and with R’s permission linger longer to make a sketch. Dreamt about hedgerows last night.

 

St Sampson’s Church Tower, a triumph of Late Perpendicular, can be seen for miles around.

 

The lanes that are vortex-like with winter branches and beside each a stream ditch or river.  

I had the studio set up two days after moving in and have even started to carve out time with charcoal and acrylic. There is much to celebrate in drawing and painting and ‘camera as sketchbook’. And approach adopted by the painter George Shaw. 

SIDE BAR 

George Shaw talks about “being a bit of a prowler” constantly touring the landscape, neglected woodlands, these wildernesses, with his camera. He admits to taking hundreds of photographs and using these and his imagination to create works that are very real very lonely and works that monumentalise every day.

Written February 2022

For more on Shaw

https://www.artnet.com/artists/george-shaw-2/