PORTFOLIO II

PORTFOLIO II

It's been about three years now since Portfolio I. 

Time to update

Here's a selection of work I've been making recently: there's a mix of drawings, sculpture, hand worked gates, photographs and some sticks of furniture too

Literally! 

Some of the furniture is rustic, as they say, and some of the wood I've used has had the minimum of intervention from the way that it grew, out there in the outdoors before it changed from branch into table leg or into the rail or style for a gate

I work out doors, most of the time, up the hill above Hay-on-Wye on the Herefordshire-Powys border

I'm a caretaker, a factotum in fact for the guy that owns a farm up there with a raggle taggle collection of ruins and houses and converted barns

I fix things for him, up there on the hill, and I look after the grounds. It's a beautiful place, full of birdsong and silence

a while back now, I had a project to build a wall around the tank that stores the water from the spring

It was to be dry stone and I was humming and hawing about the amount of material that I'd have to hoof on the steeply sided bank where we were perched

Naturally, he says, It doesn't have to be very thick, a single skin'd do. That'd save a lot of to and fro 

And of course I'd given him an old fashioned look. I'd rate the chances of my constructing a two metre high wall a single stone wide as slim. In the extreme. I raise an eyebrow as eloquently as I can and on my insistance we decide to do it the traditional way. Double skin with tie stones and a bit of mortar on the inside, where no-one'll see it

I get the job done and a little while later head off to Sweden, and find myself in the middle of the forest there. Of course, the first wall we encouter is this one, a perfectly balanced and perfectly venerable single skinned wall. Look closely now! And wonder who it was that balanced these stones 

I thought about the making process, confronted now with the evidence of 

being wrong 

and wonder how this applies to the stuff that I've already made, as well of course as the stuff that I will make in the maybe of the future: of the assumptions I've made and will make about the impossibility of this or that in the light of my now demonstrably slip shod way of assessing impossibility
  I muse about this lesson as I meander around Sweden, and resolve to do better next time, and to try not to discount a way of doing merely on the grounds that it appears, at first glance, to be impossible. 

Some  drawings then, to start with

I enjoy drawing although my stuff always seems to come out looking a little like the before board of a painting by numbers kit. I find it impossible to make it come out any other way. I wonder how to apply the notion of the impossible we do at once to drawing, to changing one's style. I'd like to do mysterious, deep drawings with more to them than meets the eye but this is what there is for now


It's all very well to have a notion for another way of working, and another again to put that notion into practice. This is in a National Park in Sweden, an attempt to simplify the overwhelming complexity of the canopy and understorey of the forest, and to present it in a way, as the poet Charles Bukowski might have said that just makes sense

And this one, this one that's a little Hopper-esque and Nighthawk is also from Sweden. I enjoy sketching quickly, without worrying too much about isometrics, and wonder if this is one way, for me, of breaking the habit of painting by numbers. It's a cafe of some sort, and I like the way some of the counter anxiety we may have about ordering stuff at bars comes across. Not that it's me, out there in the picture, but I sympathise with everyone who's ever tried to attract the eye of a harried waiter, or a busy barman
 
This is the last Swedish one on here. I love the way the sketch offers an invitation to transport the viewer from the edge of the garden to the edge of the forest, by crossing a simple style. I wonder if this is one way to do the impossible in a drawing? To offer an invitation. To offer the magic of transport and delight

And this one of course is in colour. I called it Iron Oak with captive rock as the ochre coloured boulder in the middle appeared to have been surrounded by the oaks, as if they'd corralled it, taken it prisoner. I over-layed a photograph of the scene on top of the drawing - another attempt to look  a little less painting by numbers - and used it in a short travelogue that I wrote recently Around and about in Alcazaba, set on the slopes of Mulhassein, the highest mountain in mainland Spain, and indeed, the whole of the Iberian perninsular

Last one! I love the simplicity of the lines here: Marsh Cotton, Bilbury and the Sugarloaf Mountain, with a playfulness of clouds above them, to boot. I took a sketch book high up in the hills for this, and dashed of half a dozen or so of hillside, hill and sky.  This is the one that appeals to me the most, having made the best job maybe, of translating three dimensions into two. Of most eloquently representing the irrepressibility of Bilbury, the gracefullness of Marsh Cotten and the majesty of mountains where they meet the sky. Is that right? Eloquence, for a drawing? 

Now: Sculpture: I've completed four pieces since portfolio I, all in wood: Two in oak, one in apple and there's one in Sycamore too. I like working in wood. I like the connection of my stuff to the infinity of all the other wooden sculptures that there've ever been that havn't survived and have been destroyed by insects or razed by fire or given in somehow to the ravages of decay. It makes it more plausible for me, working away in the workshop, knowing that the likely impermanence of my particular chunk of time eating wood, the one I'm working on, is, in fact, part of an important hidden element of art history, and is likely to go to the same place - wherever that is - as the early pre-cursers of, say, the totem pole have gone, somewhere that isn't immediately accessible, and indeed, may never be

This is the most totemic of the pieces I've made: Empty head. The title is borrowed from a Minor White photo, and apart from the nod of this empty head toward figurativism it's simply a celebration of form, and the beauty of oak, and the grain hidden in there until the chisel, plane or router comes to find it. 

For years now I've been captivated by Henry Moore's 1953 work:Three Standing Figures in the sculpture garden at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and

suspected that this piece of work was indebted to it. However, when I finally got around to digging out my original photo from the Guggenheim I was surprised how I'd misremembered it, Moore's work I mean, and how Empty Head had maybe evolved in my head, and that this distillation had produced something inspired by Three Standing Figures, but something that also stood alone, as something new

 
This is the piece from the apple tree that blew down in a storm in the orchard where I live near Talgarth in the Brecon Beacons. It was still anchored in the ground after the storm, albeit at a rakish angle, and therefore easy enough to plank with a chainsaw. The finished piece, Blades of Grass, works for me because although the two pieces of the work now share a plinth, they are no longer one thing

and the way they lean toward each other speaks to me of a need that we maybe all have, to connect.

It reminds me of Forsters Howards End character Helen Schlegel advising us to live in fragments no longer


This piece is in oak, untitled as yet, 

and this next piece is in Sycamore. The Sycamore tree in the garden here was decreed to be tresspassing too close to the house, and it was decided that a third of it should be removed. I did the job with my brother Dave, and we took care to save the main bole of the removed limb. Someone told me that the finished piece reminded them of a spinal column, and I like this idea. The spinal column of a tree, the backbone that keeps it safe

It stands at about 2 metres tall and the removed material reveals an inner column, completely square, curving up through the structure.I havn't been able to think of a title for this one either

This is the place where I work, up the hill above Hay on Wye. A collection of photographs, showing the context of the smattering of dwellings up there

This wide shot here sets the scene:  It's what they told us was called was an establishing shot when I studied photojournalism at Cardiff a couple of decades ago

It's a hill farm, more or less, the highest hill farm here or hereabouts and it retains, on account of this loftyness, a remote feel to this day

To access the place there's an extremely steep and unmade track to negotiate. There's a hairpin bend above a steeply sided ravine to navigate, along with a ford to cross. The ford can be hairy in winter. 

The farmstead is at the end of an 'unnamed track' and therefore receives no casual vehicular traffic. It's name derives from the name of a village, although it must be a contender for one of the smallest villages in Herefordshire. 

I try to imagine the self sufficiency of the people that dwelt here, back in the day, and their isolation from the rest of the world.

The track is too steep for a pony and trap. I guess that, then, way back then when they must have used mules or donkeys to bring back the supplies that they wouldn't have been able to make, or grow, or barter the amount of effort the life-style would have demanded would be: tough. 

A different order of magnitude tougher than we can imagine. It's wet up here in the winter, and the red red Herefordshire clay turns into the muddiest mud imaginable, making pedestrian progress sticky, in places, and slippy in others

I was having a bonfire in the photo above. There must have been a temperature inversion going on as the smoke from the bonfire rattled off down the dell toward Hay and was, in fact, waiting for me in a hollow near Cussop when I eventually made my way home- a lonely cloud of bonfire smoke, identifiable from it's smell, with nowhere to go. 

The farm up here doesn't catch the sun in winter. You can see the sun, on the hillside, but most of the buildings remain in the shade from November to March. I often wondered about this, 

as the damp tresspassed in my bones or water into the soles of my boots,
about this seeming choice to site a dwelling with zero winter sunlight
 
Eventually, a chance conversation with a character well versed in rural lore set me straight

They wern't so bothered about the sun, see, he said, or words to that effect. It was the shelter that they craved. Freedom from wild wind and driving rain. Then, back then whenever it was, when whoever it was started to clear the forest for the sheep.

I muse about this, as a now seasoned stalwart of shade, and have, since then, appreciated the sunless shelter that this location offers. Sometimes, as I watch the wind shepherding cold hard rain away from here and on toward Hay I think of the bonfire smoke tumbling down the hill, escaping to a colder climate at a lower altitude. I feel a calmness up here on the hill, as well as a connection to a century spanning continuum of artisans that have worked here, who, as Dylan suggests in metaphor, have been given: shelter from the storm
There are traces of the people that live here, in these photos, but the winner, in terms of  impact on a landscape is surely the Spring here up the hill above Hay.

The winters linger, but the Spring, when it finally arrives, is as virile as a March hare. Energy crackles in the hedge. Songbirds are strident in their effort to attract attention. Ferns unfurl like time lapse photography.




It's this sense of the exuberance of Spring that I hope these photos achieve.

And now I'm at gates: these've all been built for the place up the hill, and most of them are built from timber that originated there too


This is the first one I made. It incorporates a natural cleft in the branch to supply the strength of the brace. It's in ash, with the bark removed for fear of rot minded beetles, and is treated with tung oil. I hope it'll last a while. I'll wait and see.

The next two are in oak: Apple tree gate is from green oak from Cilfiegan Sawmill near Usk.

It's for an orchard we are planning on some re-claimed ground. Here's a detail picture of the
apples on the top.

The components of the second gate were rough hewn from a huge oak that came down in a storm last year. I rough cut with a chain saw before finishing with a power plane before I put the individual pieces through a bench planer. One of the joys of working with green, as opposed to dried oak is in it's ease of working. The chips fly off like bits of carrot in a food processor. I feel like a master craftsperson with razor sharp tools. This gate is constructed entirely from wood, without a drop of glue or metal

There's a sketch here of the previous gate in thia location that had fallen into dis-repair.

It was a close board affair and blocked any view as to what might lie beyond. Like the stile in the Swedish drawing the new gate now offers an invitation,  and I'm looking forward to how this invitation will appeal once the oak boards have silvered up, and in the springtime to boot

And lastly: here's one in Holly and Oak. It's by  a huge and venerable oak tree and leads to a door set in the tree itself. Golly. Fairies and little folk abound up here, or so local legend has it. The door in the tree opens outward, like that of the dolls house, and reveals some fairy furniture

And this of course is the gate itself, crisp against the driven snow

Now then: On the off-chance that anyone has got this far this is the last section. Lovely. 

Furniture

There's some fitted cupboards to start: all in oak and with attention to detail in the shape of saw tooth adjustment for the shelves

and an intriguing space saving detail for hanging in the wardrobe


 



And here's a table and chair in Holly, mainly. The seat for the stool along with the table top are reclaims and all the wood is jointed  with a Veritas power tenon cutter,
 something not unlike a giant pencil sharpener

 This is the last pic: an occasional piece with two secret compartments.

The first one's shown in the photo, but the second one . . . Shhh. I can't tell you where this one is. Well, not over the internet at any rate. If you need to know, or indeed, if you'd like to commision a piece or work, my details, as they say, are in my bio. Contact me! I'll see what I can do to make the impossible possible for your project