I love this picture. It reminds me of a ‘fayr feeld ful of folk’ from Piers Plowman. Christopher Corr made it for a client from London now living in Washington. The brief was to paint the view from Parliament Hill with all London’s landmark buildings plus Gospel Oak lido and running track. He cleverly reversed the viewpoint so we’re looking back down on this earthly paradise. Click on the image to enlarge it and explore it in detail. The painting measures 106 x 74 cms. Continue reading “Corr Blimey!”
Category: Birds
Chick, Chick, Chick, Chick, Chicken
Marc the electrician came to see us, to fix the lighting and to bring us these delicious eggs from his garden in Thornton Heath where he keeps Cotswold Legbars, French Copper Neck Marans, a large speckled hen and a black tailed Colombian. Continue reading “Chick, Chick, Chick, Chick, Chicken”
Open Studio
This is Fanny Shorter‘s screenprint Common Wood Pigeon (Columba Palumbus). All Fanny’s birds are depicted life size. See flocks of them this weekend at her open studio at Cockpit Arts, Cockpit Yard, Holborn. More details here.
Hatfield Forest & Hatfield Broad Oak
This is one of my favourite trees, an ancient Hornbeam pollard at Bush End Plain, an area of wood pasture in Hatfield Forest. This place has been grazed by cattle and sheep for at least 1000 years, and these trees pollarded to keep their green shoots out of reach of grazing livestock. There are also deer here and Oliver Rackham has called this The Last Forest because it is the only surviving example of a Royal Medieval Hunting Forest, meaning forest as a place where the monarch had the right to keep deer and to kill and eat them. This maintained environment has been shaped with rides, chases and woodland by continuous managed development over the past millenium. Continue reading “Hatfield Forest & Hatfield Broad Oak”
Down & Round & Up & Over
Walking down from Walbury Hill towards West Woodhay, beneath a sky criss-crossed with the vapour trails of other, more urgent travellers. Continue reading “Down & Round & Up & Over”
Breakfast Birds
In the time it takes to eat a bowl of porridge at the kitchen window this morning, I’ve seen a wren constantly on the hop amongst the solanum; a couple of blue tits pecking on the fence; a small flock of long-tailed tits swinging through the branches of the trees; a blackbird sounding the alarm; the fleeting shadow of a bird upside down on the eaves of the shed, gone too quick to tell, about the size of a robin but upside down? No sign of the ubiquitous magpies or pigeons. Maybe that’s why there was so much activity, and the bright sun melting the frost. So much energy. Continue reading “Breakfast Birds”
The Littlest Birds
For a couple of years now we have had Fanny Shorter‘s suite of exquisite screenprints featuring some of the world’s smallest birds, all of them depicted life size. They are beautiful and popular and fast becoming an endangered species. I sold two more today, which prompted this post, before they disappear altogether. Shown here is the Crimson-Hooded Manakin, a native of the northern coastal regions of South America, where its habitat is mangroves and riverside forests. It measures just 9 cms. Continue reading “The Littlest Birds”
Murmuration
It’s hard not to love this little film, by Sophie Windsor Clive and Liberty Smith, of a chance encounter on the River Shannon with one of Nature’s miracles.