Well time moves on and my exhibition at St Columba's is coming to an end; in fact the next few days are the last week of this showing. A big thank you to all of you who visited, viewed, past comments and indeed a few of you who bought my work; affirmation is essential, it helps me on my journey.

Next week at the same venue is an exhibition of several artists and an invitation has been given to me to exhibit three of my more recent works. Above is one of them, the Hoe Stream, running through the Mayford meadows, just a few yards of the Edgley Road; basically it is a study of water surface tensions and the conglomeration of all-sorts of items and growths on the surface as it slowly passes by.

 At the present My work seems to be at a junction, image size has increased up to A2, which brings with it fresh challenges; it realy is all rather exciting. A fresh project is underway with a showing planned for next year, but that is another tale and at the same time another idea is floating around in my head, if it comes of that will be awesome.

It is early bank holiday Monday, I am sat in my study,  having painted for an hour and done my blog, so what are Liz and myself going to do today, or where will we go? It might be a lazy quiet day, or we might go somewhere. Let's wait and see.

 

Today was one of those days when with a little spare time appearing, the weather being super, so it was obvious what to do, of we went to Hatchlands for a short walk and a picnic; it proved to be an amazing nature awareness trek. 

On the way there a buzzard flew in front of the car, it was closer that ten yards; with what looked like a rabbit in its talons. Poor bunny.

Then at Hatchlands we strolled to the sheepdip lake and met two Egyptian geese with their young; they were not intimidated in the least by our presence and were happy with us walking not two yards from them. We reached our favorite bench, they followed on behind us, settling only a few yards away; we started to eat and enjoy that awaited  picnic.

Then the peace ended with much screeching and squawking. half a second later a mallard flew off in great haste, with the daddy egyptian goose hard on its tail. The mallard was minus a tail feather or two; a lesson learned the hard way to leave egyptian geese and their young alone.

 A few moments later the goose returned and landed on the water about four yards away, he as high as a kite, all full of testerone, very angry, upset, displaying much agitation, a poor analogy could be,"Not a happy bunny". He squawked and pranced around. Mum came out of the reeds with her two youngsters; she calmed him down a little, I imagined she said some thing like,"Well done dear, now you have done the manly thing, now be grown up and calm down a little" One of the chicks went up to dad, that had a remarkable effect on him, calming him instantly. withing a minuet they all curled up and had a family nap.

We finished the picnic; I also did a very mediocre sketch, which I am not going to show you.