the house of basil

How the ‘stables’ looked when we arrived here, crammed against massive conifers and looking rather shabby.

Re-roofed, re-furbished and painted, and photographed after completion today. The red is marvellous against all this lush Welsh green.

Basil approves. He took a great interest in the decorating, to the point where he dipped his toes in a pot of paint and his nose too! Now he looks as though he painted his toe nails red, but neglected to  maintain them very well. Rather chipped!

All gussied up and bright as a pin-in-paper. New fencing and a gate for easy access along a short path from the drive.

Just across the drive the Embothrium coccineum is vying with the new stable for vibrancy of colour!

And down in the flower garden, this exotic lovely bloomed overnight…

… as did the laburnum. Below are a few images taken today as the garden moves ever further into Summer glory.

postal art

Many years ago I was asked by Lizzie Organ of the Kilvert Gallery to take part in a ‘postal art’ exhibition. The idea of this was that everything had to come through the postal system, stamped, franked and delivered to the gallery by a postman! Some artists tried to circumnavigate this, presenting artwork at the post office and requesting franking on the provision that the item would then be passed back over the counter  to them for a hand delivery. The post office to their credit refused to do this, and quite right too. Not at all in the spirit of things.

I made a number of  envelopes from beautiful Japanese paper, decorating them with ink and bleach and lino-print. In each one was a slip of paper with my signature, the envelope itself being the ‘artwork’. The theme of these little pieces was suitably in scale with them. Nursery rhymes and fairy tales. I have no digital images of them, but when I transfer the transparencies to digital format I’ll post some on the Artlog.

However, over the weekend I was able to lay my hands on another piece made for the Postal Art Exhibition, a paper-engineered work that has since, in transformed versions, appeared in quite a few paintings.

The front  was made in the form of a proscenium arch with closed curtains.

The back carried a cartouche for the gallery address. Had I known before hand  the stamps and special delivery label would take up so much room and as a consequence obliterate  part of  the design, I would have planned to make the piece bigger. But it was too late to do anything about it by the time I got to the post office, so I just went with the flow. However I like the fact that Harry Corbett and his glove puppet Sooty appear on a stamp!

The artwork was sent with the front flaps closed, tied and sealed with wax. Lizzie cut the ribbons to open and display it., but left them, as I’d intended, an essential component of the work. When opened up the garden inside ‘pops’ out into a layered representation of a topiary arch with the view of a path and wrought-iron gate beyond.

Below is Paper Garden as ‘re-imagined’ for a recent painting of Saint Kevin and his blackbird, with the colours greatly changed and an image of Ty Isaf replacing the gate.