This came

to me today - inspired, I think by two areas of thought.  The ever-pressing depression, helplessness, anger, hair-tearing desperate nightmare of the Brexit situation joined the sadness at hearing of the death of Rose Hilton, and speculation about talent perhaps under-developed - although I am a great admirer of her work.  I drew the figure from a photo of Rose Hilton.

As usual, this popped into my mind when I should have been working on something else. 

Inspiration from a dark place

Don McCullin: Still life in my garden shed (image from here)
On Sunday we went to the Tate to see the exhibition of Don McCullin's photographs.  It is a big, excellent show of his work - review here which says that the work is almost overwhelming.  It did overwhelm me; I was thoroughly depressed by the time I had reached the last room, where even the soul-salving landscapes are printed so dark that they pervade gloom.  The still lives are calming, but again McCullin who prints his photographs dark, seems to continue to see inhumanity leaking out everywhere.

Don McCullin: Still life, tulips (image from here)
The emotion I still carry in response to the stark statements of witness is one of shame and helplessness in the face of humanity's continuing, repeated basest instincts.  Yet out of this strong emotional response has come a need to work, and this thought:

Escapism

Concern (preliminary doodle)
Over the festive season it was a relief not to hear anything about the current UK political situation because I had become thoroughly depressed.  I found that even reading anything serious during my usual hibernation period was not sufficient relaxation, and so I turned to my tried and tested means of escape: detective novels.
This time, however, there is a twist.  I had only just found out that Susan Hill had written a series of crime novels, and decided to get the first one for my Kindle.  Well, I enjoyed that - it did the trick of distracting me - and so I went on to the second, ... .

Darren Thompson: Winter Coat on Subway Reading (image from here)
Now I am on the 7th, and intend to go right up to her current latest one before I emerge.  It is rather like reading a doorstop saga of engaging quality, and is helping me to put news and commentary programmes into a small box.

More pages

I decided to try using one of the illustration pages - this is the first design doodle.  The birds were the easiest place to begin.  Rather than a book to read, I have tried a notebook - or sketchbook.  

Lack of cash

In this increasingly card-paying life, I am finding myself worrying about running out of cash - not because I have no money.  I try to make sure that I have cash on hand for donations - not least to buskers.

Words, words, words

I have been fascinated by words for longer than I can remember.  I was an unplanned child, born at a time when my parents had no space and less money.  I was with my mother all the time while my father studied at university and my mother either embroidered tea cloths for pin money or studied English.  I grew hearing two languages: Scots English and Greek.
My mother did her language learning out loud, reciting, reading to me.  We learned to read together.  I did not know that was what I was doing.  Then before I was one year old we went to Greece, and I as surrounded by aunts with other sounds: Greek.  Apparently I was silent for a worrying time before embarking on my attempts.

Then back to Scotland for my second birthday - back to sounds I had almost if not forgotten.  Then back to Greece when I was three - this time silent for four weeks before I began to speak fluently, in Greek, appropriately pronounced, with idiom, and including (unknowingly) Pontic Greek expressions (much delight and clapping - and pinching of my cheek!).
I returned to Scotland after my fifth birthday in order to start school.  I had forgotten my English.  The three day train journey across Europe started in panic - I could understand what my mother said to me in English, but I could not find the words in myself to speak.  A kind university student, returning from vacation on the same train dedicated himself to reminding me first of nouns by pointing, then gradually of everything else.  (I would have suffered so much more if we had simply flown as is normal today!)
In those very early years I realised that it's not just a difference of vocabulary.  Body language is also different, and thought processes, reactions, fine expression of emotions.  How much of a potential to understand more is missed when only being in possession of one language.

I went on to learn French then German, and was lucky enough to spend some time in each country.  Then by studying literature and language development at university doors and windows were opened and my understanding and curiosity grew.  Poetry became a joy rather than an embarrassing tedious chore of rote learning and recitation.  A career in publishing drew on all of the above, and contributed the additional delights of typography: the visual aspects of language, lettering, and layout.

Imagine then my recent dilemma when faced with a 19th century sample book - containing a partial gazetteer as I try to whittle down our over-large collection of books.  Was it simply sentimentality which was making me want to keep it?  By William Morris's dictum it is neither of use nor beauty - or was it?  What on earth could I do with it.

All at once I knew what to do.  I scanned the pages which most appealed.  And within this post are the initial experiments for my new project.

Hot or cool -playing with pattern

Working in threes

I've been swept up in my figgy inspiration to progress on not just one but three designs to leave to mature over the weekend.

Giving a fig

I have been inspired by Mags Ramsey's post on the current exhibition of Kurt Jackson's work.  The first image alone transported me to my childhood.  My favourite summer fruit was the fig (and my favourite winter fruit the pear), and I have not eaten a really ripe tasty fig since I was in my teens, some fifty years ago.  Sigh.  I remember well reaching up and gently pulling the warm ripe fruit from the tree.

Kurt Jackson: Fig yellow, olive green (image from here)
Reading Mags' post, and looking at the images from the Olive and Fig: Provence exhibition on Messum's website I was filled with a desire to make a figgy picture myself to commemorate my lost fig-eating days.

Adrian Paul Allinson: The Fig Tree (image from here)
First, however, I had a quick google through some other figgy art.  Here are a few that caught my eye.

Heather Mackinlay: Fig tree abstracted (image from here) 

Paul Klee: Fig Tree (image from here)

Catherine Forshall: Figs II (image from here)

Xchristakos: White fig tree (image from here)

Dee Schenck Rhodes: Fig tree (image from here)

And this is my first pass scribble towards a working doodle for Giving a fig.

Sometimes

I am at a complete loss to know - and perhaps even to guess where my ideas come from.  But at least they give me a kind of peculiar pleasure!

Design in progress: Persistent pursuit of pelican

When an idea comes along

I need to take a note, or start developing it, or it evaporates.

Doodle work in early stages of progress
I'm busy doing other things - or should be getting on with yet more commitments; but talk of tulips a couple of posts ago got the back of my mind whirring away as can be seen above.  Now that development has reached this stage I can leave it alone while I return to my to do list.
Yesterday I finished reading Enlightenment Now by Stephen Pinker - a relief to have got through it; but a read which generated many questions, and made me curious to read more about the areas it covers,... meantime also popping this visual reaction into my thinking:

Doodle work in early stages of progress
Another one for the back burner -  I hope there's room for everything!

Shouldn't be distracted, but ...

doodling as procrastination.

Quietly, into Spring

Doodle in progress

Diversionary doodle

I was scanning this snap of a burned out car when an idea came to me.  

This is a preliminary doodle - quickly drawn before the idea disappears.

Whence?

I sometimes wonder whence visual ideas arrive - but it does not trouble me for long.  I just enjoy playing with the results.  The main thing is not to go poking away trying to replicate, because, as far as I am concerned anyway, it doesn't work.  Like overnight elves, these gems arrive when I'm not looking.
Playing with the idea of symmetry (or not quite) produced this:

Don't ask what it means - if anything - but I am enjoying the sense of drama and mystery, and that mental drift it induces.  After all the birds which have been my companions over the recent years, it is good to get back to fish.  So far it calls itself Worship.
It also has that stark wintery feel to it; pared back, ... which reminded me of another design I started many years ago and put on an almost forgotten back burner: Winter sunshine.  Perhaps I shall work on them both as small stitchings in January after my hibernation.

No snow here, just cold that is not much felt because of the sunshine and lack of wind.  Sunglasses and ice.

As ever ...

... when I should be settling down to something serious

a silly idea pops into my head: a hare-raising story!  A doodle to add to my lino cutting pile perhaps.

Can't settle

I am thinking about too many things today.  So, as ever, I doodle while my mind flits!

Doodle in progress

If we run, we might look decisive

Explanation or excuse?

Several years ago, when my nephews were young they used to spend every summer with my parents, and I would take them all on outings.  One such was to a nearby bird world.  Weather-wise it was a rather drizzly day, so many of the birds - especially those from warm climes - looked miserable.
There were not many photo opportunities, but I was struck by the sculptural form of the northern bald ibis on a boat.

I found this photo the other day, and was struck again by the attractiveness of the bird's form as well as by its apparent look of total misery.  Of course I am probably anthropomorphising its mood, as other photos I have seen do not show it looking much different.  But even so, when I think about what we humans are doing to so many environments in the name of progress, but really perhaps it turns out only for the comfort of a few - in which I count myself - I wonder how we would start to account for our actions.

Nature of course is well known for being raw in tooth and claw - it's just that we humans get the prize for having pursued this beyond any wildest dreams.  While I was thinking over how one could begin to explain ourselves to our fellow inhabitants of the planet, I came up with an image using the ibis.