In fairly workman like mode… getting on with another woodcut. Wanting to get some kind of momentum with painting/cutting before settling to fiddling with the making of more finished versions. 
Posted in birds, norfolk, printmaking, studio, woodcut
Cutting one of the blocks to get the feel of how they would look once printed. Vaguely planning to later use some texture to vary the flat surface… wiping, scraping, blotting … Keeping to the monochrome to avoid getting sidetracked into colour confusion.
After a period before christmas of getting mired in processes, fairly keen to keep things simple and just produce some images related to recent sightings.
Posted in birds, norfolk, printmaking, studio, woodcut
Uploading photo to fill in for yesterday… Painting up hardboard with thin white and then monochrome studies with the intention of making woodcuts… For a long time I’ve been direct cutting with the gouges (ie. no preliminary drawing). Wondering how it would go to have some more pre-ordained sense of what the image would look like. The monoprint of monday had felt very hard edged and though I should probably go back and work through that I wanted to establish a better sense of the feel I was after.
If nothing else it was good to get the paints out.
last day of trip and a brief walk at cley. The only snipe of the trip, hiding behind a teal. Snow buntings seen fleetingly bouncing along the wave lashed beach (wind had moved round more to the north of west). Birdwatchers galore all scrutinising or looking for the western sandpiper.
Waxwing on roadside hedge, my first in Britain. Distant view after it moved into tall trees with redwings.
Warm mortar. Cement. Burnt wood. Smouldering. Burnt stubble. Wet mud. Ooze
—Keep meaning to write more colour notes… sometimes words seem better than colour matching efforts with paint or crayon. The subtleties of these winter field landscapes seem very bound up with smells for me. Not synesthesia I think, just association with previous experiences/memories.
low key day at Cley..huge numbers of people around the reserve. Gradually getting more saturated with the recurrent themes…. The water rails in and out of reed fringes.
out very early for the clear sky… I’ve got keen on trying to improve my sense of where the constellations and planets are… With the sky clear and relatively unpolluted by human lights I thought I’d get out on the marsh and immerse myself… No moon and surpisingly little bird activity… I thought I might have heard the geese go over. Saturn and Mars seen and a fresh batch of data in the brain about how the constellations lay in relation to each other. Something salutary about having the senses so limited and the impersonal bleakness of those incomprehensible distances.
A drive along the coast to wells and then Burnham… masses of people out for airing on such a fine day.
The Brent geese out on the marshes at wells amongst great muted colours…umbers of gone over sea lavender… the sea purslane a very muted dirty rag colour and the more vivid burning straw of spartina.
Later on pinkfeet in their thousands landing just below the brow of low hill… sheltering from the very strong southwesterly… not getting great views but the numbers and their grouping in flight…striations on the sky… skein seems a very good word… like something scraped/scratched onto the sky.A barn owl with legs lowered, hovering, caught in the headlights.
Back to the goldfinches on yellow horned poppy, but this time with snow buntings materialising behind them…almost as soon as we got out of the van this morning. From the hide up to 5 marsh harriers, handsome male, worn female and looks like 3 youngsters… some interaction between them and even some low key display… roller coastering.
The other real highlight of the day was the restless golden plover flock…arrowing down out of flickering flock… and the big skies… petering bodies of cloud that we don’t see on the west side of britain… mauved heads of ochre bronze reeds rising into bleached jean blue sky and then these subtlest grey bodies of cloud… cigaring out to sea… with wisps of other stuff happening around them.
Walk out from Salthouse along the inside of the shingle sea wall… brisk cold south-westerly. As far as the Cley-eye carpark. Masses of goldfinches feeding on the exploded yellow horned poppy stalks
An out of place purple sandpiper on a muddy fringe along redshank.
Black and bar-tailed godwits feeding almost alongside each other.
Brent geese all moving east during the morning.
First thing, well before light, the sound of masses of pink footed geese going over calling.
A raft of golden plover forming a tan block in fields.
Gulls & avocets subtle shades of whites and greys… soothing to the eyes. Overhead unusual cloud formations (to western eyes) huge linear formations of grey tapering back to the northern horizon with some kind of altocumulus themes and variations below.