November 6th Snape Maltings on the river Alde.

It's no wonder that Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten choose Snape to set up their music festival in the old malting buildings.

It's a magic place and I love that we have to go regularly to take the potter's ceramics to the gallery. 

I've taken pics every year for...oh it seems for ever.

and these are a combination of several years of photography. I've picked out my favourite ones.

The ones that take me back there when I look through the photo files.

Art Challenge...post one a day!

Today I've posted an edited photo taken as part of a series when we went to find Derek Jarman's cottage on the shingle in Dungeness.

"The Abandoned Boat"

What an amazing place...a wilderness of stone and sea...yet full of life with such banks of marine wild flowers and a glimpse of a hare running away from his cottage.

I may never get a chance to return...but the memories are strong and quite a bit of poetry resulted from that visit.

"The Abandoned Boat"

Wild flowers on the shingle.

 The emptiness of the landscape.

Rusting metal everywhere hidden in the maran grasses.

Sculptural rusting metals...abandoned.

The Gingerbread Hut!

...each year our daughter....neviepiecakes ... makes us a gingerbread house for Christmas...

I can hardly bear to eat them...so much work and thought goes into each one.

This year she has excelled all expectations with...

...a gingerbread fisherman's hut fully equipped with lobster pots, a little fishing boat and a driftwood Christmas tree covered, of course, in snow...

...I love... love it...so what am I to do?

 ...it is truly a piece of edible sculpture...

...but she tells us to eat it and not to be so "precious"....

...look on the door ...a blackboard telling you that fresh fish has been caught and is there for the buying.

...and behind the snow laden driftwood tree ...a pile of lobster pots await the fisherman ...ready for the outing the next day....

...oh now I'm getting carried away!!

I just had to take lots of pics ...because the gingerbread is as good as the design...so there is no way that it is going to last forever...

...as Marie Antionette once didn't say...

"Let them eat cake"

https://www.facebook.com/NeviePie

Hot from the kiln!

These sculptures are just out of the kiln this morning. Here they are still  hot in the studio.

 As soon as they were cool enough we got them photographed and on to f.b.. I put them into flickr as well and added to the various groups.
They are all destined for distant climes! Well that is Kent and Suffolk. The Suffolk galleries are,
The Snape Maltings...which I always think is very apt for Alan!...
The Buckenham Gallery in Southwold, favourite place in England....
And The Harbour Gallery in Whitstable, Kent. This is a fairly new place for us to exhibit. If you live nearby, why not have a look at these in person.

The back drop is also the work of an artist. I got it from the Tate Liverpool a few years ago. It's by a South American artist, but I have lost track of his name. He gave away freebies of the prints of his original photographs and I took a couple. If anyone out there can recognize his work, perhaps you might let me know who you think it is.