Inspired by Hockney.

I'm putting up some more pics today from Ashridge Woods in Hertfordshire.

 I went there with my daughter on Thursday to have a walk through the trees,  then  lunch  by a warming fire in a local pub.

The exhibition at the Royal Academy, of Hockney's take on the Yorkshire countryside, opens your eyes to the beauty of  "very littleness"...if there is such an expression!

It's in this way that I feel so much of our landscape is viewed......

...in the soft neutral colours and tones of the palettes as used  by our wonderful British watercolourists...
... such as Constable and Ruskin.
I love going to the Abbott Hall Galleries in Kendal just to gaze in awe at the watercolour room tucked away at the back of the building.

But if I'm honest to my own colour leanings.....I crave colour and expressionistic saturation!
I'm a lover of van Gogh and Matisse and also the northern group of expressionists,  the Blaue Reiter...with Nolde and Kandinsky etc.
In many ways I think this is what Hockney has brought into the art of English landscape, from his living and painting in California .
So the photo above had some colour washed out on the saturation app. on Picnic...and the one underneath, had the colours saturated in the opposite direction.

(The photographer in the pic. by the way... is she of Neviepie Cakes fame!)

I'm sure people have their own opinions about whether or not an artist should take colour "liberties" when painting the landscape.

Maybe you might like to post a comment on your preference.

I'm just posting up some of the other creatures who really don't mind either way!!

 

Just as long as he can rediscover the secret hiding places of the autumn nuts hidden for a hungry day!

A Poem for Thursday.

I'm not quite sure where this all came from apart from the different concepts being at the centre of quite a lot of my thinking. I think that the home in the poem, is my Belfast home, and certainly the photo is of the garden there with my sister and myself. It may also have come from a recent family revelation which had us all a-twitter, but it may have nothing to do with that at all...just the ramblings of a "bit-poet"!

Beyond the open door
A house that was a home.

Pandora leave the magic box alone.

Beyond the open door
A shelter once I had.

Bruce Naumann let the cat out of the bag.

Beyond the open door
A refuge for my soul.

Miss Potter was it you who feared the cold?

Beyond the open door
A mist is closing in.

Come playboy, come and save my soul from sin.

Beyond the open door
The rooms are upside down.

Kandinsky, Klee and Freud are out of town.