I'm a painter and printmaker in Yorkshire. I’d love to inspire you to make deeper connections with nature and the outdoors, through art. You will receive a Get Inspired! email on a Sunday morning each month.
Invincible Momentum
Making the effort to seek out and forage is all part of the pleasure, being out in the wilds in December and stirring accumulated memories of wintery landscapes. In Spring the surrounding area is wonderful for seeing and hearing curlews, lapwings, snipe, oyster catchers and mistle thrushes, not to mention call and response cuckoos. It’s not like that in December though but we did see a huge buzzard lofting cautiously. Tales From The NorthI found a 100 year old book for children that came from my great grandparents house. Called Animal Stories From Eskimo Land by Renée Coudert Riggs, the wife of a governor of Alaska, and published in 1925 it is in some ways a relic from a different age with a patronising but kindly attitude to the Inuit people. Nevertheless I was drawn to the folk stories which are adaptations of original Inuit tales collected around 1910 - 1920 in arctic Alaska by medical doctor and amateur anthropologist Dr Daniel Neuman. The stories explore the values and traditions of Inuit people and convey strongly their respect for nature and their relationship with the arctic environment. This story, The Crow And The Daylight feels especially appropriate for now, dealing as it does with a longing for light. In case you are wondering, the crow succeeds in bringing daylight to his village and in this story, unusually, he is the hero. Other tales present the crow as an untrustworthy, wily trickster which is probably a testament to the intelligence of Corvids. The Illustrator is George W Hood. It’s amazing that you can search online for all these long gone people mentioned above and rapidly find a lot of information plus photographs of Inuit families from that time too. Smoke And ShadowThis is my own version of the spare nature of the Calderdale landscape in winter. I made the original charcoal drawing well over 10 years ago and it sold quickly. But since then the reproduction print has been enduringly popular. I’ve always been fascinated by coiling smoke. Maybe being born around Bonfire Night accounts for it! The ephemeral, insubstantial nature of smoke seems a challenge to draw although I’ve found charcoal, being smudgy, is perfect for the job. Which is appropriate since charcoal is a product of burning. The smoke in the drawing is actually created by the absence of charcoal on the paper, with the use of a mouldable eraser. You might be surprised to learn how many kinds of eraser there are and that erasure is a whole way of working in art. I may write about that at a later time. RipplesThanks for all the kind condolences and positive feedback you sent after my last email. And perhaps none more so than subscriber John who spent the last week in November up in the Cairngorms in Scotland having an epic adventure. John was certainly facing the weather head-on and was thus able to send me this outstanding photograph he took on the mountain. The light is just fabulous. John is happy for me to share the photo with you and it seems an appropriately transcendent image with which to wish you all a lovely Solstice, Christmas and a hopeful start to a new year. Thank you to everyone who has bought my work this year or at any time in the past, it means so much to me to continue being an artist and to be able to pay the rent on my studio.
|
|
Angie Rogers Artist
I'm a painter and printmaker in Yorkshire. I’d love to inspire you to make deeper connections with nature and the outdoors, through art. You will receive a Get Inspired! email on a Sunday morning each month.