Angie Rogers Artist

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Connecting you to Landscape, Nature and The Wild.

Minor Mysteries in March
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Hello there,

March is almost over and I’m wondering if you noticed anything unusual in nature these past few weeks?

This month is one of those transitional times where anomalies tend to crop up. No longer winter but not feeling quite fully spring. Some things are noticeably early and some things are late.

But we expect these variations because Nature isn’t a machine and the seasons are a process.

Nevertheless the sudden appearance of a bat in the bright daytime in March in the north of England is a surprise.

For a split second I thought it was a bird but there’s something completely unmistakeable about the oiled smoothness of a bat’s flight.

I took this photo with my phone camera and it was pure luck it turned out so clearly.

A more peculiar sighting was this mussel shell I found on a quiet woodland path alongside the canal. Hebden Bridge is in the Pennines, the central spine of England and more than 50 miles from any coast.

The shell was damaged at one end as though it had been pecked or chewed. Freshwater mussels are rare and aren’t found in West Yorkshire and so it’s a mystery how my mollusc got there.

I have my suspicions though. For a few years now a Cormorant takes summer possession of a lamppost in Mytholmroyd, the next village along the main road to Halifax.

More recently another one has also claimed an adjacent streetlamp, so we have two of these large, reptilian looking waterbirds, often seen perched on the lamps with spread out drying wings like heraldic emblems.

I can’t help imagining there must be a connection to the bivalve I found, the result of some opportunistic thievery from a fishmongers bins perhaps?

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Bringing The Outside In - Crow Skull
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We found this crow skull in woodland at Cowdale in the Peak District of Derbyshire.

My keen-eyed companion spotted it and I carefully carried the delicate bones in my palm all the way back to our accommodation - full concentration required and no sneezing!

Although clean when we found it, I have sterilised and whitened the skull with hydrogen peroxide. I’ve never done this before and was pleased to discover that 12% peroxide diluted 1:1 in water is not unpleasant to do and works well.

Bird bones are so beautiful and light. As I held the skull in my hand I could not stop thinking that once this structure contained the mind of a crow and all its vivid experience of our shared world. The profound mystery of life.
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The Fish Doorbell

Here’s a piscine oddity if you enjoy the interactive wonders of the internet. Did you always want to ring a bell to let a fish in the Netherlands through a door? Of course you did and now is your chance.

In Utrecht there’s a manually operated lock gate that unfortunately delays the progress of fish during their March to May migration.

To prevent holding up the Eels, Bream, Roach, Perch, Pike and Rudd, a live-feed camera and doorbell have been installed so you can look to see if any fishes are waiting. If you spot one, ring the bell and the lock keeper will open it to let the fish through!

Visit the Fish Doorbell and live-feed camera

Biblioclasm, Defacement And Transgression

I love books and have done since my earliest days. Electronic books are convenient but I will always prefer the experience of reading the physical object even when they are heavy and tiring to prop up in bed..

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However I think books, like paper maps, are there to be used. They are tools and it's fine to annnotate/write-inside/crease them usefully. Obviously this only applies to books that I own and that are not antique or historically valuable.

But I still have a kind of taboo about deliberately defacing the contents. Or at least I used to.

A while back I was given a coffee-table book by a friend. Initially the title led me to believe I would be entertained by the text and copious photographs. You can probably guess the kind of book it was when I mention that sadly I was rapidly disappointed and sent into a fury by the smug-seeming people showing off their large dwellings, copious outhouses and huge gardens.

That book was dumped out-of-sight on a very high shelf in my broom-cupboard sized studio. And so it came to pass that late one day I used-up the very last page in my sketchbook yet I still wanted to carry on working. What to do? The Smug Book looked down its nose at me from up high - its fate was sealed.

Repurposing a hard back book as a sketchbook and sweeping thick paint over photographs and text feels shockingly transgressive at first but you soon get over it. Now that paper and board serve a useful purpose instead of being an irritation and waste of space.

Ripples

Thank you, I had some good responses to last months email and a lovely collector sent me a photograph of their recent purchase, a framed Curlew woodcut looking lovely alongside their vintage pale pink glassware.

I've made a new post in my website Journal titled Walking The Unpath - Stepping in and outside the lines. It's a slightly expanded version from an email article I sent out about 18 months ago about going your own way.

Read Walking The Unpath

In the meantime, enjoy the gradual arrival of the green. Go outside and enjoy fresh air. As artist David Hockney says "Spring Cannot Be Cancelled".
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All the best
Angie

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