Autumn is when we begin to wonder why every year Britain is not prepared for winter.
Autumn is when trains don’t run because of leaves on the line. Or a low sun in the eyes of the drivers. Or flooded rails. Or fallen trees.
Autumn gives frost warnings, and the weather men start mithering about the possibility of a ‘coldest winter this century, with snow lasting weeks if not months’.
Autumn. The heating goes on again. Sunrise is after breakfast. The first gales blow more and more leaves off the trees. Rain starts to be more frequent, harder, sometimes horizontal. Long coats appear, the barber talks of wearing his Barbour when he walks his dog
Part of the harvest from the garden, which continues to give, and collected as I to and fro from the studio
Autumn. Super abundance of tomatoes, apples, blackberries. Homemade jams at the local boot fair.
Autumn is a time of abundance, a last flourish before we batten down for winter’s storms, a time of stocking up with logs and provender, preparing the Christmas cake mix, pickling shallots or pears, stocking the larder as if for siege.
Autumn is when the machinery appears to reform the beach ready for the storms to come.
Autumn is when we start drawing the curtains early in the evening to create our warm cocoon, bemoaning the lack of any decent new programming of the telly, the difficulty of finding a good book.
Autumn is when the new Bernard Cornwell story appears.
Autumn is when the studio starts to be really cold for an hour after the heater goes on.
Geranium 3. From one of a series of photos taken in Tacoma’s Unversity Place
Autumn is when I shall spend days looking after my exhibition, except I won’t because I have to go into hospital after just three days, leaving my long suffering enduring love to care for it instead. Looking after the show is fun for me. Talking to people about the work, where it has come from. Old ladies leaning on walking sticks delighted to have the chance to chatter, turning out to have been at the Royal College in Hockney’s day, or having worked alongside great designers. Old faces and stooped manner hiding sharp minds, sharper eyes, trained in the days when drawing mattered, testing ideas still, faces alight with love of art.
Autumn of their lives sometimes twenty years on from my three score and ten, but whilst their bodies may be in decline their eye and minds, nurtured by art and design, stimulate as they question, yet delighted to see they are sharing with an equally receptive mind. Mindful of my own corporeal problems I have time to listen, and then enjoy the exchanges. Open minds in which experience has shed fads and fashion to see fundamentals. Minds prepared to enjoy challenges.
Geranium 4 – another of the Tacoma images. Unable to choose I am tackling both, working ideas and colour through both
Autumn of my life now, time to produce the fruit of my years of labour in art and design. Time to distil the essence of what I’m about in my painting. To show it, to share it.
Autumn is a time to look back on the pleasures of summer, in life to look back on the golden haze of adventures, travels. So many unexplored images in the memory banks, images taken with possible paintings in mind, elevating photographs beyond just imagery into the organisation of the random, randomising of the ordered.
Autumn flowers from Seattle come the fore in new paintings Geraniums number 3 and 4. Deadheaded geraniums floating in Tacoma’s small boat harbour, bringing to mind autumn fruitfulness from a Port Orchard garden, fresh picked raspberries on my morning porridge.
Autumn fruitfulness stored for enjoyment through an English autumn and winter season. I am prepared for winter.
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