They can see that he’s just a fool
As he never gives an answer
But the fool on the hill
Sees the sun going down
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning around”
There is a large chunk of me in this Beatles song. As a service brat I was always moving, never part of a community, always an outsider, a watcher trying to understand the scene I had been pitched into (See ‘The outsider, a Perpetual Watcher’)
One of several banks of peonies
Until last year I had spent 13 years on a hill in Surrey. I was working, but also every day watching the weather, photographing the garden and drawing less than I wanted to. All to the point where I became afraid to draw as the skills atrophied. Now I have a new garden, a new environment which OH and I are busy moulding and I’m beginning to draw again, fighting impatience. Impatience over results is destructive, and I am trying to just let the images flow.
Gold in them thar flars
With finer weather now here I am able to spend more time outside drawing, building my visual vocabulary anew. I am struck with wonder again at what I see, and the cameras are working with the drawing to build this visual vocabulary up. Yesterday I started to draw and photograph the gold I discovered within the peonies.
Their colour seems short lived as petals seem to get paler over the day, and the life of a flower seems relatively short. Capturing the colour was my goal, and having filled some pages in the sketch book and taken many photographs I am ready to push forward, going with the flow, see where it leads.
New buds and new seeds too
William Blake wrote
“To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.”
No longer on a hill I am trying to be an innocent eye, to just enjoy. To see pure gold in the heart of a flower is my reward this week
“He never listen to them
He knows that they’re the fools
They don’t like him
The fool on the hill”
(Lennon & McCartney)