This blog has been up and running for seven years. Where that time went, I have no idea, but I thought the occasion should be marked. So this month I’ve gone back to the very first blog, 'On Titchwell Marsh', to give it an Anniversary showing. For some of you it may be the first time you’ve seen it. For others it will be a case of ‘seven years? You’re joking. It only seems like last month when I read this one.’ Others again will have totally forgotten it amid all the events and crises of the past few years. ‘On Titchwell Marsh’ was one of a number of pieces that came out of a day spent sketching and painting at the RSPB Titchwell nature reserve. It was painted on quarter-imperial Wookey Hole rough watercolour paper, using the size 10 round brush pictured below. Anyway, enough of the preamble. Here it is... ~ On Titchwell Marsh, 2016 I first painted at Titchwell Marsh in 1978, accompanied by the booming of a bittern hidden somewhere in the reeds. When I visited last month, it was the lonely piping of the oystercatcher that greeted me. It was one of those days when there were subjects everywhere, and I hardly knew where to start. Like a little bird trying to decide where to build its nest, I went from this spot to that and back again. I spent a lot of time just looking, taking it all in, mentally editing - mooching up and down, settling on 'angles'. Below me, the waders were doing their own mooching, probing the nutrient-rich mud with knitting pin beaks, and leaving a web of wandering trails behind them. At length, this is the subject I settled on, looking East across the brackish lagoon: People tend to write off mud as brown, but it really isn't. This mud reflected the silvery light, with a diaphanous shimmer of pinkish and violet greys. The swathes were incised by snaking ribbons of water. And that island of reeds in the middle distance - if there was a bittern secreted down there today, it was keeping 'mum'. The only movement down on the mud was the constant mooching of the waders. You'll notice I haven't painted them in. People do comment, 'You never paint the waders in, why?' Well, at this scale they'd be nothing but a peppering of full stops and commas. The light, the mud, the reed bed and the blue-green distance were enough for me. And that haunting call of the oystercatcher followed me home... ~ This and other paintings of Titchwell can be viewed on the Landscape and Marine page under 'Watercolours'. Before anyone queries the brush technique, I should just point out that the flight of birds in the upper left of the subject was not painted with a size 10, but with a rigger. Had I used a size 10 brush for those, they would have come out as clumping great forty-pounders. I know this for a fact, because the first time I attempted a flight of birds, using a size 10 brush, my tutor at the time looked over my shoulder and said, ‘Well, there’s a herd of clumping great forty-pounders, if ever I saw one…’
Comments are closed.
|
Judith Key
Judith Key is a Norfolk based artist, working in watercolour and pastel. She has exhibited with the Society of Graphic Fine Artists and New English Art Club at the Mall Galleries, London. Her paintings are in collections worldwide. Categories
All
Archives
May 2018
|