I have to confess to not being much of a one for taking holiday photos, unless they're for reference purposes. If you're going around looking at the world through a camera lens it's very easy to miss interesting things, fall over people, put your foot in a puddle or not notice you're about to fall backwards off a cliff.
Anyway, we went to the Chippenham Folk Festival (cold and wet) and then went via Glastonbury to stay with friends in a wonderfully remote part of Devon. These shots were all taken in the Somerset Museum of Rural Life, in Glastonbury. This first one is of a tithe barn - I do love the timbering they used on these things.
And here we have what I assume is a cider press - though if any of you know better I'm prepared to believe it. It's just that it was Somerset, and it looked too big to be used for pressing flowers.
And, finally, a view of Glastonbury Tor from the yard at the Museum. It seemed much more effective to take it from ground level, cos for the Tor itself is EXTREEEMLY steep, and the top of it was awfully windy (see also my comments on why you don't want to spend your holidays looking through a camera lens, above). Considering we are supposed to be having the worst drought for 100 years, don't you think that the countryside looks rather green? And somebody forgot to tell the Rain Gods in Chippenham that they were in drought mode.
Still, it meant that we came back to a nice, green, lush garden where Nelly Moser is just starting to flower ...
Love,
CAS xxx
Puflet has to stand on the window sill to reach the higher levels.
Puflet is normally quite shy about being seen in public places, but here he is, cleaning the first of the windows of Puflet Palace. Eventually, the Palace will have a gallery all its own where people can go and look at pictures.
Now, gentle readers, this may look like a landscape featuring some horse chestnut leaves in the foreground, but if you look carefully, you will see that the air (if you can call it that) is actually populated by mackerel. They live under the sea, so I thought that other people from Illustration Friday might like to see them. The original of this is an oil painting, which took ages to do. I also like to work from direct observation, which poses problems when you're working from things like fish which get smellier and smellier the longer you keep them. You can't photograph these things - you just lose all those shimmering colours. In the end I compromised by doing a very careful drawing from observation, and then painting from the drawing.
