Nooks
Old twine embedded in branches like bracelets,
Small mossy spaces. 
Limbs that strangle.  
When I was a child (I had a good imagination) I would have imagined gnomes in these spaces - gnomes with hearty white beards,  like gnomes like in my precious Will Huygen book.  

I don't see trees anymore, I see limbs, legs and arms.  90 degree angled arms like traffic conductors on busy box junctions illustrated in my old copy of the Highway Code.  

There's something poetic about this but I'm reluctant to launch into word - painting, making, photographing and constantly singing and occasionally dancing - (or maybe it's just arsing around for the woodlouse's amusement) is enough for now.    To respond to this place, I will make it my playground.  There aren't many people in West Somerset, so no one's watching - apart from the sheep and a few woodlice and it's quite liberating to play at being a tree.  

My work has always felt seasonal, documentation in the summer, when my tenagers are constantly hungry and I spend more energy making sourdough than painting.  But I never stop looking, especially at shadows at this time of year, looking at how they fall.  I love Phyllida Barlow's drawings - the strong shadows and wonder if she decided where the shadow would be in a drawing, or whether she made the maquettes, shone a light at them, and her shadows are true?  

I have a young assistant, who at 14, doesn't mind curling up in a tree nook for me - this is so useful, for the documentation and when the nights set in, and everyone's back at school and university this will inform new art.  I always follow the unknown, and approach things with a very open mind, I love not knowing what the art work I'll make will look like after a couple of months of playing amongst these trees.  

I could write reams about this. Making pictures of pictures: graffiti, snippets from the Beano, vintage children’s book illustrations, symbols taken from maps. Sometimes I manipulate these images and make them my own, sometimes I don’t.  Often they’re perfect just as they are.

It's over-quoted probably - but this does resonate: "When you start working, everybody is in your studio - the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all your own ideas - all are there.  But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one and you are left completely alone.  Then, if you're lucky, even you leave"   John Cage - and quoted by Philip Guston (my love). 

The daily avalanche of images our smart phones kindly deliver - a bit overwhelming - no?  Addictive - yes!  

I killed a bit of time in Waterstones Charing Cross waiting for a connecting train to Sussex in the summer and leafed through Beg, Steal and Borrow: Artists Against Originality by Robert Shore.  

I agree there can't be such a thing as truly original art, that we're all borrowing and remixing.  

The questions about originality, authorship and ethics..... big questions for AI too......  

The crucial distinction between appropriation and plagiarism revolves around intent I guess, the degree of transformation (if there is indeed any transformation).  What about acknowledgement?

I had a chat with Perplexity AI about this: 
"Appropriation artists may not always directly cite the source but often operate with the assumption that the source is recognizable to the public, especially in cases involving iconic images, and the context makes the act of borrowing.  Plagiarists deliberately obscure the origin, intending for the viewer to believe the work is entirely their own creation"

Thinking about my own work - say the painting I made in June with the Pink Panther leaving  solid ground with anxious expression in a hot air balloon (?!).  I assume he is recognisable to most people.  

Perplexity tells me that I should have considered copyright and trademark as he is fully protected under US law and managed by MGM!   The copyright expires around 2060, so maybe he'll hibernate until then.  Titling it Pink Panther made the situation worse - as that "implies an association with the trademark owner (MGM) "

I'm not alone painting the Pink Panther - there's Katherine Bernhardt - https://galeriemagazine.com/katherine-bernhardt-art-omi-pink-panther/

I had a look wondering if she asked permission - I'm not genuinely concerned btw, or remotely hesitant about the images I use, just curious... - there's no mention of a licensing agreement.  Perplexity AI says "her work is placed in a legally risky position, even if enforcement is rare for artists working in the fine art context."

This is just 'Loose Thoughts' - just things that I think about as I'm about to ditch assemblages (again). 

I can't remember where I found this piece of plastic - Dungeness maybe, its edges have been softened by the sea, there's a handle on the other side, thick plastic - sun bleached and been around a while I expect - like the old days when plastic toys didn't break - and could be passed down again and again, ... 1970s Fisher Price.    I like the skin-like wrinkles in the hair roller - echoing the wrinkles on the back of my hands.  

For a long time I’ve avoided responding directly to the landscape around me, despite living in a wild, rural place. I think it’s because I’ve found it overwhelming in its totality - vast, unknowable and not truly mine as I wasn't born here and West Somerset isn't my roots.  I think about this wild place I live in though, the landscape here is impossible to ignore, a bit like the weather!  What I’ve been able to connect with more easily (so far) are the fragments within the landscape: human interventions, remnants and materials that break through the natural surface. 

Having recently graduated, with an MA behind me and a rambling body of two year's worth of work that feels mostly resolved, I'm ready to shift.  The MA brought clarity and focus and a voice within me keeps whispering - respond to your place! 

So I'm determined to try - not to depict my environment not as a whole - (at least for the moment), but to respond to smaller elements that speak to me.   Currently I’m drawn to the laid beech hedges that criss-cross the Quantocks and Exmoor: their gnarly trunks like fists, joints and elbows, the way they grow at strange angles because of how they've been shaped and interrupted by the hedge-laying process. There’s something resilient and quietly sculptural about them.  They remind me of Arthur Rackham's anthropomorphic trees.  Hello, there's childhood again - however much I try to keep the past out of my work, I can't seem to shut it down. 

My process is  - Walk, Photograph then Respond.  Nothing new there - I've been doing this since my late teens.   I don't always draw - but I should do as I find drawing a good way of working something out.   An HB pencil, or a stick of charcoal, nothing precious - in a notebook or back of an envelope -  get it down before my wandering mind moves onto something else.  

I'm not an expert - but I believe some of these gnarly stumps are quite ancient - hedge banks which lined routes used by farmers for centuries for livestock.  Old hedge banks - a system of earth banks and walls topped with beech trees.  ​