Sculpture
Tawny Owl Sculpture
The Tawny Owls here are noisy at the moment. Their calls are really quite musical, I’m hearing a number of different ‘hoots’, which is not surprising given it is their breeding season. The familiar hooting of the male has several functions – as a territorial call, a courtship call and also an announcing call […]
Spring Stone Carving Course
Over the weekend Lastingham rang with the sound of stone carvers – all busy on my Spring Stone Carving Course held in village. I know I’m repeating myself by saying how delighted and astonished I am about the ability of first time carvers, but just look at what was achieved in the allocated two […]
York Minster Stone Carving Festival 2018
I heard yesterday from the Stoneyard at York Minster that I have been allocated a place at the York Minster Stone Carving Festival 2018. This will be a new experience for me as I haven’t carved at a Festival before, or for that matter, ever attended one. It is an international Stone Carving Festival, […]
Fog and Fox
Still blanketed in fog here, as earlier in the week – but today feels so different. I’ve shut out the damp, cloudy feeling and I’m getting close and personal with a fox. I’m thinking of Jim Crumley and his book Encounters in the Wild – Fox as he writes so exceptionally about meeting […]
Fog and Fish
A foggy start this morning, making everything seem heavy and cold. I know it will clear soon enough, as there’s a warmer, brighter beaming of the background sun, which will shine and clarify. Sometimes carving feels like this, a shrugging off required of all superfluous stone, which weighs the shape down, a dense enclosure. […]
In the Workshop today – a Stare of Owls
The collective name most often used for owls is a Parliament – but I discovered there are many others, less well known, like Stare, what about Hooting, or Looming. They seem to make more sense to me. A Stooping, or Diss are suitably descriptive as well, or there’s a Wisdom of Owls. Anyway I’m […]
Bird Sculpture Book
In fact it is a monograph on sculptor Geoffrey Dashwood which I’m reading at the moment. It is a magnificent and illuminating book. The sculptor himself has written sections which for me, makes it doubly inspiring. It is a book of brilliance and filled with exceptional sculpture, it heaps such a surge of beauty […]
As a postscript to stuff Siberian
It still blows in – but now I’ve forgotten about the cold. Thoughts are sculpture. There are contemporary sculptors from Siberia, as well as the ancient Scythian ones. I’ve discovered Dashi Namdakov – and I’m enchanted – mesmerised. His words ‘We shall not run away from our roots, from the forces of […]
The Siberian blast
I’m feeling it here. The snow is light and dry, easily blown up by the wind to sting my face. As the next white blizzard streaks past my workshop door, I’m getting a glimpse of what it is like for Siberian sculptors! It brings to mind treasure buried in the Siberian permafrost and […]
Snowy stoat
Many layered this morning as the forecast was for really cold, glad too, as it was blizzarding at the workshop, and into the workshop! Snow gets in through the smallest gaps and holes, and seems to go round corners to find its way in and I can’t clear surfaces quickly enough. The downfalls are, […]