Don’t Fall Off!
Posted on February 28, 2014
some watercolours from last autumn in the Célé valley. Vertigo?
Impossible blue sky but true… yes true deep blue with only free wheeling birds 🙂 The blue sky that envelops us all… that evokes a sense of freedom in me 🙂
Watercolour of Spring in the Dordogne
Posted on February 2, 2014
This Candlemas morning (“festa candelarum”, the festival of candles), there was the first ray of sunlight after weeks of heavy rain. The light is again high & strong. I’m yearning for spring & fresh air & sunlight.
This watercolour from March last year. Hope that February won’t be rude or glacial! It can be freezing & extreme in February here in the Dordogne. Half way through winter now!
In pre-Christian times, this day was known as the ‘Feast of Lights’ and celebrated the increase strength of the life-giving sun as winter gave way to spring. – http://projectbritain.com/year/candlemas.html
Watercolour of a Lotus Flower
Posted on January 25, 2014
This was the last lotus flower of 2013 that I saw on the lotus pond. Somewhat battered by the winds & cold nights here in the Dordogne. But still offering up its golden heart, despite of it all.
I love the life cycles of flowers. Yes they reach apogee, perfection then deteriorate, disband, fall apart. Sometimes even in the time span of a morning. Doesn’t this transience make them all the more beautiful?
Currently enjoying the tips of sprouting daffs & hyacinths in the garden.
Vignobles, Dordogne 1
Posted on November 21, 2011
watercolour
28 x 38 cm (approx 11 x 15 inches).
© The Artist. sold
Lime Grove, Chateau de Beduer
Posted on July 30, 2011
watercolour 15″ x 11″ Early moring, brightearly summer sunshine, see the leaves glowing green-gold.
pssttt! – don’t be scared of green!
Posted on July 30, 2011
Homage to green – the green fuse , the living green, the vernal green , the green that oxygenates us & lets us breathe fresh, clean air. When I painted these green watercolours the air was so beautiful with fragent green sappy smells. 🙂
into the sunlight (contrajour) vs. sunlit from behind in watercolor
Posted on July 16, 2011
watercolor
30 x 40cm (approx 11 x 15 inches).
watercolor
30 x 40cm (approx 11 x 15 inches).
© The Artist.Same gate, different lighting. Not just a cloudy vs. sunny day but the light in front of you as opposed to the light coming from behind. Good exercise!
These two watercolours were demonstrations from Chateaux Painting Holidays, France 2010 & 2011. I talk about demonstrations & art teaching here. Therees also some Youtube short demos to see there too. Enjoy 🙂
La Dordogne à Beynac 2
Posted on March 17, 2011
28 x 38 xm (approx 11 x 15 “).
© adam cope
number two of two paintings
“the light’s changed…”
La Dordogne à Beynac 1
Posted on March 14, 2011
28 x 38 cm – approx 15 x 11″
© dam that cope
River Dropt 2 – Wendell Berry on Local Care of Shared Places
Posted on February 21, 2011
Wendell Berry on Local Care of Shared Places:”My wife, Tanya, and I were just in Massachusetts visiting with a friend of ours, Rachel Fletcher, who had organized some of her neighbors in her town to make a “riverwalk.”
A little river runs right through the middle of her town. For maybe generations people had looked at the river the way we Americans have learned to look at rivers—as something to carry things away that we don’t want. The town had just tumbled whatever they didn’t want down among the trees on the river bank.
Rachel began to persuade people to allow a riverwalk to be built across their back lots. She organized cleanups, and people would come and bring their children. They picked up all the trash and cleared the river bank and built their walk, and they made a beautiful thing.
Any walk through the woods gives one a lot to look at, especially a walk along a riverbank. People made donations to put in seats in memory of loved ones who had died and so on. That was how it started.
The next thing that happened was that people who had property on the other side of the river, who weren’t organized into this effort at all, began to clean up their lots. So here you’ve got a neighborhood institution that is minimally organized. So far as I know, it has no trust fund. But it’s cherishing something local that everybody can have in common, and to me a thing like that can’t go wrong. It’s just a little narrow walkway, scaled right, but it’s an enormously suggestive thing.
It was a way for people in the neighborhood to give days of their labor to one another, to give one another shares in their mutual place, to make a place where they would meet each other without agenda or schedule. And as the cleanup across the river would indicate, it has an influence.
So that’s the way my instinct says to work. If you believe in goodness, if you believe that goodness has a power, then why not act on your faith and do something good and see if it won’t call forth more goodness?”
Jack Jezreel interviews Wendell Berry, U.S. Catholic magazine.