later, evening

Dusk greys the garden, lavender clouds bank in the East. I am acutely aware, despite my limited horizons, of the earth's slow, inexorable turn Eastwards. The evening is all but still; the frivolous breeze of earlier hours has given way to a gentler tide of air; the tall yellow daisies now hardly stir. Minos and I sit together on the bench beneath the cotoneaster. I watch the birds arrowing homewards and wait for the first star to ride clear in the curve of the firmament. Minos curls around on my lap. He purrs, I can feel the gentle vibration of his little body, hear the throaty rumbling.When he gets down from my lap, I repair to the house, murmering an emotional 'goodnight' to him

Still have the 'grid drawings' very much upon my mind; I worry about them, yet am compelled to continue to make them. When at first Britain went into 'lockdown', I drew as though my life depended on it; I have many 'grid drawings' to show for my efforts, among these a good many that please my eye. Two long series preoccupied me; 'as though my life depended on it', and 'with my mother in her garden at sunset'. I came to use a palette which included soft, bright, luminescent pencils; pink, orange, green and blue, several blue pencils of varying shades, crimson lake, dark violet , spectrum orange and turquoise. The 'neon' pencils glowed through the skin of graphite that I apply across the colours when I have finished filling in the little squares.

 Over the course of the last three days, I have made three drawings,using a similar palette to that above, but with the ommission of neon green and yellow; the resulting drawings are light and airy, pink and blue. I am recalled to Agnes Martin's love of pastel hues, and the delicate 'spaceiness' of the large paintings. My own endeavour is decidedly more modest, the tiny drawings intimate in scale and not varying from the format which came to please my eye when I first began to work thus, back in 2016.

As I write, the dusk deepens beyond the window, and I need to illuminate the house with electric light. I still carry the stillness and peace of our tiny urban garden within me, the hush of the threshold time between aftternoon and evening, between sunlight and twilight. Minos remains in the garden. He will have business to attend to which does not include me. Each of us in our different domains have, I hope, been enlarged by the mild scope of this evening and each other's undemanding company.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"Below the sea of clouds lies eternity"



From Wind, Sand and Stars published by Penguin Books1973

cloud studies - drawing practise

These two  tiny studies were made in the Autumn of last year, and thrust out of sight into a drawer so that I wouldn't destroy them. I have but recently returned once more to drawing, following a hiatus of some months after the two studies above were made.

I find my drawing practice much subject to inconsistency; I begin, tremulously, only to cease, having suffered a crushing sense of defeat and loss of confidence. However, periods of activity do follow each jarring halt, even if after a few weeks, or sometimes months have elapsed, and I am learning how to draw again, beginning to trust my nervous hand and reacquaint myself with my materials.

It seems that I can only draw in isolaton; I deliberately close my mind to the works of other artists, and indeed to my own earlier works, and seek to attain a meditative state, concentrating solely on the drawing in hand. I use small off cuts of paper, as yet not trusting myself to embark upon a 'finished' work on the larger sheets of paper upon which I was formerly accustomed to drawing.

As it is with my practice, so it is with studying the clouds themselves; sometimes I cannot bear to look on them, so inadequate in my endeavour do I feel. I may studiously ignore the changing cloudscapes above for weeks, before returning to my former passionate observation.

I am presently conscious of a rennaisance of will and intent, fragile still though it may be, and although often prey to bouts of deepest despair, am increasingly able to navigate a safe passage through these, or at least to wait until they have passed, now better equipped to understand that they do indeed pass,  and are replaced by calmer moods  more conducive to the resumption of  drawing practise.

cloud verse

"Clouds, that surround us like a ring of white-
Gowned nuns, their vigil gentled by the wind,
Grow taller with each mile so as to hide
The blueness underneath their spreading arms.
Their habits greying with the ageing day."


 The second verse of a poem entitled 'July Journey',
from The Desecration of Trees, by Lotte Kramer.
Published by Hippopotamus Press, Frome, Somerset, 1994.

clouds and balloons

" The single clouds hanging like balloons."



Roger Deakin   Notes From Walnut Tree Farm Hamish Hamilton Penguin Group 2008

cloud pencil names II

geranium lake  rose pink  champagne  sky blue  primrose yellow  chinese white  storm 
pale vermillion  red violet lake  ash rose  cloud grey  blue violet lake
sunset gold

there ariseth a little cloud

"There ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man's hand".


I Kings XVIII 44

cloud pencil names

felt grey  teal blue  fell mist  gunmetal  salmon  slate violet  parchment  blue grey  soft violet  light ochre  silver grey  indigo  light violet  french grey  ash blue  bistre  taupe

cloud names IV

portentous  pall  plume  with my mother in the garden at sunset  the evening of the day on which I last saw my father alive 

It is one thing to conjure names for cloud drawings yet-to-be-made, altogether another to attempt to make them.

cloud names III

presentiment  harbinger  ominous  obscurus  precipitous calamitous

skein  messenger  flotilla


My own names for clouds.

mind and body

"She could smile to herself now to think what contortions the body may twist itself into when something goes wrong in the mind. That detestation of food, those dizzying moments when you twirl helplessly on a kind of vacant devilish merry-go-round; that repetition of one thought on and on like a rat in a cage; those forebodings rising up one after the other like clouds out of the sea in an Arabian tale....."


The Wharf by Walter de la Mare from a collection of short stories entitled: Modern Short Stories edited and introduced by Jim Hunter, published by Faber Educational Books, 1969.

cloud names II

"Watchtower Smoke Syringe Hoof Pick-axe Tribunal Knickers Whip Soap House Dog Photo Revolver Dysentery Fire Scissors Shin Train Bowl Typhus Turnip Latrines Sun Coat Soup Lawyer Bed Child Straightline Coal Blanket Phenol Wool Fly Bathroom Rat Moustache Tooth Stove Lice Screams Skull America Barbed-wire."


Refusal by Soazig Aaron, translated from the French by Barbara Bray, published by Harvill Secker, London, 2007.

cloud names I

"She and her friends agreed to give names to the forty-five kinds of clouds in the five different languages they spoke. They spent some time agreeing on the names, repeating them, and then making up words out of the first or second letters of each name, and so on, then doing the same with the names spelled backwards.....

......Right up to the end, Klara told me, the clouds helped them get through the blows, the screams, the lack of privacy-....

......She gave me the list of clouds. One is missing."


Refusal by Soazig Aaron, translated from the French by Barbara Bray, published by Harvill Secker, London, 2007

cloud quotation

"When I do not walk in the clouds
I walk as though I were lost."


Antonio Porchina  Voces 1943

Translated from the Spanish by W S   Merwin.