Drawing Tuesday - view from a window

Having taken, from my window, lots of photos of people outside Tesco, across the road, thinking to combine their poses into "something", I had a different idea, in which a poem on my blog (2014) meets a page of an older sketchbook (2016).

"Of the Surface of Things" by Wallace Stevens 

I

In my room, the world is beyond my understanding,

But when I walk, I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud.

After Etel Adnan

So I set out to capture Stevens' image with Adnan's simplicity. And got bogged down in varying the composition - "a cloud and three or four hills" is not a lot of elements to be imaginative with.

The most Adnan-like scene is at the bottom of the page, when I switched to coloured pencils, as in my earlier drawings -

Others stuck to the brief - by far the best policy!

From Janet B:  Way, way out of my comfort zone but good mental exercise.

From Janet K:  This is the view from my work bench.

From Carol:  Just before lockdown we were charged with sourcing the roses to refresh the memorial bed at church with a view to having a planting thanksgiving service to follow. All named roses and really difficult to find. Needless to say all is closed down and cancelled and we are now left with the job of trying to keep them healthy in pots throughout the summer.

From Najlaa:  The lovely trees at the back of my house brings lots of birds daily. I saw magpies, robins, monk parakeet and squirrels chasing some birds.

From Sue:  Good to have sunny weather and good light to work with.

Here are our views from the house - Rich decided to join in today!

Richard

Sue

From Judith:  Nearly finished then the sun came out and view looked much better but too late!

Joyce's view is from her landing window -

From Mags:  Not really suitable paper for watercolour but fun to do. Most of my window paintings have been from the train so makes a change.

From Jo, views from upstairs -

Dip-in pen, india ink, + bit of brush+water

Fine-liner pen + water soluble crayons
"The house opposite from upstairs. Right - Tresco pine planted
 too near the house. Left - eucalyptus ditto!

Back garden - Water soluble pencils, candle wax on paper
 behind magnolia tree (mid-right) and neon yellow fine pen

A north London view from guest artist Gill: It’s done using pen and ink.

Seeing all these, I sat at my studio table-under-the-window and looked and drew as the light faded, continuing until the many greens became indistinguishable -

Les Hortillonnages, Amiens

In Amiens, I stumbled upon the Hortillonnages. In fact when I looked at the map to see where Amiens might be, it was the configuration of blue that caught my eye - it turned out to be the river Somme, and what a lot of lakes etc...

You can walk for 7km along a riverside path ... but on the day my feet took me towards the park, and an instinct sent the feet along a different path, the sun was low in the sky. 

Les Hortillonnages are the area at top left - here's the satellite view, closer up -

An area of drainage canals and small islands containing gardens and summer cottages, accessible only by small boats. It's been like this for about 800 years; originally the area covered 10,000 hectares, now only 300 hectares are left, of which 25 hectares or so are used by a dozen of the remaining market gardeners.

A short way along the road was a sign indicating an art display -

 Over the bridge (the passerelle) we go, to check it out -

 What a lovely peaceful place.

 Part of Sheena Seek's installation -

Hopefully the text will be legible if you click on the image -

 The next one didn't work so well for me -

 This was hard to photograph -

 One part of the larger whole - it had a really good feeling to it -

 Not art, just someone's hidey-hole....

 Back to the installations - a hop yard -

 These lovely white branches, a skeleton that might be walking around in the forest -

 Some things that were there became part of "the art" ...

 A distant view of something jolly -

 More glimpses over the canals -

 Back to the art - this one was large and you only "got it" after walking around for a while -

 A view into the city, and this strange monster crawling out of the swamp...

 Back to the riverside and the calm reflections of evening -

 But it was the anarchic area of old cottages and leaping spans (high enough to pole a boat underneath) that was so interesting -