I recently worked on an illustration commission for NaturBornholm, one of Bornholm’s premier visitor attractions. Geologically speaking, Bornholm is the only place in Denmark where traces of dinosaurs can and have been discovered, and NaturBornholm have put together an exhibition based on the (quite limited) footprints, teeth and other bone fragments that have been found in the last century or so on Bornholm.

Without the ‘wow factor’ of huge skeletons, NaturBornholm decided to commission some really quite incredible dinosaur models from a Copenhagen based company called 10tons and create a family friendly but informative exhibition. The models are life-size, feel incredibly real, and are about as close as you can get to standing beside a living dinosaur. I was commissioned to create a series of illustrations to support NaturBornholm’s exhibition narrative.

A bit of a dream commission really… but pretty much everything I do is rooted in ‘live’ observation in some way or other, so I was a little out of my comfort zone. But, as everyone knows now, birds are dinosaurs, and this fact – together with a childhood spent perched on the kitchen table drawing innumerable prehistoric creatures – meant that I felt confident enough to take on and complete what turned out to be quite a large commission. My watercolours and drawings were blown up and printed on 2m high partition walls, together with the text and some of the objects.

NaturBornholm has just taken delivery of some new dinosaur models, which will be placed out in the open, outside the visitor centre, and the next part of the commission is to create some illustrations supporting these models, with activities for families and so on. Updates will be coming…

‘Earthbound’ the exhibition is opening in about four weeks (Thursday the 5th of May, Gudhjem Museum, Bornholm) and I am busy working on the paintings I will be exhibiting. I will be showing ‘time-based’ work, where I am looking at changes (in light, colour, form, vegetation, etc) at specific locations on Bornholm through time (minutes, hours, weeks, months, the year).

All my work for this exhibition is either painted out ‘in the field’ or based on sketches I have done in the field. A side ‘theme’ to my work in ‘Earthbound’ is looking into the process of creating ‘finished works’ from sketches – so some of the finished pictures I will be showing are paintings of paintings of paintings, a sort of ‘chinese whispers’ that means that more personal subjectivity is added with each ‘layer’. So while some of my paintings will be immediate (for instance sketches of a preening gull done every five minutes for half an hour) others will be more ‘processed’. This whole area really fascinates me and underpins everything I do… observation, interpretation…

My main source of inspiration has been the view from my studio – a field, some trees and a band of trees a little further away. For once, there will be very few birds in this exhibition – at least from me… Lone Schiøtz will be exhibiting some of her wonderful birds. Barbara Sørensen, Eva Brandt and Hans Henning Pedersen make up the rest of the ‘Earthbound’ artists, all of whom take their inspiration from Bornholm’s natural environment in one way or another.

I’m really looking forward to this one… more pictures and an exhibition report to follow…

Wallasea Island lies in the Thames estuary on the River Crouch in Essex and is the site of one of the most exciting habitat creation projects in western Europe. The RSPB is creating a landmark new reserve here using waste spoil from London’s Crossrail Project which is deposited on the island in order to raise the ground level by several metres across 1,500 acres. Controlled breaches of the existing sea wall will then create new saltmarsh, lagoons and islands. The RSPB has invited the SWLA (Society of Wildlife Artists) to document this massive feat of engineering by creating an artistic record of the change in habitat from sterile agricultural land to a landscaped wildlife haven.

An earlier residency took place in the third week of April, with seven artists recording the machinery and bird life of the region. Between the 21st and the 24th of September, and together with five other artists from the SWLA (Carry Akroyd, Brin Edwards, Dafila Scott, Robert Greenhalf and Johnnie Foker), I was lucky enough to take part in this exciting project.

Meeting up on-site, we were given a tour of the project by one of the wardens. An almost lunar landscape, the vast sky and flat horizons were unlike anything I was used to. The infill with soil from the Crossrail project was complete (although they still hope for more spoils from alternative sources) and some of the sea walls had been breached, meaning parts of the area were flooded with the high tide. Bird life was sparse and the distant, save a few thousand canada geese.

The weather was…English and the first day was spent under an umbrella trying to sketch and not get too wet. The weather improved over the next few days and I managed to fill half a sketchbook. As everything was new, I found myself rushing around trying to record and get to grips with everything (=not getting anything done). I felt like I needed to ‘connect’ more deeply with the landscape, and on the second day I decided to limit myself to recording the rise and fall of the tide on one particular creek.

Wallasea is a really fascinating place and a really exciting project. I had some really interesting chats with walkers and birdwatchers passing by, and I really hope the RSPB manages to fund a return trip (or trips) – an artistic response to the changes through time could really make this project come alive in an exciting and more valuable way. I can’t wait to go back and see how it develops (hint hint)…

DFUNK is the name of a brilliant organisation in Denmark that helps young refugees. They do lots of different activities, with an emphasis on raising awareness of the plight of young refugees, and getting them integrated into Danish society.

One of the things they do is hold a summer camp, where they invite young refugees in Denmark together with young Danish people, to live, work, eat and play together for a whole week. During the week there are lots of different activities and workshops – the whole emphasis is on having fun, making friends and – well that’s it really. The atmosphere is fantastic and very positive. Denmark is bloody good at this sort of thing.

In July, I was invited to teach some workshops over a two-day period at Jyderup Højskole. We started off doing some ‘architectural constructions’ with spaghetti and marshmallows, and moved on to charcoal drawing self-portraits. On the last day we did some ‘land art’ – where we had to go out into the (very picturesque) surroundings with an egg and create some sort of sculpture, using only the materials that we found.

My initial description of what we would be doing was met with rather blank stares, but in no time at all they got the ‘gist’ of what it was all about, and a few hours later, had produced some really cool stuff…

Fugle, Naturligvis (= Birds, Naturally) is the name of my new exhibition opening at midday, Sunday the 28th of June at Galleri Vang, in Vang, Bornholm. 

The Gallery at Vang is an old stonecutters’ workshop, and what it lacks in ammenities (= er, lighting!) it makes up for in location. It sits right on the beach almost, in the shadow of the overgrown walls of the old granite quarry, and I’m really looking forward to putting some of my stuff on the walls. There will be large charcoal drawings of Barnacle Geese, together with watercolour sketches (and sketchbooks) from Bornholm, Estonina and Scotland.

The Gallery is open every day from 12 until 6pm and Saturday the 4th of July (start closing 4pm on the last day). See you there!

See ‘vangflyer’ below for the poster…

vangflyer

Just back from a week-long sketching and painting trip to the wilds of Estonia… We were four – myself and three bird, flower and plant experts /nerds – and we used every opportunity to watch, collect, observe, photograph, listen and draw and paint (me) the local flora and fauna. The song of the Cuckoo and nightingale were our constant companions. 

The whole country (at least what we saw of it) is heavily forested. Very flat and rather unspoilt. The population density seemed very low, and we saw only fleeting glimpses of the locals. Based on my mostly hire car-based superficial musings, there seemed to be a strange mixture of things going on – on the one hand an obviously neglected and decaying Soviet-era industrial and agricultural infrastructure, but juxtaposed with an assured Nordic sophistication and an influx of Euro-wealth (at least, in the metropolitan centres). Non-existent signage to a bird tower, but with a beautifully translated English description. Weird.

We started off by basing ourselves deep in the woods by Lihula, where we made several trips to the forests and marshes in the surrounding areas. Whilst we missed out on the big concentrations of migrating birds, and were perhaps a little early for the flowers, there was still lots happening and passing through. Highlights included a HUGE flock of Barnacle Geese (6,000? All of which at one point put up by a sea eagle, which were also very numerous) and an obliging Lesser Spotted Eagle. We then moved on to Sareemaa (an island) where I stayed put while they went off looking for orchids. We spent the last few days just north of Haapsalu where we went looking for marshes and bogs. At one wonderful location there were Black Grouse, Montague’s Harriers, Black Kites and Lesser Spotted Eagles all flapping about  in front of me. Almost too much to take in. Amazing.

Anyway, I ended up getting lots of sketching done – actually mostly of birds I see here at home – but the light was good and the birds were performing. Some House Martins collecting mud for their nests… some back-lit Swans battling a strong wind…. Yellow Wagtails prancing about on some sleeping sheep… the monotonous song of the Great Reed Warbler… these are some of the things I took back and will be working on… And thanks to my companions for taking on the lion’s share of the organising, planning and driving…

I’m in the process of trying to get funding to take an exhibition of five artists working on Bornholm (including me) to exhibit at the Oxmarket Gallery in Chichester. The exhibition is called ‘Earthbound’ as we all take our primary inspiration from the natural environment of Bornholm. What with transport, insurance, lodging and so on, it’s quite an ambitous undertaking, but I am really excited at the thought of showing off Bornholm art to a wider audience.

The artists are – me, Barbara Sørensen (mostly oils), Eva Brandt (ceramics), Hans Henning Pedersen (wooden vessels) and Lone Schiøtz Nielsen (watercolours and prints). Three rejections already, but my fingers are crossed – I really hope we get some support for this as I’m convinced this will be a Good Thing.

…is a charismatic and enigmatic bird. I was lucky enough to have recently been loaned a dead nightjar by a birdwatcher here on Bornholm, who had found it dead (struck by a car I think?). The breast was quite damaged, one wing was broken and many tail feathers were missing, but it was still amazing to get so close to a bird that I had only ever heard ‘churring’, or seen very fleetingly before.

When you get the chance to really look at a bird like this, you get the opportunity to witness all of the incredible adaptations and peculiarities that each bird has. The hard feather-bristles around the beak, the strange serrated comb on its claw, the long and graceful hawk-like wings. And its beak! It actually looked quite small and sweet (or so thought my daughter) until you open its mouth, and then you can see the incredible gape. With its huge mouth and bristles it resembles nothing but a minature airborne baleen whale – so said my daughter, and she was quite right.

And then the markings! Incredibly detailed and intricate. A (young?) female. Out in the field I’m always telling myself not to get too bogged down in the details, but here, in the luxury of the studio, with a immobile subject, I relish the opportuinty to really lose myself in the details. I tend to get into an almost zen-like state, for hours on end my eye caresses each feather, and I start to see the rhythms within the patterns of the plumage. Each bird has this – the way that the colours and/or markings alter and metamorphse as you work your way ‘through’ the feathers – there is a pattern there to be discovered, and there was so much to discover with this bird.

After four days, however, it was time to put it back in the freezer. Despite painting with the window open and the heating off, it all got a bit ‘much’ at the end. Next up, a common partridge I found just before Christmas…

The weather has been so awful recently. Rain, wind and no sunlight. I’ve been keeping myself busy with drawing the tree and house sparrows that congregate on the hawthorn bush right outside my studio door (they sit there and preen  and chatter, before they swoop down and steal all my chicken’s food).

I don’t usually attempt to draw the smaller passerines – anything smaller that a blackbird usually moves too quickly – but the sparrows are there all the time, so there is nearly always a ‘new model’ on hand. I’m going to make it my mission to really keep these going and see where it takes me.