"Last Haiku" finished

Through the eye of the telescope

The falling eagle is coming on after a good session yesterday. Almost prefer it as a white silhouette. Will need to add more descriptive detail into the forest beneath. Sky looking good.

The most recent watercolour is the least successful. The first is still the best and the shortest in terms of execution!

Cityscape studies

The first in a series of watercolours painted from outside our top floor flat in Deptford. The wind whistles, the birds make a right racket and the paint just moves and swirls..whatever the weather!

New Year, new work

We are back living on Crossfields estate in Deptford. We managed to move in before Christmas after a few days staying at my parents where we enjoyed a bit of heavy snow!

The flat is small but tidy and suits us fine for the time being. The one thing that is hard to get used to is the sound of traffic 24/7. Maya nearly getting hit by a car running a red light and witnessing a phone mugging brings you down to earth with a bump! It has been great seeing loads of friends and going out. London has changed a lot in a short time.

The photos above and below are showing the progression of my latest painting featuring the lightning-struck eagle I saw before leaving Portugal. It was such a powerfully metaphorical image that I had to capture it visually. It took time finding the right eagle image (I will also be using images of it from memory). It is a collage of 4-6 different landscape photos from around where we were living at Moses. On the 3rd photo you can see the lightning cutting across the composition, opposing the diagonal of the treeline. The borders will have a dark, circular telescopic effect: really hard to paint! This will need a lot more work. I should add in the drawings and watercoulor studies too.

It has been a good first couple of weeks back at Welling school. I feel lucky to have got straight back into a job (albeit slightly different) at a funny time of year. The welcome from staff and students has verged on overwhelming! It feels wierd teaching in a media room (Nina's old room) but it has actually taken that long to adjust. Teaching film studies is great, though preparation and planning needs more work. The current unit is British film from a macro perspective and I've selected Clockwork Orange and Harry Brown. Taken a trip to the BFI on the south bank for a seminar on the evolution of Hollywood and the studio system. Fairly basic, but still really informative with clips from Dark Knight, Memento and the full viewing of Sherlock Holmes. The latter was surprisingly good. Took some getting used to seeing Holmes portrayed by RDJ on a occasions like a cross between Charlie Chaplain and Jackie Chan!

The melancholy of departure

So, all good things come to an end. During a tempestuous storm on 7th December the decision was made. We were going back to London. It was an intense last two weeks of heated discussions, tears, visions (most notably a falling Eagle struck by lightning) and dreams. We went round saying our goodbyes, starting with the lovely Winter family. It was hard to do after 4 wondrous months but this was it. I will miss the stream, the wind in the trees, the shadows, the birds, the insects, the light, the big landscape, then sunsets, and all the other memories of fresh outdoorsy life. Mas nao pod ser.

Violet's teachers wept when we told them we were leaving and only then did we realise what a bond they had ll formed with Violet, kids included. We all cried loads, especially when after taking us out for a leaving meal they showed us a powerpoint of all Violet's moments since starting! Gulp!
The trip back up through Portugal and Spain was smooth until we needed petrol at midnight 100km from Santander with all the petrol stations shut and it had started to snow! Fortunately we found a nearby hotel in a small skiing town to stop for the night.

After stopping for a few days at my folks, we were lucky enough to move into a flat on Crossfields estate in Deptford. The flat is bijou but clean and tidy with less stuff in than we normally need so it will be 4 months of a more streamlined existence unti we move back into our house in April.

Yesterday I spoke to Floresdocabo and have now booked the exhibition in Sintra for mid-April. Bring it on.

102: Tues 7th December

The big bird falls slowly;

Lightning pauses,

the bell in my head tolls.