Felix Envy

09 felix

Hello fur-less monkeys. Sparta Puss here. I’ve got my paws on the pooter box again. The feeble-minded apes that I choose to live with went away to an icy land last week – in the middle of winter! I mean, honestly!  They paid to be cold when they could have stayed home with us and the central heating for free. Idiots. The she-monkey took her scribbly stuff away but didn’t draw any cats. She says she didn’t see any cats. No surprises there, Sherlock. No self-respecting kitteh would bother to live in an icy land.

So today the hairless primates went out into the cold to visit friends and the she-monkey drew their cat. He’s a fine figure of a Tabby called Felix. He lives in the countryside in a detached house with 3 acres of hunting grounds and his own personal wood-burning stove. Ming the Merciless and I are envious, our monkeys are obviously not working hard enough!

ps I just brought in a mouse! Hear the monkeys shriek! See them run around, flapping their monkey arms.

MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHHH!!!!!

The Hidden People

This is definitely my last blog about my recent trip to Iceland, probably. Our most excellent guide, Olafur, told us about the hidden people, the Huldufólk,   supernatural beings who live in rock formations and only rarely show themselves to humans. Many Icelanders believe in their existence.

One day, we went off road in giant jeeps to the Gigjokull glacier. As we drew near the ‘tongue’ of the glacier I noticed a vast snow-covered fissure in the icy cliff which clearly had faces staring at our vehicles across the landscape. I kept pointing them out to Husb, but he couldn’t see what I was talking about. I snapped some photos through the bus window and when I got home and put them onto the computer, I could clearly see the faces, still staring out at me. Here they are below; the scale is enormous, people are like tiny ants at the bottom of the cliff.

adjust 2

I rarely work from photos but this one really inspired me, and spooked me out a bit as well, if I’m honest. I’ve spent the past week working on the piece below. It’s size A2 on paper primed with rabbit-skin glue and coloured randomly with thin washes of yellow, red and blue acrylic paint. I’ve worked up the image in black and white oil bars.

huldenfolk 2

The faces are so obvious to me, I can see four, dominated by a rather imperious woman. There are many legends about their origin. The one that interests me most is that they’re descended from Lilith, the first wife of the biblical Adam, who ran off with the fallen angel, Samael, because Adam was a bit rubbish. In the Jewish tradition she had many children by Samael, including the Lilin, her daughters reputed to steal newborn babies, but I hadn’t come across this Icelandic version before. This was very hard to draw, it took ages to make the faces appear, almost as if they wanted to remain hidden. Spooky.

That’s the last about Iceland, unless I can ever save up enough to go back. Many thanks to Discover The World for putting together such a fantastic adventure.

Step Nine: Holy Proofs Batman

Here’s a marvellous glimpse of the new lino prints made by Swansea Print Workshop’s artist-in-residence, Fiona Kelly.

 

Step Nine: Holy Proofs Batman.

Hot And Steamy

dawn on the road

Another dawn on the road, another glimpse of the morning star. On our last day we went to the Blue Lagoon, a mineral-rich outdoor pool filled with hot volcanic waters. We had to run from the nice warm building out into the freezing cold and then plunge into the lagoon. Lovely.

Blue bridge

The skies were spectacular and the lagoon has beautiful walkways.

Lagoon 1

We arrived early enough to watch the sun rise through the hot steam.

Blue Melvyn

Husb hot and steamy 😀

Blue window

The view through a window……..

Blue roof

….and another window.

 

 

The (Late) Morning Star

morning star

It was a bit weird getting used to the very short days up near the Arctic Circle and waking up, breakfasted and out into our tour bus for a comfortable 9am start meant that we were stumbling around in pitch darkness. But it gave us a chance to see the sunrise every morning over the extraordinary volcanic Icelandic landscape. Although the nights were too cloudy with snow for us to see the Aurora Borealis, we seemed to have some fairly clear dawns and were lucky to see the moon (almost full) with Jupiter earlier in the morning and then a bit later, Venus and Saturn shining brightly over the mountain tops. Here’s the Morning Star above the heavy mountains with the slightest streak of an orangey dawn just starting to peep over the horizon. I prepared a Khadi sketchbook with a grey ink wash, applied randomly with a sponge and drew over this with compressed charcoal, chalky oil pastel and white conte crayon.

power station

We saw a lot of power stations, hydro-electric and geothermal, making good use of natural resources. They were generally quite pretty, lit up with coloured lights, contrasting with the black, barren landscape. The geothermal ones were on the volcanic bits of the island, which smelled faintly sulphurous.

Hot And Cold In Iceland

 

geysir 1

Iceland is full of geological wonders. In the freezing weather of late November, we welcomed a stop to explore geysirs and hot springs. The original Geysir, the origin of the name for all similar phenomenon, no longer blows, but a few yards away Strokkur blasts away every few minutes. The landscape is ethereally misty and lovely and warm. Earlier in the day we visited the massive waterfull, Gullfoss in appalling, freezing conditions. I tried to draw, but it was snowing heavily and I only managed about 30 seconds.

gullfoss

I scribbled a very brief impression, but the weather was too brutal to carry on. Here are some of Husb’s photos of the waterfall. It’s massive.

gullfoss 1

gullfoss 2

 

East Meets West In The North

thingvellir

Iceland is a lump of lava up by the North Pole. The reason it’s there is because volcanoes keep erupting in the area because the North American tectonic plate and the Eurasian tectonic plate are pulling apart from each other. And this keeps setting off volcanoes. As the plates rip apart from each other, a large bit of land in the middle is gradually falling down between them, forming a rift valley. It was one of the places we visited and it is the site of the ancient Viking parliament, Thingvellir. It’s an extraordinary place; one minute you’re standing on the Westernmost point of Europe and a short drive later, you clamber out on the Easternmost point of North America. Awesome. I made this drawing of an unusual rock formation in the high cliffs on the American side. I used a small piece of mounting board, pre-prepared with a grey wash and drew in compressed charcoal, white conte crayon and soft oil pastel.

drowning pool                                       church

Not far away was this frozen pond, in the top photo, which is called ‘The Drowning Pool’. It was used in times past to execute women by drowning. The trees were too small for hanging and men were executed by beheading. Grim. Underneath it is a photo facing south along the rift valley, taking in a typical country church.

the rift

On the left, North America. On the right, Eurasia, a rift valley in between.

Floyd On Ice

on the road

Travelling across Iceland with Olafur The Guide, Otto The Driver and a gaggle of, mostly, babyboomers, we went off-road in some giant jeeps up to the Gigjokull glacier. We’d had three days of deep snow, which was spectacular but unfortunately it meant that we weren’t able to see any Aurorae because of the heavy cloud cover. We set off in darkness and a blizzard (it’s so far north that sun didn’t rise until about 10am) and headed for a rendevous with our intrepid drivers, who said very seriously that the snowstorms had made conditions on the glacier treacherous and that some jeeps had been having difficulties getting into the wilderness. Then they grinned broadly with a gung-ho, bring-it-on spirit and we loaded ourselves into the jeeps and off we went on an adventure.

Truck

Look what Husb found!

The conditions were certainly the roughest I’ve experienced, and I’ve been up the Karakoram Highway! But hell, what fun! There were no roads and only the occasional track sketched very faintly in the deep snow. The landscape changes all the time; rivers alter their courses; the riverbanks can collapse without warning; all good stuff. The guys we were with knew what they were doing; they’ve been going into the wilderness since they were kids and they loved it.

Blue ice 1

The landscape is so amazing; my feeble sketch doesn’t begin to do it justice (mind you, my fingers nearly froze off after about 30 seconds, so I’m not going to beat myself up over it). On the journey back to the road, we hit a very steep river gully and there were a sticky few minutes when the jeep really struggled to pull itself out of the river and up the other side. As it strained its way up the riverbank through feet of snow, the driver cranked up the volume on the hifi and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon blared out to the cheers of the jeepload of babyboomers. Surreal and spectacular. When I first heard that album, almost 4 decades ago, I never dreamt that I’d ever hear it in circumstances like this. If I’d died at that moment, I’d have died happy :D.

blue ice 2

Scribbling On A Glacier

geysir small

ICELANDIC JOKE (courtesy of Olafur The Guide)

Q. “What do you do if you’re lost in an Icelandic forest?”

A. “Stand up.”

I guess you had to be there.

There are lots of  forests in Iceland made up of the Arctic Birch, Betula pubescens tortuosa, but because of the climate the trees are generally very short, slight and contorted. Hence the joke :). The reddish brown colour of the bare trees combined with the orangy yellow of the grasses splashed colour across the monochrome winter landscape. I scribbled the sketch in a couple of minutes (it was soooo cold) using compressed charcoal, white conte crayon and soft oil pastel onto a small piece of pink mountboard randomly prepared with a grey wash of dilute Indian ink.

Glacial pool

We travelled off-road in giant jeeps to the Gigjokull glacier where I took these photos. Despite the altitude and freezing conditions there were plenty of Arctic Birch around.

Glacial trees 2

The day was dry and clear but brutally cold and the snow very thick. Our guides showed us how to walk on deep snow without sinking (you stamp on it) but once I didn’t stamp hard enough and sank up to my thigh! We were many miles into the wilderness but saw a lonely hunter searching for ptarmigan, which is a Xmas delicacy in Iceland. It can only be hunted for personal consumption, not for sale. We didn’t get to taste any ptarmigan, but we ate smoked puffin and wild greylag goose. Very tasty.

Stacks And Giants

basalt

We spent a while on a wonderful beach of black sand covered with shiny dark, coin-shaped pebbles, fringed with towering silvery basalt columns, like the ones at the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. I couldn’t resist scribbling and despite the snow, sketched some of the basalt with one of the Reynisdrangur sea stacks in the background. Husb snapped me from above. It was freezing. I managed about 3 minutes with my gloves off.

basalt stack

This is drawn into a Khadi hand-made paper sketchpad, 20cms square, previously prepared with a sepia wash sponged on randomly. It is drawn with a Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen, size S, and graphite block. By the way, my luggage was searched at Heathrow and my bag caused a stir because the chemical sniffing machine detected graphite and that’s one of their banned substance. They made a bit of a fuss until I told them that I’m an artist and carry blocks of graphite for drawing. They could’ve asked…….

stack cave

Husb photographed the sea stacks from a large cave eroded into the basalt cliffs.