Berry Fade

Berry-fade, originally uploaded by escher1.

My mind had been distracted from land art for quite a while so I had failed to notice the rowan berries that had suddenly sprouted on the trees. Once I had noticed I could see that they were everywhere and had a large variation in colour.

I pickeds some in Birk Bank car park and we walked along to the quarry to make something. None of the rock slabs seemed flat enough and I knew I would struggle to make anything unless the surface was perfectly flat. And I was right!

The gritstone surface undulated quite a lot and the little berries just kept rolling around. Each berry was not uniform in colour, so to get the fade affect I needed to position each one esactly one way up. How very difficult was this to do?! Extremely!

Over and over again they rolled messing up the design, so I eventually had to balance each row against the next one. One wrong touch in the wrong place would result in them all falling out of line and having to start again. Very frustrating!

After a very long time I was nearly there, only for the square to look a bit misshapen from some angles. So I spent another painful half an hour trying to reconstruct the corners. I couldn't quite get it as square as I wanted but I just couldn't take it anymore, so left it as it is. NOt bad but not totally how I wanted it to look, but I am not sure whether I could ever make it like that!

Bracken Fade

bracken fade, originally uploaded by escher1.

It has been quite a while since I made have anything but I have picked out changes in the environment, in the plants and of the landscape as the wet summer has progressed. Flowers have grown, grasses have become tall and many things have changed colour. The bracken near Birk Bank is now thick but in places where the heather has been burnt back they are shorter and dotted here and there are plants stifled of a drink with hues or burnt umber, orange yellow and pale green that are just crying out for a fade design. First of all I was going to use a whole branch for each colour and create something larger, but the wind was strong and I couldn't find anywhere large and flat enough to do this. I then tried to create a swirling design over a rock hole but it looked too untidy. Finally I settled on this two fronds of the same colour opposing. As I am a little out of practice my attention to detail is lacking and the result looks a little out of balance to me. The fade from yellow to green is too sharp, but as a first try it isn't bad. One thing I had noticed about note doing some land art for a while was the things I had missed as I had not immersed myself fully in the environment as you must do when trying to create something of merit, and so I had missed the sprouting of rowan berries all over, they are thousands of them and intriguingly their colours range from a pale yellow right through to deep red and are just crying out for something to be made from them.