St. Martin's, Isles of Scilly
In June, we were in the Isles of Scilly gathering material, sketching and collecting images and impressions. St. Martins is one of the smaller off-islands of the archipelago, which is located off the SW coast of Cornwall. Each year, we combine sailing, sketching, drawing and painting, and use the period to generate ideas and projects for the year to come.On this trip, I was sketching coastline, rock and seascapes with a view to producing more multi-block lino images in the series which I began last year with "Hell Bay," which was exhibited and sold at the Oxford Arts Week Exhibition in May at our Strawbale Gallery inDuns Tew. Specifically, I had in mind an area of St. Martins known as The Plains which is ideal to illustrate a poem called "The Call of the Windswept Downs." This was written by a classicist late great aunt of mine, Ellen Owen, in the 1930's and recently discovered in her effects as part of a large series of previously unknown poems written in pencil in exercise books, and worked up to a final draft condition. I am intending to typeset a selection of these poems, and to hand-print them using our Adana 8x5 with illustrations taken from lino or wood cuts. I did find a suitably wind-swept part of the downs, and produced both sketch and linocut while we were still in Scilly. At the same time, Rosie was working on a two-block reduction image, which is still in the process of being refined, and I managed to sketch and cut a block to represent Cancer pagurus - specifically our lunch on the first Wednesday. This vast edible crab was provided to us by Ian the fisherman with whom we stay each year.
The final product of our annual trip to Scilly goes far beyond the actual images we sketch, paint or cut at the time. This is a period of great creativity for us both. Many of our ideas, plans and projects for the coming year are first formulated on Scilly, which also provides us with breathing space to begin afresh when we return...
