Poetry

We spent some time in Pembrokeshire last week, mostly around the cathedral city of St. David's. I love the sea, so for me it felt like coming home. Having bumped into illustrator Jackie Morris on the beach, we had a long chat about the direction of our work...I have so many sketches dreaming of becoming weathervanes, so I can't wait for the new gallery & studio to be back in order. I also seem to have adopted a new obsession with wild flowers after strolling the coast path with the dogs. Most people come back from Pembrokeshire in love with seals, dolphins & puffins...

The charming little rabbit weathervane has now left for Virginia, and the apple shipped off to Norway as well, so the studio is all but empty as we finish building work. Spending days in the office where I found an old poem of mine:

oh the winds they are so great
rattling at the garden gate
knocking at my kitchen door
as they blow across the moor
whistling through the trees so high
pushing clouds across the sky
spinning round the weathervane
I hope these are the winds of change

Okay,okay slightly simplistic & the first line is even a bit Monty Python ("oh Lord you are so great, so absolutely huge"...wasn't Eric Idle great in the closing ceremony of the Olympics!), but the Dartmoor days were when our kids were small. Surely I was reading Maurice Sendak's
Chicken Soup with Rice: A book of Months:

"in March the wind blows down the door
and spills my soup upon the floor
it laps it up and roars for more.
Blowing once, blowing twice
Blowing chicken soup with rice."

hear Carol King singing it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syAtmgKqc9c

Jackie Morris

Friend, artist, author and illustrator Jackie Morris first approached us to make a weathervane based on one of her stories, when we still lived on Dartmoor. The story, called "East of the Sun, West of the Moon" was a wonderful retelling of an old Norse tale.  I remember being told the story as a child, and especially remember the Kittelsen print of the young girl, so upright, riding on Kong Valemon's enormous back.

And why might I be mentioning this now? Well funny enough I am working on a Sun & Moon weathervane, so it was intriguing that Jackie's weathervane should pop up on a Google Search....esp. as there is neither a sun or a moon in the design.

Jackie's story followed the journey of a young girl who must travel East of the Sun and West of the Moon to save her bewitched lover, who is trapped in the form of a polar bear.
The resulting design of a girl riding a polar bear, can be seen on our website or "in action" on this You Tube link. It is interesting to see how the copper has darkened and started to gain a patina.
An avid blogger herself, Jackie can be followed on Drawing a line in time. I love her enthusiasm for including us all in her Process: whether that be the studio, the work itself, her cats(!), her travels, the artists she knows and loves, and all the inspirations that make her work and books so popular.


As an exhibitor and demonstrator, she started her video tour of this summer's Best of the Best tent (2011 Art in Action) with our Montagu's Harrier Hawk.  Thanks Jackie!