Hot off the bench- Blackbirds Weathervane

For all those clients & friends who responded to our request to join LinkedIn, Thank you.

Big news: Two of our weathervanes have been selected to compliment The American Museum in Britain's opening of "The Compassionate Eye:  Birds and Beasts from the American Museum’s Print Collection". This exhibition will feature works by some of the great American artists from the mid-20th century. The show will run from 10th March - 1st of July 2012. See the museum's website for more details about the exhibition. This is a great excuse to visit Bath, see Claverton Manor and view our monumental weathervane of Liberty, commissioned last year by the Museum to celebrate the opening of the new Folk Art Gallery.

We have 3 weathervanes in the studio on the go ( as well as several spec peices in preparation for Art in Action): a goose in flight, a barn owl and a quintessential English weathercock.

Speaking of weathercocks, here's an antique English one that I adore...look at the true patina on it, and the wonderful rivets & bullet holes in the tail.

Pair of Blackbirds

We are working on a pair of blackbirds as a weathervane, as well as a goose in flight. Whilst the blackbirds are a totally bespoke design, the goose is numbered 5 in the series. I really like the goose, and have used it on the homepage of our current website, as well as having had postcards printed, and included it in the brochure. The first goose had a shorter neck and longer beak and sold from Cirencester market (8 years ago?). The the second one (with the beautiful long neck) sold to a diamond heir. Number three, well I would have to look in my files, but number  four found a semi-local home a few years back on a gorgeous garage with a bell tower. The Astin Martin convertible in the garage was pretty beautiful, too!

The realisation of every design begins with a full scale drawing. Below is a detail of the blackbird design, and next to the drawing is a big pile of (annealed) copper patterns ready to shape.



This is a tricky design, as the upper bird with it's wings outstretched is not facing into the wind. I have never seen or made a weathervane of a bird in flight with it's back to the wind...risky business! The ultimate reward will be if it's possible to do without reinforcing the edge of the feathers.

Three Banners for Scotland

We seem to be having a run of Scottish commissions; this time a repeated design from the portfolio. The five original banner weathervanes  were completed when the studio was still on Dartmoor, back in 2004. These three new recruits have been commissioned to join the five, as the restoration project on the building is now finally complete. Eight weathervanes on eight turrets...very grand!

The banners represent the Scottish flag and included quite a number of small pieces to be assembled, including spun copper balls, rivets and brass rings. I love when the worktable looks this busy.

Once assembled and cleaned, they were left out on a glorious day, to dry & then into our "clean" studio for a gilding session.

Gordon decided to do a vane a day, which meant preparing the surface the night before, and then gilding for around five hours the next morning. Three full days of gilding...not the funnest weekend, but certainly a productive one!

Fox Photo Shoot

Well  the fox  is packed up and off to it's new home after a blustery photo shoot.

Photo shoots are notoriously one of the more stressful elements of every commission. With the fox, the wind meant we were trying to position the vane and get the picture before the tail swung around in the wrong direction. It usually means we discard more than half the images. Occasionally we keep one of comic value, or of a strange angle or moody background. I am only sharing the one  below, because it somehow reminds me of "The Creation of Adam". Not that I would compare either the photo or the weathervane to a masterpiece by Michelangelo, but the hand still seems enigmatic....

We also completed the internal dial for the heraldic ship weathervane this week. We have set up an impromptu studio gallery in the house...it creates a nice warm place to pack gift orders, gild and bring clients in from the cold, for a coffee while looking at the portfolios.

Chestnut Fencing in the Snow

Well, we had our first snow early Friday morning. It fell in heavy clumps as the barn at the back was being clad, but never promised to stick, so the crew progressed with the help of several cups of tea. For those of you following the changes around the farm and fields at Woodfield Farmhouse, I thought I would post a few pictures of the changes.

When we moved here in 2008 we must have been the two most optimistic people on the planet! Having spent 7 years in a cramped stone cottage on the moor, we had no idea the amount of money, energy & resolve this house was going to require. But the potential was undeniable.

 The 3 acre field at the side had a small paddock, a few cider apples, a hardy pear tree in the middle & two gangly and corrupt cherry trees facing an ancient plum.
Because the field is used for livestock, the plan was to split the field in half, and create a new orchard at the bottom. The orchard needed to include hardy tree-surrounds to deter the hungry & curious beasts. The Duchy opted for chestnut with the instruction that we should include several different fruiting trees and that the planting scheme should be random rather than in lines. The simple wire fence erected to split the top and lower fields has now also had a mixed hedge planted and a new gate. It all seems wonderful to see such radical progress in just a few months!

A Fox on the Table

Currently on the workbench is a Stylized Fox weathervane. He only needs his hindlegs closed and a bit of lead for ballast, to balance out his over-sized tail. I have been concentrating mostly in trying to achieve a sly, foxy look in his eyes. He looks great mounted above a large set of cardinal letters. The idea of a moon (shown in the design sketch below) was discarded once the client opted for a larger size.

The fox is an offshoot of an earlier, and very popular design, the Hare and Moon (featured in an article last year in the Daily Telegraph). The eyes of the fox remind me a little of Mr. Toad, but more so the huge bull sculpture that now resides in Florida. I have a really great mermaid design as well, but there will be little time in the Spring to do anything "exploratory". It's so frustrating to have your head swimming with ideas and never enough time!

Our Christmas tree is up and decorated. Whew! Schools break up on Friday and then it's lots of cozy fires and a little break from all this hard work.

I wonder if it will be a white Christmas? It is certainly blustery with threatening skies.

The end of a project

At the end of every project, the weather becomes of critical importance. After weeks on the studio workbench, a night in the bath, and a morning being scrubbed and waxed, the weathervane goes out to face the day... This is less about checking that it works (of course it works!) and more about getting a good picture. And you usually only get one chance to get it right. You need sun, and little or no wind, interesting clouds and a sense of horizon. I can tell you it isn't very often we are so lucky. The snapshot above was taken, lying flat on my stomach in a sodden field, just as the last of the days sun had disappeared over Stockley Hill. Dare I mention that  this was taken at the end of a 48 hour gilding marathon; "tired" doesn't begin to cover how I felt.

For the official portfolio picture, you will have to visit our webpage heraldic ship weathervane .

This weathervane forms part of a larger project, including a mechanism which turns an internal dial in the house. The client requested the style of this dial be inspired by & reflect the fluid lines

of their bespoke wrought iron staircase by Paul Hodgkiss. Unfortunately the staircase did not exist yet (well conceptually it did, but not actually on paper). We proposed around a dozen random ideas mostly rough sketches. The "chosen one" wasn't much more than a scribble on the back of a scrap envelope...

We wanted to keep the feeling of it being "quick" & "light"...a sketch in copper. I wonder if the gold will give it a feeling of density.

Here it is before cleaning, measuring about 600mm in length.

We did still manage to have Thanksgiving, although only a small one, in amongst this project...I even finished Hound of the Baskervilles. Having lived a mile outside Princetown and on the road to the Grimpen Mire (or the Foxtor Mire as it is actually named), it was quite rivetting to read! Now I am quite geared up to read the Great Gatsby, and perhaps after ....the Grapes of Wrath? We watched the most amazing documentary on Steinbeck. British television has such an interesting angle on American culture. It is quite enlightening to see my country from another point of view. I have given up on ever explaining Thanksgiving though!