it's all about the light

August is change... I felt it early one morning last week, there was a slightly different quality to the cool air wafting through the open window

couldn't put my finger on it but it was more than just the feeling of a cooler summer morning - more like a felt memory of late Fall... when the nights and mornings are dark,  the ground frosted white and the geese fly overhead early and late

later that morning an email from a friend mentioned her return to collage experiments and as always happens when she writes me of them, I had a renewed collage hankering of my own

I thought of some frosty prints I had made a few years ago, some using a Lino-block stamp I had carved - a quick search found them along with a few other simpler scraps 

above is the orientation I began with, below is where I finished

not sure which is best but I'm leaning above

along with everything else, I've also been working through a "Winter Writing Sanctuary", a seasonal free offering by Beth Kempton last winter - the lesson I was on whilst working on this collage was to write a winter Haiku poem using various prompts - the one I had chosen was "winter garden"

shadow petals drift

thorns lay bare across the snow

winter garden moon

not a direct translation of the collage but there's something in each that reminds me of the other

on searching for the said prints I came across some pigment-coloured cloth I had made a couple of years ago

in search of twilight at the time of making, I had played about with indigo, black and yellow ochre

the result wasn't overly successful but as I looked at it the other day I had a hankering to draw darkened bare-limbed trees

a dip pen and carbon black ink I made worked rather well I think

done lightly, there is little to no bleed 

small, absorbing what-ifs that whiled away the hours a few times this week