Most mornings I sit in bed with a cup of tea and look at clouds and the trees in our garden. There seem to have been some beautifully different skies in recent times.
This morning I was watching the shape of the clouds move with the wind stream. My child’s brain somehow expected the whole pattern to move in unison but it doesn’t do that does it? What we see as a pattern with some shading, hinting at 3D, is of course multiple clumps of clouds and different heights and distances. They move independently on the air streams where each one is. Everything around us is more complicated than we remember to think.
That’s not all the cloud complications. The sun and air movements change temperatures and clouds can change consistency and even state. A thin whispy cloud might suddenly become transparent and disappear or the opposite. I realised I have spent my life staring at water in all its forms and trying to catch some of its subtleties.
San Gimignano Clouds forming
That reminded me of Elif Shafak’s ‘There are Rivers in the Sky’, which uses water in various ways in the imagery of the story. One theme is the amazing strong electrochemical bond in H2O. She plays with the idea of how long water has ‘lived’ and what it might have ‘witnessed’.
Suddenly I was intrigued by how strong that bond is. First the bond is at molecule level, so an individual drop of water has much weaker bonds and molecules can wander off at any time. That molecular bond is magically strong though and people don’t fully understand it. There are many competing theories and we really want to be able to break the bond efficiently, in terms of energy and cost, so we can unlock the hydrogen. We always want to move on to the next solution. There is a lot of water about but we are not good at managing it. From prehistory on, especially when we band together in bigger groups and let some people get too powerful, we have ruined the useful water in one place and moved on to the next. We are doing it with greater frequency every day. Many improvement are made but they are outweighed by selfish and badly thought out decisions.
Water in various forms
It pleased me enormously to find that the lower half of my window view does splits the water molecules all the time. The plants there use photosynthesis and the power of the sun to achieve the job. I love finding out just how far behind the world we are in terms of inventiveness. We haven’t made a great job with our power and nosiness so far. There will come a point when nature stops rescuing us.
In 1963, one of the first ‘public’ pieces of art I did was a pencil portrait of one of my Grandads. It was realistic, recognisable and admired. It went back up to Barrow with him, was framed and lived on the mantelpiece. It was drawn side on, which is easier, and I have always had a delicate touch with pencil shading. I was just beginning to understand art, what I could do and what I was less successful at.
Since then life has been one long session of ‘if at first you don’t succeed, then try, try and try again’. I’ve always had the shakes, I’ve always had my brain suddenly lose concentration. If I pick up a ruler and start measuring my inability to hold numbers in my head soon makes me lose control. I’ve always tended towards the ‘real’ and away from the romantic, picturesque or theoretical (pointillism, cubism etc.). There is good art everywhere but I sometimes think too much theory loses some of the power that exists in early cave paintings. When I first saw the ‘Arnolfini Couple’ I was entranced by it but I soon became fonder of Bruegel the elder and then onwards into the whole of human and animal expressions of creativity.
Slowly I’ve got a better grasp of what I can and can’t achieve and used that to push the boundaries and increase what I can say with my work. This is the story of one of those explorations.
At our art group exhibition earlier this year, my young friend Georgina put up a work she had done for A level art, based on L.S.Lowry.
I’m not a great fan of Lowry but I also have no time for people who are snobby about his work and if I started listing the artists who I’m not fond of, it would be a long list. Georgina’s painting made me think about how things have changed. I wondered if I could do a version that started in the past and moved forward to the present, where every other person seems to be walking about with a throw away coffee cup in their hand.
I did a quick mock-up and asked Georgina if it was OK for me to use her work as a basis.
When she said yes, I went and looked at Lowry images. This one is called ‘Coming Home from the Mill’ from 1928.
The first thing that hit me was how much movement and expression there is in the work and how colourful it is. The next was how well-off the scene looks despite the background. It crosses class boundaries. If you’ve ever been near one of those mills, or factories or a big engineering works when everyone clocks off their shift then you will not recognise it in this scene. Next impression was how technically competent it is. Most people would be horrified at the task of detailing so much. Although the perspective is simplified, it is still basically accurate. In true Lowry style, there are no shadows to complicate things and the light and shade is simplified. The surface on which the figures walk has no subtleties of depth and texture, but the figures are placed on that surface and not floating in air. It is not a naive painting. While a Vermeer, for instance, is always masterfully painted, it is nearly always a staged moment in time with little hint of movement. I think the Lowry captures elements of life much better.
I realised that, as with other artists, we often get an idea about someone and fail to look more carefully or ask what their intended meanings and motivations were.
So now we come to my effort. Because of a workshop we did, I decided to do it in watercolour. While I am used to the medium, I do not normally use it for these complicated group scenes. This is the first choice on which the jury is still out.
I sketched the background in and left the street much like Lowry’s and light coloured so that I could paint the figures on with less problem.
As you can see, at this point I realised that my perspective was inconsistent and that I needed to paint out the area where I wanted two foreground characters. Art doesn’t have to be a slave to perspective but is helps if your decisions about it look intentional. I decided I might be able to make the perspective thing work. The trouble with something complicated like this, when you are an unreliable and inconsistent painter like me, is that the more you add on the greater the fear of suddenly ruining it. An earlier me would have torn it up and thrown it across the room by now and probably sworn never to paint again. I’m a bit more at ease with my imperfections now.
Here is the current state of things:
Call me pretentious if you like, but the idea is that the area near the big mill is the past and time moves forward through the picture. The two wall adverts on the terrace rows are probably more about the time when Lowry died, when instant coffee was in charge and almost no adverts showed men cooking. In the front there are coffees being carried, they have different names, more people have dogs that they can name the breed of, usually somehow related to a poodle cross, and they often expect them to be able to go into cafes with them.
Does it work though? It is certainly not photographic and in my world view that is good. My figures are cartoonish, as they have often been. That is perhaps consistent with the Lowry and I often admire cartoonists. The perspective is not fully convincing but you do feel like you could walk into the picture, especially if you were being distracted by holding on to your dog and coffee at the same time, perhaps while trying to stop your messenger bag sliding off your shoulder.
One of the problems with works that have messages is that they potentially fail if the message is not clear. Could you get the messages without me explaining them? Have I tried to put too many little messages in and lost focus?
As always I can see all the problems in this picture, but I can also see positives in it. It will probably sit around and after I’ve had a rest from it I may spot a way, within my competence levels, to improve it in my eyes. I’ve even managed to improve things years later. I’ll move back to something that I feel uses my abilities better, or that other people will smile at quicker but I’ll keep trying things that stretch me because I’m still learning.
August 2026 and it is dry. Not as dry as the Australian novel of the above title of course. Thankfully we store most of the water off the house and outbuildings and even the grey water from upstairs sinks, bath etc. With careful watering of the newer and more tender plants the garden is surviving. I even throw washing up water on the lawn.
As it is a little cooler today I’ve been out and around the garden sorting out things like a down pipe off the platform roof down the hill, which had got blocked by nest building in the absence of water in the gutter.
For some reason I’ve had respect for water and its storage and usage for as long as I can remember. I noticed old schemes where water was collected into basement tanks for pumping round the house in houses off the beaten track. I wondered at the engineers in the past who built reservoirs and even channels running miles round the contours of our hillsides to move water from one system to another to maintain water pressure. I realised that water often gets re-used as it moves down hill. When we had a drought in Yorkshire in the 1980’s my attention to water became even more focused. The site of streams of water tankers arriving on a hillside to pour water down into a reservoir was something to behold. I started finding containers to store water from roofs wherever possible. In our present garden we have taken that much more seriously.
When I built a large shed in the garden, I channeled the water from both sides of the roof round to a water butt at one side. When it was obvious that the butt was often overflowing, I connected a second to the first and then a third.
I did the same with the roof of a lean-to extension on the house and when both barrels there overflowed I realised I could feed the pond at the bottom of the garden, so ran a hose all the way down along the hedge line.
The biggest, yet still simple, scheme was when we put an overhang along the front of the house, which broke the line of the gutter downpipe. We had the builders just feed the shortened pipe into the new gutter and I piped that along the side of the house and into more barrels. Because they often overflow, I put a drip feed pipe from them back along the side of the house to water a normally arid piece of raised garden there.
In total there are now more than 10 water collection points. We even collect some grey water into a butt that normally gets fed by the roof at the back of the house. That one overflows into the drain.
All year round we use less water for our very green and colourful, wildlife friendly garden. That means more water for other people. Collecting the rainfall from every bit of roof means we make the most of what we get. It is worth mentioning that that the design of the garden, with plentiful trees and shrubs giving levels of shade, also reduces water use. The drought conditions picture below shows the greening effect of that shade on a patch of grass. South is left on the picture, so the shade has effect for the main part of the day.
At some point Ruth’s daughter set up home in New Zealand. When we visited we realised that the house collected all the rainwater off the roof into a big tank, to provide the water supply for the house. When I visited the local builders merchant and asked about rain butts, to collect water from a separate lean-to roof for use in the garden, they pointed me at tanks big enough to live in. Even in NZ though, there is still too little attention paid to water. Gardens are set up for having BBQ’s and too little attention is paid to shade. In similar drought conditions, those water tankers are going to individual houses to re-fill tanks.
Back in the UK, for too many years we have just assumed that someone else will provide us with as much water as we want. Builders have been allowed to build without thinking about water seriously either in terms of collection but also run-off. The result is that our ground is increasingly arid while at the same time we have increased flooding. The increasingly arid soil is also part of the problem creating more wildfires.
I used the word respect at the top of this article. I’ll add another – responsibility. There is often not a lot that we can do, as individuals, to change things for the better but we can help by showing respect for our utilities. If you can, set a water butt to collect water to use on your plants. In droughts like the present, I even take the washing up water and throw it over the lawn to help keep it alive.
This week I installed a sculpture paying homage to birds and butterflies at Stirley Farm, a charity project showcasing organic gardening and protection and encouragement of wildlife. The same week a friend asked if she could have one of my Paths of Desire series that depicts the effect of immoral and selfish overuse of cars on everything from the soil to wildlife and us. I’ve donated the sculpture and, as usual, the full sale cost of the other artwork goes straight to a charity, bypassing me. A week with smiles in it.
During the current heatwave it is pleasant to get out in the garden early. We use rain and grey water most of the year but supply is running low so I thought I’d use a hose for a change to help things along before a likely ban comes in.
A couple of clips here that I am not sure about (nothing new there). The first (ignoring the Tits) is obviously a young bird. At first the second looks the same, not sure how to get at the food then suddenly works out a way. Then all becomes clearer on a new clip of the mother feeding the young one at the feeder.
I should have put Questions in that title but it was getting a bit wordy. Hopefully it will make sense in a minute.
Let’s gets straight to the catchy bit. Like many living things, cuttlefish reproduce by mating and one common tactic in the mating game is for males to try to become dominant or ‘alpha’. Unlike most of us, cuttlefish can change their surface colouring (other than by adding makeup or foolishly sitting too long in the sun). They do this in response to stress and as a way of sending messages, like bird calls.
Now, people who look at evolution too simplistically see the ‘dominant’ word and think that is all that matters. They rush out and buy supplements and sit staring at themselves in gyms. This applies to all genders and sexual preference because dominance applies in a groups.
The cuttlefish is a good example of alternative strategies. The males, especially smaller ones, can adopt female colouring on the side facing the dominant male and a male display pattern on the other side. Clever. Some males also herd females into a hollow and sit over them, getting exclusive access. Other clever males can even adopt full female colouring and sit in the pile under the dominant males quietly mating when the chance comes.
So far so very male minded. The male cuttlefish is either a bulky bully or a sneaky smally. Evolution is way more complicated than that and females instinctively know it (they have evolved that way). The classic male interpretation of the herding into a hollow habit is that the females trade some loss of freedom for protection and access to the dominant gene. How simplistic.
I have said elsewhere that evolution is the survival of those that happen to survive, to try to emphasise this complexity. The statistics will indicate that there is no one way for a single individual to predict what will make their offspring survive. There are options that are simpler to adopt and that also sit higher up in the pile of options but there is also variation in both mating and offspring care adopted. This indicates that the statistics often favour those who adopt each way bets. So females let the dominant male sit there on edge guarding his harem and then sneak off and mate with other males who have shown the resilience not to give up and the wit to appear in the right place for the opportunity to arise. That ensures the most favourable balance of gene survival to deal with the complexities of survival. Females also mate with multiple males to let the sperm and ova do the selection.
So what has all this to do with reasoning? The first stage of reasoning is hinted at above. You only get past the simplistic understanding of evolution if you ask questions. The questions to ask here are ‘how does the male cuttlefish decide which range of colours to adopt?’ and ‘how does it decide that fighting is not the best option but sneaking into the hollow has good chances’? If you think a bit further on from that you can ask how the successful adoption of a tactic get passed on to offspring? Is it a better instinctive colouring ability or a brighter brain?
Of course I don’t know the answers to those questions but the existence of the questions has wider implications for the ways we reason about all sorts of things. Sadly the habit of asking questions seems to have got a bit lost in some of the narrower, results led, approaches to education that we have adopted. We already had a habit of using reasoning to show dominance in various ways, because as well as helping people recruiting others to jobs and courses, exams and qualifications have always been used in that way. I think we are in danger of losing the habit of asking questions about our own reasoning. As with evolution and the cuttlefish we need to keep our options open. We must remember that the ‘fitness’ to purpose of a person can’t simply be measured by exams but also involves adaptability and the ability to ask relevant questions.
