The islands consist very much of a series of spectacular landscapes containing mountains, steep slopes, cascading waterfalls, fiords – and no trees. Sheep graze everywhere on the lower slopes and present, as we were warned and duly found out, the most serious hazard to motorists. Otherwise, driving is a sheer joy on a modern road system with little traffic on well-maintained roads which, confronted by a mountain, go through it, and by a fiord, go under it. Usage of kilometres of tunnel is electronically logged and billed later. Most of the landscape is uninhabited; villages,  hamlets and farms, characteristically widely spaced, hug the valley bottoms, favourable shore-lines and road-sides. White-walled, green turf-roofed churches punctuate the landscape.

Here is a small selection of meaningful views:

above: Sheep ruminating characteristically on a steep slope down to the sea

below: Saksun (built 1858), a typical small church (typically locked) in an awesome landscape of heavily eroded mountain-side and waterfall

above: the now abandoned ‘old’ farm of Duvugardar, not far upslope of Saksun church, is maintained as an open air museum/heritage attraction (though  it was closed when we visited, like the similar traditional farm maintained by the National Museum near Torshavn). Its modern successor lies alongside (carefully excluded from my photograph!). The old farm is anonymously famous as the location of the brilliant TV advertisement in which a shepherd shears not a sheep but his dog because he didn’t go to Specsavers.

ADDITION: a reader advises that while the Specsaver advert was certainly shot in the Saksun area, it may not have been at this ‘heritage’ farm. I will check further.

Buildings ancient and modern: first, ancient:

On an archipelago where practically everything was built of wood, two of the oldest buildings survive at Kirkjubour because they are of stone. In the foreground right are the ruins of St Magnus Cathedral, otherwise known as Muren, completed c1340 and partly dismantled when the diocese was abolished  c1560. It was the centre of an episcopal palace immediately beyond it in this view, of which only fragments survive. The King’s farmhouse, supposedly 11th century and the oldest inhabited timber house in Europe, was built on probable palatial foundations after it was allegedly floated in bits across from Norway and re-assembled here.

In the background, centre, perched immediately above the sea, is St Olav’s church, built in the early 12th century and still in use (but locked, despite the best guidebook assuring us that it ‘is never locked’!). It has been extensively rebuilt, and is clearly under threat from the sea.

And to complete this brief note, in contrast to the old, we visited Nordragota on Eysturoy to look at a very modern building designed by Henning Larsen to house the local council offices. Nothing unusual about that except that these offices lie within a footbridge over a river a short distance from its mouth into the sea:

 

I have two more posts about the Faroes to put up idc.

This post revisits two favourite sites.

When in Orford I usually visit St Bartholomew’s church if only to look at my favourite graffiti – ships scratched on to medieval fabric (they were of course actually scratched on to lime-wash covering the stonework). Above is one ship I have already published and which I notice now seems to be etched on top of an earlier one of a more rectangular profile (previously published blog 2016/10/20).

Below is the faint outline of another with a mast just above the crack.

 

On the same column but on its other side I also noticed, I think for the first time, two more ships, each difficult to discern. The first seems to be a vessel of shallower draught than the previous two, but also built of presumably over-lapping planks and with a mast.

 

 

 

Very close to that is the one illustrated above in this characteristic palimpsest which might well also contain a smaller ship within the body, as it were, of the main, bowl-shaped ship at the top. Whether any one or more of the five or six vertical lines is/are a mast is unclear. If I go with proper lighting equipment next time, more, if not all, will doubtless be revealed.

Not far from Orford is Sutton Hoo where the presentation of the famous Anglo-Saxon burial site is undergoing major change this year. I have written about this recently and shown the new sculpture based on the dimensions and shape of the ‘royal’ ship as excavated in 1939 (blog 29 April). The sculpture is, I think, now finished: the skeletal steel ‘ship’ has been painted with a sort of veneer to make it look rusted and its setting has been completed with with a polished concrete surround on which is marked out a sinuous path encouraging people to walk right up to the ship:

In its centre, as the photograph shows, is a platform occupying the equivalent of the exact position of the burial chamber in the original ship. It is of course the exact size of the chamber too, though it is a symbol rather than a replica, for the original was of course in wood. The upper surface of the platform consists of polished concrete slabs on which are drawn the contents of the chamber in their ‘original’ positions:

This view is from the centre looking towards the stern. The head of the hypothetical ‘king’ buried in the chamber – no body was found in the excavation – is marked on the right and the other shapes are of objects recovered from the burial chamber. The whole is a neat concept, and if it does not quite work in conveying hard information then it has to be remembered that the whole is a work of art and that its archaeological and historical context will be fully explained in a a brand new exhibition currently being completed alongside for an opening later in the summer.

 

Of which more anon.

Our Summer Exhibition at Snape has evolved over recent weeks and is now more or less complete – though of course individual paintings can come and go. This year the theme is ‘Light’ so we have selected works which are characterised by both lightness of touch and of colour, and/or seem to give off light, mainly by using white.

Most of the works are glazed so the images here of the hung exhibition are generally of a poor quality, with reflections in them and/or they are taken at an oblique angle to try to avoid reflections. So the aim here is simply to give an overall impression of the exhibition rather than highlight all the works individually. Over the next week I’ll try to take down some individual paintings and photograph them properly.

Starting clockwise from left of the kitchen door is (upper) my small inkwash painting (17/14) on paper of a field-hut (cattle shed) seen through an open gateway on the island of Inish Meain, Galway Bay. Below it is a dramatic print by Michael Carlo called ‘Storm Field 9.’ The subject – a hill with fields on its side and topped by a clump of trees – is a  familiar one in the Carlo oeuvre:

 

 

 

 

To the right of the door is (upper) a small recent ink on paper impression (20/19) called ‘The Carnser’, a local name for a path along the edge of the marsh; with (below) ‘At the Lookout 3’ by John Crossley 2014:

 

 

Then comes the first of two pencil sketches by Harry Becker; this one is ‘Shearing’ in Kent from a notebook of 1898 (see below for larger image):

 

By the window is ‘Coconut fragments’, a recent (12/19) PJF collage on paper

On the right of the window is one of Michael Horn’s favourite subjects, ‘On Weaver’s Way’, here in mixed media; with Birkin Haward’s ‘Entering Wroclaw 5’, 2017, round the corner as the first of seven works along the long wall.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next to it, on its right, is my ‘Wallpaper’ collage (47/18) followed by my small oil on khadi paper of a ‘Geometrical abstract’:

 

Then comes perhaps the star of the show in its way, a recently acquired carborundum print by Ross Loveday called ‘loose threads.’

To its right is an untitled print by Tessa Newcombe.

 

Here is a better image of ‘loose threads.’

 

Then comes my ‘Visit to Happisburgh’, 2017, inkwash on paper, followed by the second Harry Becker pencil drawing of sheep in Kent 1898 (see Ipswich Catalogue 1993, p. 41; shown here, upper, the ‘Shearing’ sketch from the same notebook, illustrated earlier in the exhibition above).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The run of works on the long wall is closed by Linda Thomas’ ‘Barns, Boyton 2’ acrylic on paper.

 

Then, to the right of the window, comes ‘Ovine hoof-marks’, a small part of the flooring material I showed in an earlier blog being walked over by sheep last month. The mud and soil marks are in a sense random but the image is not, for it is a carefully selected extract with a pattern or visible composition.

 

 

To the right of the door is one of my favourites of a few years ago, ‘Dissolving coastline’, much rubbed oils on canvas board. In one way an abstract linear composition, this is actually based on an imagined impression from above of an East Anglian/Lincolnshire coastline where sea and land merge rather than meet along neat lines.

 

And, to finish in the main room, just around the corner are two similar small watercolours by different artists. One (upper) is by L.Self and called ‘Pastures at Southwold’; the other is untitled and by an unknown painter.

Here are better photographs of these two:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beyond them are two oddities: one is a modest water colour of Adam and Eve at Avebury which was one of my earliest, and cheapest, art purchases (£8):

 

The second is a hot-off-the-ground ovine hoof ‘painting’, the first that I effected when I trialled the method on the sheep as they shot out of the trough-gangway with hooves wet and sanitised. The pale blue is from the liquid used for this foot-bathing. One reader has already identified this as ‘the star of the show’; but can I claim to be its artist? Is it indeed art?

 

And finally, just outside the main room in the entrance lobby are two paintings: one is my ‘Landscape on a windy day’, an inkwash on paper work created immediately before the ‘Happisburgh’ painting above in 2017. I begin this post with a better image of this painting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Also in the lobby is this unfinished small inkwash on cardboard called ‘The Hard’ (19/19), hung now primarily to see what it looks like. It looks less than impressive but I know what to do with it now

 

So that is the exhibition overall, with just one or two still to be added but the running order will probably not change. What fun it is to play at being a gallerist!

And while we’re on animals, here’s one who is certainly not a pussy cat:

 

This is Gandalf, a Herdwick ram (to state the fairly obvious), a recent addition to the National Trust’s Orford Ness Rare Breeds flock with a fairly clearly defined jd for the next year or two. Gandalf was actually at Sutton Hoo, trotting around among the burial mounds, when I took this photograph. He’s one of several sheep on the site where they have the all-important task of keeping the grass down to a reasonable height while mildly entertaining visitors who probably haven’t seen a Herdwick, or even White-faced Woodland, before. Sheep and grassy archaeological features are usually a good combination, though I noticed that the grass on the side of Mound 2 has been partly worn off – though not necessarily by the sheep alone and certainly not by the White-faced lambs who have only just arrived:

Sutton Hoo is in the last stages of a major presentational overhaul at the moment. A key addition outside is an art work – it is very important to understand that – based on the framework of the full-sized ship as found containing the famous ship-burial in 1939; but it is not a reconstruction, it is a sculpture, here in its unfinished state, a work in progress. The photograph is a poor one which I will replace asap, but is the only one I took of the sculpture at the end of my visit on what was a much duller afternoon than I appreciated. So, I’ll have to return to take a better photograph and, in yet another serendipidous connection between art and sheep, seize the moment to say ‘Hello’ to Gandalf once again.

 

Which is precisely what we did and here is the result (the earlier photograph has been deleted). This is an impressive and imaginative sculpture which seems almost bound to become iconographic – even before being finished it grabs the eye.

We also went to see Gandalf – of course: