I am crushed.......................

found out my lovely poppy poos had a cancerous tumor, fingers and toes crossed its all gone and she will now have a happy long life with me!

I am looking to move again....

i am a busy bee looking for suitable places for poppy and i to live... we are wanting to be as close to the countryside as possible and we are so excited about the new chapter ahead, so watch this space!

i am so so happy!

yesterday we got the news we wanted! I feel like I can breath again - the best news I've had this year!

just had a lovely message from the lovely mrs b

love the new picture. So beautiful, you look so happy.... I'm wishing I could take you back to sardinia, to beer o'clock and the sunshine. It's good for the soul.....x xx

last night i saw..... andy cave

my parents treated me to see andy cave latest tour 'learning to breath' at caernarfon. It was a true inspiring talk and it has topped me up again to do more and more, so watch this space! He is one remarkably chap. Check out the promo for the tour here

Also here is a snippet from the promo site:
Andy's show will bring to life his best-selling book of the same. He takes the audience on a tremendous human journey through his experiences of the miner’s strike in 1984-85 to his traumatic expedition to the perilous North Face of Changabang in the Himalayas in 1997 - an expedition in which his climbing partner paid the ultimate price. His inner-turmoil and eventual decision to return to the mountains is one of the most stirring tales of modern mountaineering. Set against a backdrop of the Himalaya, Patagonia and Alaska, Andy explores some of the severest challenges modern Alpinism can pose in his understated but humorous style.

artist: richard long

the other night i spoke to zoe on the telephone and she was telling me about a photographer who she thought I would like called richard long. And she was certainly right, he uses space around him whilst walking in the countryside to create sculptures which he captures through photography.

Here is a description of his work:

Nature has always been recorded by artists, from pre-historic cave paintings to 20th century landscape photography. I too wanted to make nature the subject of my work, but in new ways. I started working outside using natural materials like grass and water, and this evolved into the idea of making a sculpture by walking.

Walking itself has a cultural history, from Pilgrims to the wandering Japanese poets, the English Romantics and contemporary long-distance walkers.
My first work made by walking, in 1967, was a straight line in a grass field, which was also my own path, going 'nowhere'. In the subsequent early map works, recording very simple but precise walks on Exmoor and Dartmoor, my intention was to make a new art which was also a new way of walking: walking as art.  Each walk followed my own unique, formal route, for an original reason, which was different from other categories of walking, like travelling. Each walk, though not by definition conceptual, realised a particular idea. Thus walking - as art - provided an ideal means for me to explore relationships between time, distance, geography and measurement. These walks are recorded or described in my work in three ways: in maps, photographs or text works, using whichever form is the most appropriate for each different idea. All these forms feed the imagination, they are the distillation of experience.
Walking also enabled me to extend the boundaries of sculpture, which now had the potential to be de-constructed in the space and time of walking long distances. Sculpture could now be about place as well as material and form.
I consider my landscape sculptures inhabit the rich territory between two ideological positions, namely that of making 'monuments' or conversely, of 'leaving only footprints'.
Over the years these sculptures have explored some of the variables of transience, permanence, visibility or recognition. A sculpture may be moved, dispersed, carried.  Stones can be used as markers of time or distance, or exist as parts of a huge, yet anonymous, sculpture.  On a mountain walk a sculpture could be made above the clouds, perhaps in a remote region, bringing an imaginative freedom about how, or where, art can be made in the world.


Look at some of his work here, I hope you enjoy!

don't let others take your light away