Barb – the Blueberry Cat

Since settling in Dunchideock, I have started to use in my paintings/collages/installations more and more attributes from the garden.

My studio is situated in the epicentre of the garden, in a certain way that is. It is in the middle of the gardens ‘natural resources” and flora, as well being centred in the macro and micro dimensional sense. Among the trees, bushes, and flowers there are also a huge variety of insects, birds and other animals, both alive and dead. The nearness and the intimacy with the nature has an undeniable affect on my imagination and it so happened that my new born paintings are full of leaves, styles, petals, filaments, fruits, and small stems from trees, bushes, flowers and weeds; but also some parts of dead and alive insects and birds. In some of my old abstract paintings I have already used couscous, rice, diverse seeds, grasses and bay leaves. But it was only incidental and my imagination was limited by the ingredients I had in my kitchen and on my balcony. In Dunchideock, in the garden of Lyalls Cottage I have unbounded forms, colours, pigments, consistencies, structures and odours; the last aspect is only significant for me not for the paintings I am afraid.

At the moment I am still at the stage of experimenting with the natural materials, dried and fresh. I take small cones, flowers, actually everything with interesting constitution and facture. Some of the leaves, styles, fruits and stems I let desiccate and use/ will use them dried. I am thinking of experimenting with natural pigments from fruits, vegetables and leaves. I will keep you updated.

Once, strangely my right hand had became paralysed for around 10 minutes, and I had a weird feeling before and after like someone had acupunctured my hand with 1000 needles. Prior to this sensation I had used lots of orange-red fruits from a plant growing in our garden. Afterwards Jim checked this plant on Wikipedia. It appeared that this woodland plant was known by an abundance of common names including Wild arum, Lords and Ladies, Jack in the Pulpit, Devils and Angels, Cows and Bulls, Cuckoo-Pint, Adam and Eve, Bobbins, Naked Boys, Starch-Root and Wake Robin and is poisonous (especially its attractive orange berries). The berries contain oxalates of saponins which have needle-shaped crystals which irritate the skin, mouth, tongue, and throat, resulting in swelling, breathing difficulties, burning pain, and stomach upsets.
Furthermore I discovered that the juice from blueberries isn’t violet like the berry. It is more like brown-green-dark purple. Only the skins of the blueberries possess the right violet/ dark pigment.

In my new painting on the Barb-Blueberry cat, I used juice from the blueberries, acrylics, stamens from an unknown plant, a piece of a branch from a cypress tree, petals of red and scarlet roses, dried and fresh. You can also find stamens, hairs and petals from a weed called Common Corncockle (also poisonous- “it has been used in folk medicine to treat a range of ills, from parasites to cancer but it may produce chronic or acute, potentially fatal poisoning”).

Back to my painting: the story is obviously about a cat, a lady cat. I have satisfied myself that my Tabby cat shouldn’t be single. And so the Blueberry Barb was borne. (The Barb is from Barbara, women with this name are very close to me).