When Icicles Hang by the Wall....

 Sugarloaf from Bailey Park, Abergavenny,

Christmas Eve, 2010

We’re having an unusually cold winter here in the UK with the mercury hitting record night-time lows before Christmas and far more snow than we’re used to. Apparently it was the coldest December in Wales for 100 years - but also unusually sunny and dry.

Even though the snow in Abergavenny is now confined to the mountain tops and large heaps around the edges of the main car park, the weather remains cold and miserable as we seem stuck underneath the motionless grey skies of anticyclonic gloom. December’s sunshiny ‘deep and crisp and even’ seems to have given way to January’s bleak ‘earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone’.

Shakespeare’s description of winter – ‘When icicles hang by the wall...’ has also been passing through my mind. And when I was leafing through my artwork from school a couple of months ago, I noticed that one of the poems/stories we had been asked to illustrate was that very poem!

So here it is:

WHEN icicles hang by the wall,
    And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
    And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipp'd, and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
                    To-whit!  To-who!—a merry note,

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

 ...and my teenage illustration of it!

The icicles in my painting aren’t exactly hanging ‘by the wall’ and I don’t understand where the light source for the shepherd’s shadow is coming from - the lantern doesn't seem to be giving out enough light for such deep shadows. But I think if I were to paint this subject today, I’d use an almost identical composition though maybe I would try to include the owl and even Greasy Joan, keeling her pot (if I knew what 'keeling' was!). I would also probably avoid quite using quite so much grey.

But on the other hand, there does seem to be an awful lot of ‘greyness’ about the weather just at the moment and I find it quite depressing! I much prefer snow and sunshine!

I took the photo above on Christmas Eve at about midday, on my way back from last minute shopping. A few hours later, I returned to the park with my son, who had just arrived from York and fancied some fish and chips - the one type of food that I didn't have in house! This time, as we crossed the park on the way to the chipshop, the setting sun was lighting up Sugarloaf so that it looked as if it was on fire - a spectacular sight that I've never seen before! And would you believe, for once I didn't have my camera with me! My son took a few shots with his mobile phone but without a zoom, the mountain looked like a very distant pink dot! I rushed home and fetched my camera - but too late! The sun had almost set and everything looked a very dull pinkish grey -

So perhaps I should make a New Year's Resolution to carry a camera with me at all times  - just in case!


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