Society of Animal Artists

Jonathan Sainsbury has been elected a Signatory member of the prestigious North American Society of Animal Artists, which will be celebrating its 50th Anniversary in 2010.
www.societyofanimalartists.com

RGI

Barnevelders square’ hung in the 2009 148th Annual Exhibition of the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts

‘Turkey square’ was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Society of Watercolours, 2009 and is currently on display in the Strathearn Gallery Christmas exhibition, Crieff, PH7 4DL, 01764 656100 info@strathearn-gallery.com

Society of Wildlife Artists, London

'Woodcock square’ and ‘Pheasant square’ hung in the SWLA exhibition 2009, in the Mall Galleries, London

Birds in Art, 2009

'Apples' was chosen for Birds in Art 2009 at the Woodson Art Museum, Wausau, Wisconsin, USA’  Retain second paragraph, changing the name of the museum to ‘Woodson Art Museum’. 

Poetry

Poets have a freedom to associate images across time and space. For example, John Clare, in his poem 'The Skylark', refers to shoots of green corn, yet only a few stanzas later, introduces an image of boys gathering armfuls of buttercups. In real life, there would be a passage of many weeks between those two visions.

The picture surface of 'Apples' (see above) and 'Cock pheasant', both based on poems by Laurie Lee, is broken up so as to show the passage from one image to another. The surface is divided into four columns and four rows. In 'Cock pheasant' the bottom row shows the marrow and the 'creviced pumpkin' of the poem. The next row shows the apples and the one above, the hazelnuts. So, the eye is drawn up through the images, just as the reader progresses through the verses of the poem.

COCK-PHEASANT

Gilded with leaf-thick paint; a steady
Eye fixed like a ruby rock;
Across the cidrous banks of autumn
Swaggers the stamping pheasant-cock.

The thrusting nut and bursting apple
Accompany his jointed walk,
The creviced pumpkin and the marrow
Bend to his path on melting stalk.

Sure as an Inca priest or devil,
Feathers stroking down the corn,
He blinks the lively dust of daylight,
Blind to the hunter’s powder-horn.

For me, alike, this flushed October -
Ripe, and round-fleshed, and bellyfull -
Fevers me fast but cannot fright, though
Each dropped leaf shows the winter’s skull.

Laurie Lee