Art and Landscape (1): 'John Constable' in Ipswich

There has been much excitement over the last couple of days on the Ipswich Waterfront outside UCS (by the Langlands and Bell Question? installation). The 'John Constable', a reconstructed Stour Lighter has taken up a temporary berth in 'dry dock' to enable members of the public to encounter this barge at close range, before it moves on to Sudbury tomorrow. The Lighter forms a key element of the 'Managing a Masterpiece' project.

You may be wondering what this has to do with 'Wild and Wonderful' nature ... John Constable was a relatively local artist: East Bergholt, Constable's birthplace, is only about 12 miles away. Constable painted the rural scenes of his day, scenes such as the 'Hay Wain', 'The Cornfield' and 'Flatford Mill'. I have included a photo by David Gill (see below) of the mill area as it is now. Constable enjoyed incorporating natural phenomena in his creative work. He painted rainbows over Salisbury Cathedral and over the River Stour. He even painted a double rainbow. He liked to paint storm clouds, large trees and running water. A Constable painting of 'The Lock' recently fetched over £22 million. 

Today's activity, however, was not about selling. It was a time to admire the craftsmanship that has gone into the building of the 'John Constable'. The Lighter will eventually have a new life on the River Stour, allowing people to take a boat trip along those waterways that Constable knew so well.

Today was a time to celebrate, and those of us on the Waterfront were able to enjoy listening to boat songs and to tunes from an accordion and harmonica. 

David Gill (ITV news report on the boat - here)

The view below shows Flatford Mill as it looks today. John Constable's father owned a dry-dock, which was the setting for the building of these boats in the artist's day. His painting, 'Boat-building near Flatford Mill' depicts the scene. The small figure gives a sense of scale, and I must admit that it was the sizeable dimensions of the lighter that surprised me most.

The photo below shows the steps needed to climb aboard!

John Constable's approach was considered radical at the time, in terms of his distinctive brushstrokes, his bold application of colour and portrayal of emotion through the natural subjects that he encountered in Dedham Vale and beyond. We may find this hard to appreciate in these post-postmodern days of abstraction, but Constable's work was highly instrumental in pushing 19th century painting towards the contemporary approaches to art that we know today.

'The sky is the source of light in Nature and it governs everything.'

John Constable

Marshland Habitat (2): From Dead Wood to Dunlin

We are greatly enjoying our exploration expeditions in Suffolk. The light was fading fast as we set off, but we were delighted to see so many Dunlin (albeit at some distance) out on the mere. I have never knowingly watched these birds before. Another first for me.

As I have mentioned in a previous post, the reedbed landscape is usually only punctuated by sails or church towers, windmills or ... dead trees.

These 'corpses' are apparently not the result of disease or strikes by lightning. Rather, they are reminders of the time when the old fields were flooded.

Particularly high tides breached the bank in this area near Snape back in 1953, creating a large area of mudflats. In days gone by, the barge sailors referred to one of the wide stretches of the river Alde as 'Troublesome Reach'. It is still possible to see withies - long wooden stakes used as markers - standing proud from the river bed, to guide the vessels along the deeper channels.

We saw most of our birds out on the water, but there were one or two rustles in the leaves overhead. This Great Tit was pretty camouflaged in the sunlit mosaic of turning autumn leaves.

We seem to have seen more Ladybirds than ever before this year. There were one or two Seven-spotted ones (Coccinella septempunctata) on the stinging nettles.