Downland spring

“Still. life, with leaves” was my working title for this piece when I started working on it a week ago. This is the same pond as Painted a couple of years ago in its winter dress in “Ice On the Pond”, now with its new owners. I haven’t been back, so this is not a pleine air piece but another piece of imagination., based on what you might see from the bird watching hide built on the west bank. At this time of year there can be a lot of pollen settling on the water, so I have included a mustardy yellow shape on the right, where the ice is forming on the earlier picture.

It’s a bit seasonal, with bluebells showing on the slopes behind the trees. I know there are bluebells in the woods along there and they seem to get denser the further away from the path you get. So that is what I have tried to show here.

The big dark green oval on the right is a self-planted rhododendron.  I thought of showing blossoms studded over it but that seemed too literal and distracting from the level of abstraction I was trying to achieve.

The water is  always very murky but I thought there might be some fish lurking there – life  - so I have included a couple of trout like shapes. There are trout in the similarly gloomy  Silent Pool on the same slopes of the Downs, they are both springs feeding little streams, so why not?