A tale of parakeets and visivests – not the sort of yellow jackets that are buzzing around Westminster either! A motley group of unrelated works I guess connected by the colour yellow. Well green and yellow in the case of the parakeets. The first is the work above in detail and in full below, one of my dead tree works but as I was painting it one of the wild parakeets appeared at the top of the tree, probably curious to what I was doing. So it ended up in the work!
Green-ringed parakeets are not native to Britain, but have appeared in greater numbers recently, they seem to be thriving and there is a rather noisy population in Bushey Park and other parks in London. I saw a parakeet feather and didn’t pick it up – which I was kicking myself later when I wanted to make a parakeet quill after the quill drawings of #37. I went back and couldn’t find one much to to the bemusement of the parakeets and deer.
The next piece is an old one I recently finished but still not happy with it. Part of the Urban Watercolour series of graffiti works and abandoned places in watercolour, I’ve painted the filter beds before and this second attempt started on a windy day. So windy it blew part of my Winsor & Newton Field Set into the disused site!
I tried many calls to Thames Water, many days of trying to chase someone who could let me in…until early one morning I gave up, found my hi-vis vest (I got it free at a Duckie Gay Shame event!) and scaled the wall and fetched it.
Naughty but I did try the official way but they never even phoned me back…As that old edict goes, and as Banksy knows, you can do anything in a hi-vis vest if you look official and confident enough!
So for a long time I didn’t finish the work, feeling it was jinxed. Also even though it was bright sunshine when I did it, it seems rather too ‘Californian’ and too intense colour than real. Something very odd with the lighting which is probably because I did it on two days, at different times, with different lighting. I like the graffiti bit though, and the water reflections.
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