Go tell it on the mountain--13 days 'til Christmas

"Go tell it on the mountain," today's 5 x 7 #watercolor card

Mountains call, and I missed it.
Yesterday was #InternationalMountainDay and that hashtag on twitter leads to many quotes and images.
This one, retweeted by Cambridge University professor and author Robert MacFarlane caught my eye:
"People were evidently looking for something in the mountains they believed they had lost a long time ago."
       (A Whole Life, Robert Seethaler, trans. Charlotte Collins).
A favorite song of mine is "Go Tell It on the Mountain," largely because we adapted it years ago when taking church kids to a mountain camp in New Mexico.
Mountains are deep inside me, and they always call, as they have throughout history and spirituality. They called the Israelites, Jesus and his disciples and religious people of many beliefs.
Christmas looms, like mountains.

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Readings

Read, paint, draw, and a little writing, but more reading. These last two weeks have alternated between  these diverse doors of reality.

• Watercolor--Whitney, a late great painter and teacher helping me in my DIY art school. Daily readings and thinking required.
• Just finished, Palmer, On the Brink of Everything...deep thinking and truths about getting older.
• Just started, Thomas Merton's autobiography, since so much I read seems to refer to him these days, about living and eternity (oh, wait, that's redundant).
• Hopping chapters, Craig Childs travels about out southwestern deserts, and the repeating dyings of our planet, including now.
• Seabald, Rings of Saturn--here's a story of my summer international twitter bookclub, headed by a professor at Cambridge. Mind blowing. 

Words you have to look up, and mountains

Mountain journey, 9 by 12 watercolor, 140# d'Arches

Books that you have to circle words in--I love it, and go back and look them up. Reminds me of mountains--no matter what you see, there's always the unknown, more to learn.
It's mountain mood today, reading  The Living Mountain by the late Nan Shepherd about the Cairngorms of northeast England, another place I'd never heard of.
I found the book in another I'm reading, Landmarks, By Robert MacFarland of Cambridge University, about the deep place names of local places in England and Scotland, complete with partial  glossaries of the old names.  Names as landmarks...so powerful for any country, and any reader or writer and seer.
I first found him about a year ago in his book The Old Ways, about walking the ancient paths in England.
In this recent book, he devotes most of a chapter to Shepherd's book, and writes the forward to her most recent edition. It's a book of a lifetime of discovering mountains up close, not from a distance.
Other than English and Scottish terms I don't know, there are words throughout that I've circled, going back at the end of each chapter to look them up in the OED.
Discovery.
Thus today's watercolor, Mountain Journey, exploring and risking new paths in watercolor.

A window on real education, in a word

Cambridge students punting while they attend, and tourists "attending" to students.

Words are windows on the way we live. Thinking about our pilgrimage to Cambridge--the town and mostly the University...students don't "attend" Cambridge...they "study at"--and therein, with just one word,  you have the difference between real higher education, and in America, especially public education. Isaac Newton  and Charles Darwin didn't attend Cambridge, they "studied" there, for example.

Ready to punt

There's another word with a difference.
Here, "punting" is what Bob Stoops does twice. In Cambridge, "punting" is boating on the River Cam. Cambridge is named after the first bridge over the river back in 731 AD. Cambridge as a University was founded in 1284, but we do have some similarities at UCO and in America. We have buildings, and we have students, but they attend here, not study. There are many more bridges at Cambridge these days, some dating from the 1500s and 1600s. The University has 33 colleges, none of which has more than 1,100 students "studying" there.

Ready to punt

If you go to Cambridge, you have to go punting, and we did...down the river, on the "backs" of the medieval campus buildings, with other tourists and students. 
At top is a photo of why I prefer the English punting, two students who "attend" Cambridge. Susan and I did too. 

Top students get the best rooms, and windows

For more windows, here are some others. Here are some  windows dating from 1460 behind which some excellent students live. I learned that the best and biggest  rooms go to the students who have the best grades.
 And for lower classmen and other students who just "attend" rather than "study," I expect the rooms are somewhat less kind. 
 

Punting on the River Cam, with King's College iconic chapel in the background

Haunting windows of UK itinerary discoveries

The Benedictine abbey, destroyed when the Protestants revolted.

We worked almost a year on putting together an itinerary for the trip to England and Scotland.
Susan did most of the work, using travel books, and then we turned to Vickie Nichols of Nichols Travel for more help.
We made some of the arrangements ourselves, including a stay in Cambridge, and bed in breakfasts in York and Keswick, driving through the moors, Lake district and into Scotland. 

Someone still decorates the graves of monks.

Still we rented a car in York, and braved me learning how to drive and sit on the opposite side of the car and road than here. 
And behind the wheel of this new Mercedes, thankfully with a gps system we named "Maggie," we discovered countryside and people we never dream of, nor planned on our large itinerary. 
Discoveries included the ruins of this haunting, historic  Benedictine Abbey on a high, windy bluff overlooking Whitby, a fishing village on the coast of the North Sea.
For some reason I'm having trouble writing and organizing these trip stories, but the them of windows helps keep be going. Susan's priority were the moors and mine was Cambridge. We missed much and changed schedules. More about that later.

So for the record, here's the official itinerary--we neglected to plan for all the walking--anywhere from five to nine miles a day, so we lost weight!

• London--five nights. parliament, Westminster Abbey, Churchill's War Rooms, Buckingham Palace, Tower bridge and the Tower of London, Trafalgar Square, Picadilly circus, British Museum, Harrods department store, Dickens' house and museum, side train trip to Canterbury Cathedral, and various pubs, using the Tube (subway, cabs, double-decker bus, and walking..
• Brit rail to Cambridge--one night. My pilgrimage to a real university. Punting (not the Stoops' kind) on the River cam. Painted one watercolor.

Haunting windows on the past

• Brit rail to York--three nights. touring York Minster, largest cathedral north of the Alps. Toured the National Railway Museum, a little boy's dream of real locomotives. Visiting Viking center, visiting pubs, walking the medieval walls. Car trip to Scarborough and discovering Anne Bronte's grave. North through the most beautiful country I've ever seen. Whitby and the Abbey. The Yorkshire Moors. Whitby was a religious site from the mid 600s. The Abbey was built about 1225, after the Catholic Normans had conquered England.  Henry VIII disestablished the monasteries in 1540 and destroyed it. The windows are haunted, in more than one way. Bram Stoker lived in Whitby and the abbey  may have been an inspiration for "Dracula."
• Keswick--Lake district, two nights in a country house. Drove through beautiful North York Dales. Drove to Grasmere, toured Wordsworth's Dove Cottage and grave. Hiked in the mist alongside on of the lakes. Painted one watercolor.
• Scotland and Edinburgh--three nights. Drove up through Scotland on the rural roads, Turned in car at Edinburgh after nightmare traffic.  Took 12-hour small bus tour to Loch Ness and through the highlands. Shopped Edinburgh. Toured Edinburgh castle, and sampled great Scotch. At and drank in pubs.
• Took tram in front of hotel for 30 minute ride to airport, five pounds each. Home.

A journal of journaling in England

Every time we take a trip, this old newspaper man can't keep from taking notes, finding time at the end of the day to comment, to record impressions, to give a brief summary of the day's events. That, by the way, is where the first meaning of "journalism" came from, a record, or log, of the day's travel--using the Latin and now French word for "day," which is "jour."

Painting in Cambridge

So yes, I'm a journalist in many ways, and our trip to the England and Scotland was no exception, but with a couple of twists.
First, I went off and left the specific journal I'd bought for the trip. Fortunately, I had an Associated Press reporter's notebook in my bag.
And I did take another kind of journal, the handmade leather bound watercolour (in deference to my British heritage) from Mind's Eye Journals that I bought at the Paseo arts festival this year. And I brought my traveling watercolor kit, plus one other brush.

St. John's chapel

I had no idea if I'd have time to paint on our two week trip, but I was going to try. Fortunately, I did three paintings, and while they're not very good, they are mementos for me of specific days and times I will remember forever. I remember the seller of the journal telling me the journals are artifacts, and indeed they are--but then so have all my trip journals become.
Another reason the painting isn't great is that painting in England is far different that the desert southwest, where there is little moisture and lots of harsh landscapes. It's a slow transition for me to different painting.

My watercolours, and painting journal

Having been to England, Susan and I now understand how that landscape has so influenced English painting...it is moist and green. I wrote this in my AP notebook on the train on the way to Canterbury: "The English atmosphere cries out for watercolor. It's humid, fluid skies, green. It's idyllic, pastoral. The landscape drips with watercolour."

Here's the second of my three watercolours...St. John's College chapel at Cambridge University, done on the rooftop of the Varsity Hotel, virtually on the banks of the river Cam. It's late in the evening, we're getting a little sunburned, and there are lots of clouds in this distance. We've eaten, had some wine, and are listening to some Cambridge students at the next table celebrating the end of the semester. 
Yes, it's done in plein air, drying quickly, and painted quickly. I'd like to do it over, but that's later, and won't have as much meaning.

My AP notebook and transcribed notes

But at least, my doldrums of writing since we've returned seem to have ended. Here's hoping for a fresh breeze to gather and write all the thoughts and stories we encountered and experienced, recorded on those 81 pages of notes in the AP notebook and three watercolors. 

Some of my previous trip journals--the thick one is from Paris, 11 years ago,

"Watercolour," Brit artists and social media

British influence in  "colour," trial watercolor, 8 by 6, 140 # d'Arches

Today's painting above has an international story with it, thanks to "social media." Notice I spelled "colour" the British way, for a reason.
Social media has made the world much smaller and more fruitful as I've met and contacted new people and old.
Thus it is that recently, someone in the UK favorited one of my paintings earlier this month on twitter, and we've begun following each other.
We have much in common. He's Ian McKendrick from Cambridge, U.K., and he's a watercolour artist and student, in addition to being a social media guru for business...fitting in with what I teach in journalism these days. His web site Ian McKendrick for his watercolours is really sophisticated. I'm envious and have been prodded to develop my own site, separate from this blog. 
I've noticed that his favoriting of my paintings added much to my blog traffic, and I've also favorited his paintings. 
He showed a painting, he calls them "projects," from another Brit painter's book, and so I ordered three of the books. One of them arrived today, and inspired this experimental painting.
What I gained most from the book "Landscapes in Watercolour" was new combinations of "colours." Oh, here's the link to this painters page, and his name is Ray Campbell Smith.
I do notice that much of his work has much more atmosphere and moisture in the air than we have here in Oklahoma, and certainly in my beloved West, where the landscapes are more dramatic. In addition, I've been experimenting more and more with brilliant color, but still I think anyone who is painting in watercolour is always a student, always learning. Thus this painting today.
And here too is Ian's web page as a Social media guru. His twitter handle is @watercolourJrny.
I hope to meet him in person when we travel to the UK this summer, but in the mean time, we'll certainly be sharing more and more. Now if this were really "British style," the comma would be outside those quote marks and in the following. I love the spelling of "watercolor," but though a direct descendant of King Edward Longshanks , the tyrant in "Braveheart," (ironically now married to a Campbell), I'm firmly an American (not a Yankee though) journalist, and periods and commas always go outside quote marks--over here in the "colonies."
Isn't it great the stories behind paintings? So much to learn.