Hey Blog! On Thursday I attended a workshop trying something I’d never thought much about before – making natural pigments!

If you are a regular reader, you will know I am very interested in history and prehistory, and I am currently doing an Arts Award on the subject of prehistoric art. The ancient peoples knew the colour properties of the different rocks and soils, which is most evident in the cave art, but it is highly likely they used pigment in other ways too – for example as decoration or magic marks. Either way, they knew how to use it to make good art – which to my mind has in some ways never been surpassed! The variety of colours able to be made is remarkable, and though today’s synthetic acrylic paint makes brightly coloured paintings, ancient techniques create more sustainable, subtle, and infinitely more mysterious pictures. The most known ones are the ochres, browny-red-to-yellow pigments that were used by cultures from thousands of years ago to the present day; we used some examples of these in the workshop. I know I said natural colours are more muted tones, but even so it’s surprising at first quite how bright the colours produced are – sandstone produced a vibrant red and ash created hole-dark black! It’s quite intriguing how many different things contain pigment – unassuming soil, pieces of cliff, slate, even brick!

The process for making almost any paint is rather simple, but refining it is a bit more tricky. You start by grinding up your chosen pigment, with or without a little bit of water, in a pestle-and-mortar (NOT Mum’s one kept for spices!) and reducing it to a powder. You can use it at that stage if necessary, but it will be lumpy and full of grit – not ideal for paint! To make it better, you can levigate it – no, not levitate, but levigate, a way to separate the finer granules from the thicker granules, in which your ground-down pigment is swirled around in a jar of water and the heavier sediment sinks while the lighter pigment sits on top. This is also a good way to remove sticks and roots that have got in by accident! Once the water on top is clear, it can be poured out carefully and then the jar is swilled again, more gently, and the pigment comes out. When the pigment is tipped into a tray and allowed to dry, it can then be brought to the next stage.

Here, you have another choice. You can mull the paint, or can use it as it is – as it is will result in gritty stuff, but less gritty than the straight-ground. Mulling will make a smooth paint, as the pigment is once more rubbed and powdered, but in this process a binder is added – whether your paint is a watercolour or oil will depend on this stage. Oil paint is just that – oil is added as you mull it and the paint can then be used – but watercolour, which we tried, has a mainly water binder with a little other stuff added. To mull, you use a very heavy and smooth weight on a glass chopping board or similar – we used an old iron iron, which nearly stuck several times, but was very effective – the paint created was fine as any watercolour I’ve seen, and in some ways even better!

The person running the workshop told us there were many materials that could be found locally that would yield pigments, so in the future I will be most likely making my own paint – and painting my own pictures! This will mean I can almost create every element needed for painting – just the brush to go. Hmmmm, I wonder?!

Hey Blog! Last month, as you know, I went to the Orkney Islands, off the north coast of the UK. This is a book review on a book we read while we were there, inspired by the ancient history of the islands!

The book I am reviewing today is called The Orkney Cycle – The Shattering Sea. It is set in iron age Orkney, but references the prehistoric connections. You may have been thinking of The Boy with the Bronze Axe, an earlier tale of the folk of Scara Brae, but this new book is just as good! The Shattering Sea is much more focused on the myths and legends, containing fiery sea monsters called Asawans; mysterious fish-like humanoids the Fin-folk; mind-reading Divers and skull-talking Speys. All in all, it has lots of mystery and one of the best plot twists I know of – when you find out the bad guys are actually the good guys everything gets confusing!

The story starts when fin-footed farm boy Talorc watches his family and home burn as the Asawan attacks it. He had previously seen what he thought was a Finman summon it (seal pup, flint knife and an arrow shape of grass being used in the ritual) and when the house is destroyed, he sets of to tell the king – meeting the princess Runa along the way. When it appears everyone is going to war, Talorc and Runa set of to kill the Diver summoning it – only to come up against the most extraordinary plot twist. Dun dun dunnnn…

It’s a very good book. Being able to weave a story with that level of detail, making every last little feature of the landscape into a setting of a fight, ceremony, meeting or fall off a cliff, the author clearly knows Orkney, and we could see the places from the book as we went around the islands. I like this way of incorporating real places into a fantasy (we are currently reading The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and it also has that stunning feature – I may have to cover it on another review sometime soon!) as it means you can feel your way around in the same way as the characters, and in historically set novels you can feel part of the past – not that you need a book to do that on Orkney! “Scratch the ground and it bleeds archaeology,” people say!

The author Daniel Allison has a few more books coming, set in the same world, so there is clearly more to The Orkney Cycle! I eagerly await these reads.

Hey Blog! Last Friday I tried out a game I’ve wanted to play for a while, but never done – welcome to the world of Dungeons and Dragons!

Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) is a roleplay game, first envisaged in the ‘70s. Roleplay is an ancestor of many modern computer games, and is based on players making choices as if in the role of a character, and rolling dice to determine the outcome of a particular task, eventually creating a story. The storyline can be as long or as short as you wish, as it is created by playing the game, and it can go on for as long as you like. It is infinitely flexible, as you can try to do anything between opening a door and flying into another universe. As its name suggests, there are mysterious dungeons and fearsome dragons in the game, as well as a variety of magic, weapons, obscure creatures and much, much more. Whether you class it as a game or not is controversial, as there is no set end – a campaign (campaigns are a long adventure – think the length of Bilbo’s journey in The Hobbit) could resolve everything, or send you hunting more dangerous, dark and dastardly daring deeds of deadly high adventure (woah, that was a lot of Ds!).

A special player, the Dungeon Master (DM), runs the game, keeping everything in order, and deciding what happens to the characters, based on their dice rolls. Everything depends on these dice rolls, and in social interaction, your words; and yes, it is very complicated! There are hundreds of rules, and I don’t think anyone can remember them all; besides, it gets even more confusing when you start making characters for you to play with – for a start, you have to choose a race (species), and a class, or profession; and then to fill out your character there are pages-long lists of spells, weapons, magical objects etc.!

The D&D game I did was with my online Humamatees tutor Jake. He is a roleplay fan (in addition to books on many other subjects, the shed in his garden is full of piles of manuals on D&D and other games!) and before lockdown, when people used to visit his house to learn regularly, he used to play with them at the end. The one I did was a beginners’ course, and Jake has said as I now know the basics I can play the game on any level, if I want to! It wasn’t the most complicated game; it consisted of four random strangers getting teleported in their dreams to a wood in the middle of nowhere. Then, there was a lake with a glowing orb in it, a leprechaun, a giant spider, a frog, and some other weird creatures! The goal was to get home – which was achieved by swimming into the lake and touching the orb – which would take you home! It was made less confusing by the fact that none of us had a spellcasting character, which helped a little – but was a very good experience for a first go!

I don’t know what my future is playing D&D, but one of my friends is planning to get a group together to play it – he has now said I might have memorised more rules than him! – and I would love to take part. I hope to play some more, but bye for now!

Hey Blog! This weekend I had two archaeological digs in a row, so in this post I will tell you about them both!

I have told you about archaeology before, a long time ago in ‘a dig into the world of archaeology’, Jan. 2022; but this is the first time I have told you about an actual dig!

The first dig was with my Young Archaeologists Club. It was in Castleton, which, much as it sounds, does have a castle on the hill. Unfortunately, we weren’t digging at the castle but below it, at the New Hall, that is, we were digging up the new hall as it is now gone. The dig is run by the University of Sheffield, one of the few universities left to still have an archaeology department, and has run for a few years. The archaeologists have found several features of the building, which they believe to be with two ranges and a connection, centring around a courtyard with a well in it. The well was thankfully capped off, and this year’s spoil pile was on top!

I have my own trowel, so I brought it, but circumstances fell that I didn’t even use it – I was doing the mattocking! This is a good thing – I have already done a lot with a trowel so it was nice to let the others use them for the first time. Anyway, I did the mattocking, which is a very warm job, and I wish they had a longer handled mattock as I was having to bend down to use it (I’m 5’10’’). We were very lucky with our timings, as by the time we had finished at the dig site it was clouding over, and by the time we had got the umbrellas up it was a thunderstorm! We spent the rest of the session trying to shelter under umbrellas at the same time as walking to the finds washing barn on the other side of the village. It was still very fun!

Sunday was a bit different. I was with the Derbyshire scout archaeology badge, which I told you about on 20^th Nov. 2022, but this was the first dig run by the badge team. It was in Ripley, not far from us, so Mum, who is a member of the team, helped on the Cubs day, but I went on the Scouts day instead. There was a set of four different activities: geophys, digging, finds washing and finds analysing. Of the four, geophys was the only one I hadn’t done, so I really wanted to have a go.

Geophysics is a type of surveying; there are three main types used in archaeology – radar, the most expensive type, using rays that bounce in the ground; magnetometry, the cheapest and fastest, which reveals the soil’s magnetic properties; and the one we were doing, resistivity, where probes stabbed into the earth measure the resistance with electric current. The three reveal different types of features, and is why Time Team uses them all, but the “cheapest” still costs over a thousand pounds, so much more than you can ask for a birthday present! I found it quite straightforward with the machine, and very fun, sticking the probes in the ground and listening for the beep to tell you it’s recorded. But then the out-in-the-field bit is always the best – sitting and prepping the machine or arranging the data is not as brilliant! For whichever type, it’s done over a grid, which is laid out beforehand, and the machine cleverly records the system where it’s placed in the ground. The data-crunchers then orientate the values measured and it gets printed – hopefully showing “anomalies” which hint to where an archaeological feature might be, if you’re lucky, or if you’re not, the gas pipe!

Digging is the next step. Forget Indiana Jones, or any other treasure-hunting program (if you’ve seen them; I haven’t but all archaeologists I’ve talked to agree) – digging only takes a fraction of the total time invested. It was very kind of Morgause, the badge leader, to let us have two stints at the digging, and this time I did get to use the trowel! There were some very good finds, but none of them by me, though everyone found bits of glass and pottery – the site was formerly a brickworks, and people suspect there was a rubbish dump in the area, as huge amounts of broken glass and ceramics were found on the dig. We also found lots of broken brick, obviously!

Finds washing is more boring than the others, but still interesting – when you clean up a find you may reveal the beauty of the artefact. When doing this be careful to only take from one bag per tray, as mixing where you found the finds can lead to confusing mess-ups! And once the find is washed, you can analyse it, putting it into period, type of artefact, material and any other category. This was the last activity, after which specially commissioned badges were given out – mine is already on my Scout Blanket!

Hey Blog! Last post of the Orkney series.

Skara Brae, the Neolithic village lost to time, was, when discovered in 1850, one of the greatest discoveries of Stone Age archaeology, and still is. It remains a site of wonder, and we need to remind ourselves that these dwellings probably occurred all over Britain, it is merely that only those built in the hardwearing stone survived – and stone was only used when wood was scarce or simply not there at all – as it was in Orkney. That takes nothing away from the sense that you are walking where others walked, you are looking into the homes of those who could be our ancestors, and that this place is about 5000 years old – if every generation issue offspring at around 25, that’s about our 200-times great-grannies! The small, carefully built huts show a certain crude, refined beauty; it has lost some clarity by being buried under the sand for 5 millennia, but the structure of the site remains. My one pity was you weren’t allowed to go in, but nonetheless it was a very special visit. The museum was also good, and showed you many of the more portable things that would get blown away from the site (Orkney is windy – we were lucky to have good weather most of the time)!

There’s also a good beach on the bay of Skaill for skimming stones – I managed somewhere in the region of 15 bounces, though I have a way to go to get to the 40-something bounce world record!

Our last two nights were spent in Kirkwall. Though this may seem incredible, Orkney was once property of the kings of Norway, and had stronger ties to that country than Scotland! Also in its history, it was dominated by two rival, joined powers – bishops, and earls. Both built great palaces, one earl even attempting to join his extended palace to the preexisting bishop’s palace, and the result we went to see! They are recent in terms of Skara Brae, as they were only constructed in the last millennium, but when they were whole and not, as they are today, in ruins, they would have looked stunning. As the weather was fine, the ground had dried out, and made the remnants of the former formal gardens out the back stand out as green lines on yellow grass. This was interesting, as we could trace the layout exactly to the example on the signboard! I turns out a local legal building is situated just behind where the connecting wall would have been, evidently carrying on the trend of important business being carried out at that site for half a thousand years! The tower on one of the palaces provides spectacular views of the whole town, which in the past would have been very different – the sea came in further and the buildings were smaller. The only thing to rival the height of the two palaces was the cathedral, which we also went into. It is truly spectacular, beautifully made and with a long history.

An interesting fact of local history is the Ba’ game, started from the cathedral green and a remnant of the communal football games that were once widespread across the UK. Shrovetide football, an almost identical game, is played in Ashbourne, near where we live; there are occasional villages which do a similar thing, but these are all that survive to this day. It sounds very fun, but very boisterous – all the houses have barriers across the doors and windows to prevent the ball going through!

I would like to go back to Orkney. It’s more than anyone can say, a land with a long history which you can see, because those who made it left it for us to find. You have to see it to feel it, and there will be more discoveries, so we will hopefully go back one day!

Hey Blog! Sorry I haven’t uploaded anything recently, but that’s because I’ve been on holiday to ORKNEY!

The Orkney Islands are a group of islands off the north coast of Scottish mainland. The largest is simply known as the “Mainland” *, and there are apparently around 70 – but only 20 are inhabited! They have a UNESCO world heritage site, internationally important seabird colonies, some of the best wreck diving grounds in the UK, and lots more! As with our France trip, we didn’t want to fly there, so getting there we had several Experiences during the trip – but the Sleeper was definitely the best bit; it’s really cool to get on in London, go to sleep around Milton Keynes, wake up in Edinburgh because the train is being disconnected and reconnected, and then wake up again to get off in Inverness! The final train of the outward voyage was from Inverness to Thurso, just a few miles west of John-o-Groats and next to the ferry port. The ferry (this one named Hamnavoe, the old name for Stromness) was brilliant, we saw lots of seabirds (they look quite small when you see them from the deck of a massive ferry, as we subsequently found) and were hoping to see some seals, but didn’t at that point (we saw some later though!). The highlight of the ferry was sailing past the Old Man of Hoy, a famous and tall sea stack off the coast off the island of Hoy**.  The captain brought us close in and we could see it really clearly

On Orkney, we found it was exactly what I had expected, just a little larger! Compared with the UK mainland, it is quite small, but when you’re on the island, the distances are much bigger than would be thought from the things saying “quaint, small islands, steeped in history with loads of sealife”! If you don’t go in the tourist season, it’s a sleepy little place out of the towns – Kirkwall, we found, was full of tourists of the cruise ships that dock there – but once you go outside, it all goes quiet. We thought Stromness was very nice, it’s not overcrowded but is a very interesting town. The campsite was good and the museum is lovely and big for the size of the town! We also stayed at the Birsay hostel (though it is now group bookings only) and the pods at Kirkwall campsite. The “pods” are much better than the ones we stayed in in Cornwall last year, they are a lot roomier!

We came to Orkney to see really two things, the archaeology, and the wildlife. The archaeology I will detail in a later post(s), as there is more of it than the wildlife. However, some of the wildlife is of immense quality – more on that later, so I will start with a species special to Scotland, the Great Yellow Bumblebee. It is not endemic to Scotland, but within Britain, the species only lives on the north coast of the mainland and in the Scottish islands. While crossing back over the Churchill barriers, we stopped to have a walk along an old quay, and in the dunes behind saw this fuzzy flying yellow ball. I’m pretty good with bumblebee ID, and identified it as the great yellow, one of the list we had wanted to see!

One of the other things on that list was the puffins – everyone’s favourite seabird, right? Well, we saw them, one time when we went up to Yesnaby; and also at the brough of Birsay, an islet only accessible by a low-tide walkway. There weren’t very many of them, but they were there! Another tick. We saw even more seabirds on Marwick Head, on the cliffs of which there are gannets, Razorbills, Guillemots, Manx Shearwaters, bonxies (Skuas), gulls, and many more! No one can truly appreciate seabirds, I think, if they haven’t stood on top of the cliffs, watching thousands of them coming and going. It reminds you what we have to lose if these species disappear. I was so glad that there, at least, the birds seem to be very happy!

Another reason for going to Yesnaby is it’s a main site where the endemic Primula scotica, the Scottish primrose, is known to flower. Unfortunately we didn’t find that one, but still.

On the train from Inverness to Thurso we had seen, out of the corner of the window, a grey-backed, black-wing-tipped bird rise from a rock and fly, and there was nothing it could be but a hen harrier! Also known as sky dancers, these beautiful birds of prey are sadly widely persecuted. We saw one in Orkney too when one flew almost over the car while coming back from between lochs Harray and Stenness, it was not a sight to be missed! We followed it in the car to see where it went, and it literally flew over the primary school and through someone’s back garden! Words can’t really describe it, so my best recommendation is to go to Orkney and try to spot one yourself! Not much can top a Hen Harrier, so what else could Orkney show? A Short-eared owl hunting? Yes, it could! We saw this while driving back to Kirkwall, and immediately stopped to watch. Short-eared owls are light brown, and speckled, live in moorland and marshland habitats, and are the most likely of UK owls to hunt during the day. Its face was shown to good effect, and the wings subtly wavering as it looked for prey – most likely the Orkney vole ☹, a species only found on Orkney and is SO CUTE! We didn’t see this, but in terms of the owl, I’m glad, as I would have been rather upset to see them both in the same frame! The owl was stunning, and something I would love to see again!

In my next post(s) the archaeology of Orkney will be told of, so stay with me!

* Historically known by the Norse as Hrossey, or Horse Island – Hrossey is also the name of the ferry we took coming back!

** From Norse for ‘high’ – Hoy is very hilly so was known as the High Island.

Hey Blog! Time for my summer book review!

The book I am reviewing today was written back in 1998, and is totally unlike anything I have ever read before. The plot is the more twisted and convoluted than a half-knitted ball of string after three cats have fought over it while trying to tie the whole thing up in knots, and the result is a masterpiece of balance, hidden secrets, laws, curses, and a slowly revealing truth. Holes, by Louis Sacher, is totally unique. My big brother read it when he was younger, and now Dad has found a copy for me.

The plot is made up of three parts. Two are much earlier, and the third and main story is set contemporarily. Of course, according to Mrs. Yelnats, curses don’t exist and we shouldn’t believe in them, but… Anyway, the timeline really starts with 19^th Century Latvia, where the protagonist Stanley Yelnats’s no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather Elya Yelnats falls in love with the most beautiful girl in the village, Myra. To cut a long story short, Elya tries to provide the fattest pig to gain her hand, with the help of the old gypsy (witch?) Madam Zeroni. While originally against the idea, she agrees, so Elya has to carry a pig up a certain mountain, let it drink from a certain stream, and sing a special song – every day until Myra’s birthday, and then carry Madam Zeroni up the mountain too, or his family be cursed for eternity. He almost succeeds, but fails on the final day, causing him to not only lose Myra but receive the curse, and when he emigrates to America, he finds a trail of bad luck following. By the time his great-great-grandson Stanley Yelnats IV is born, the curse is not yet broken, and the song has become a lullaby.

One generation later, in the town of Green Lake in Texas, white schoolteacher Kate Barlow falls in love with the black onion seller Sam. When the two kiss, which goes against the racist laws of the state, Kate’s schoolhouse is attacked, and as the couple try to row away, Sam is shot and Kate is ‘rescued’. After Sam’s death, a curse is somehow placed on Green Lake, causing a hundred-and-ten-year drought; Kate later escapes and becomes outlaw Kissin’ Kate, who robs and leaves lipstick kisses on her victims. She even robs Elya’s son Stanley Yelnats I, a continuation of the bad luck which rids the Yelnats of their fortune. Eventually, the local landowner comes back to find Kate and demand her buried loot. She refuses, gets bitten by a venomous Yellow-Spotted Lizard, and dies laughing.

Stanley Yelnats IV, the main character, arrives at Camp Green Lake: Juvenile Correctional Facility after he is falsely convicted of shoe theft. At the camp, all campers have to dig a 5ft deep, 5ft wide hole every day, to “build character” probably looking for something buried on the dry lake bed. Over time, he gets to know the other boys in his tent, including one named Zero (Hector Zeroni), who is the smallest and best digger. After finding a lipstick tube with KB (Kate Barlow?!) on the end of it, Stanley deduces her treasure – including his grandfather’s treasure – might just be buried somewhere near: and possibly what the campers, or rather the Warden who controls them, are looking for!

Holes is definitely the one of the best books I have read this year, and stands alone in all books in the world. I have never to my knowledge read a book with flashbacks before, nor have I read a book containing so finely blended paranormal and, well, it’s not ordinary, more non-supernatural. You don’t often hear of a book for children or young teens set in what is effectively a jail, a forced labour camp. Even though the camp has no fences or any kind of protection – it has the only water in three hundred miles, so if anyone tried to run away, they would die. Probably. It includes difficult themes for writers to introduce to children, namely being convicted in court, and racism, which, even though I am constantly thinking up stories, I would definitely find hard to incorporate in a way that would be suitable for a target audience. The setting and characteristics of that setting (like scorpions, rattlesnakes, a scorching sun and yellow-spotted lizards) cause an atmosphere of tense excitement and possible danger everywhere, the greatest of these in the form of a lack of water. On the whole, it is an amazingly complicated, but brilliant book!

Can Stanley break two curses, and clear his name of shoe theft? I guess you have to (chorus) READ THE BOOK! Whatever way you take it, Holes is profoundly individual, and it will definitely remain on my shelf. Look out for my next book review coming soon!

Hey Blog! This is my conclusion of my Paris work, in which I will tell you all about the two exhibitions I attended for my Arts Award. As this part of the award contains a section where feedback is required, sending comments in to me would be very nice!

For my Arts Award, I chose to attend two exhibitions, the first being Arts et la Prehistoire, at the Musée de l’homme in Paris, and the second Picasso et la Prehistoire, also at the same museum. Here, I am sharing the analysis I have done on these two. I’m very glad that they also allowed a sneaky trip to Paris – as you have seen in my previous posts!

The first exhibition I attended was entitled ‘Arts et la Prehistoire’, and was at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. I chose to attend this exhibition because it was said to show a lot of different types of prehistoric art, and do its best to explain the many interpretations of these artworks. It would be impossible to bring the real static art (fixed art, on the wall such as cave paintings/carvings) to the galleries, but instead the exhibition creators used videos and other images to demonstrate the variety.

The artists who made these artworks were prehistoric people; we do not know their names as they left no writing, only art. However, we do know they taught one another, as we can see there were different ‘schools’ of art, i.e. common features run through the different artworks, for example in details of manes on horses, some have broad streaks of colour with no texture, some have lots of little lines to show fine, delicate detail. I saw all sorts of art, both portable, such as a few of the famous ‘Venus’ figurines (not all of them, mainly the ones found in or near France), and representations of static art, by means of videos and photographs of the famous cave paintings at Lascaux and Delacroix.

All artwork showed clearly. I liked the use of videos and shadow, there was a huge amount of famous art from all prehistoric periods, ranging from incisions on mammoth bone to [videos of] magnificent pigmented frescos. I liked the layout, with portable art, then static art, then an explanatory section, and finally interactive. The interactive part was a screen where you could make your own ‘cave art’ on a screen and it would slide over to the ‘cave wall’ with everybody’s art on.

I liked the idea that people had animation, or a version of it, in the prehistoric periods, with thaumatropes. The example in the exhibition was of a bison which would have a nodding head when the optical illusion was put in motion by twisting the disc on a string. Also, the interpretation of certain objects and wall panels included many different ways of understanding the art, which is good because it reminds you to keep an open mind to new ideas about the art.

All pieces of work furthered my understanding and showed me there are many different prehistoric styles of creating animals, which is to be expected as the art was created for so many thousands of years! I think the ancient artists were masters of the moving form, which is something I want to get better with over the course of my Arts Award too. It showed me what I need to practice before my final artwork, so it looks as I envisage.

I really, really enjoyed it as it included so much art that I hadn’t seen or even heard of before, and a lot of new information, which is rare.

For my second exhibition to attend, I decided to go to the ‘Picasso et la Prehistoire’ exhibition, also at the Musée de l’homme in Paris. This exhibition was running at the same time, in the same museum as the other, and was focused on how another artist used prehistory to inspire their own art – just like I am trying to do with my Arts Award!

As the name says, this exhibition focused on Picasso, so almost all of the art was by him: paintings, sculptures and a few drawings. There were also a few photographs by an artist called Brassaï, and objects from Picasso’s own nature collection, stones and sticks and the like. 

I found it a bit confusing really. I like stylized art, but with Picasso’s, I couldn’t see what it was meant to be! All the pieces, particularly the ‘gathered objects’ that served as inspiration in his studio, were laid out very well. I particularly liked the plaster-cast of Picasso’s hand, as seen in the picture, it fits mine quite well. One of the most interesting artworks was a drawing of what seemed at first a man with a Star Carr deer-skull mask. However, the caption at the bottom said it had “the antlers of a deer, the eyes of a bird, the ears of a wolf, the back of a bear, and the tail of a horse”. Aside from being one of the few pieces in the gallery that I could actually understand what it was meant to look like, I have a book (The Dark is Rising, by Susan Cooper) in which one of the characters has a mask with that face – a link between artworks, and literature!

It reminded me to look for inspiration in nature, and to make it so that I and other people can understand what it represents.

I didn’t enjoy this exhibition as much as the other one, it didn’t contain as much information and I don’t find Picasso’s art clear. I didn’t understand some of his pieces, as they didn’t show a picture of what they were called. They looked (to my untrained eye) mostly like a bunch of things he found in and around his house that were stuck together with paint and plaster-of-Paris and transformed by association with the artist, so I expect his art is far more about concept rather than realistic representation! Most of the time I couldn’t see a picture through the slightly confusing array of images. However, the layout and setting were good.

I hope you enjoyed the multitudes of posts here about my trip to Paris. You can see how much we could see in just three short days, and it’s such a big city we could spend years there and not see everything! On that note, I hope to go back sometime, so I’m sure I’ll have more holiday notes on Home Ed in a Shed very soon.

Hey Blog! It’s been rather busy blog-wise over these past weeks, so in this three-in-one post I’ll report on all that happened in a big day out – a trip to York, to visit two exhibitions; the monthly games club; and finally today, when I went to meet my Humanatees tutor Jake in person for the very first time!

You may remember a certain post on going to visit an exhibition of Van Gogh’s artwork in Leicester. At the end of it I said that we were planning to go again, this time with some friends. Well, this has happened! We went to see the same exhibition, but this time in York, as the Van Gogh experience was also on there, and also a different exhibition on ‘rebels in children’s literature’ in one of the York museums. As they both ran simultaneously for a short time, we could fit in both! I’m not going to detail the Van Gogh experience, as I have done so already, so for this see An Art Experience, 28^th Feb. The other, however, I will detail.

We had to get up at six to drive to Derby and meet the friends who were coming – they’re one of the families we went to London with last year and we see them almost every Wednesday – then together we took the train to York station. We went to the Van Gogh experience, and then, after a quick lunch break, straight on the ‘rebels’ exhibition. It was good. As it was focusing on literature, it included all sorts of characters I have read and others I have never heard of before. There were a few famous ones, like Oliver Twist by Dickens, Matilda by Dahl, and Anne of Green Gables by Montgomery (in all of these the titular character was the rebel) but a few I had never heard of, such as Howl’s Moving Castle or Noughts and Crosses. Past the bulk of the exhibition was an area where the books from the exhibition were on a bookshelf – I began to read… Once, after moving back from overseas before we had a house here, I used to use shops like libraries – I would choose a book, and the next shop we went into I would find the same book and jump to where I had left off! Luckily, my shelves have expanded somewhat since then and I now usually buy the book if I want it that much!

Last Friday was Games Club. This is a monthly meet-up for home-ed families to play games together, as I have told you before, but this time it was run outside! Therefore, games like boule and twister were able to be played, as well as table games. Consequently it was a lot of fun.

Today, I went to meet Jake. He is my humanities tutor, teaching Geography, History, Philosophy and other human-based subjects, but today I went to his house for the first time to take part in a debate. There were only five debaters, and Jake, of course, leading it and giving us points for good or bad arguments. The rules were – a good argument for your side: 1 point. Explaining your argument: 1 point. Insulting someone personally: -1 point. Interrupting an opening argument or closing argument: -1 point. We did three debates, the first being “Should we use giraffes in war?”! As my mum frequently points out, Jake is nuts – but in a good way! My side won that argument – that we shouldn’t, by making points like, “They’re peaceable creatures, they don’t want to fight,” and “If we take them away from their natural habitat, the ecosystem will collapse.” The next question was a little more sensible, as it was “Should we eat meat?” My side lost, even though we tried. Both of these the difference between the scores were only 1 point, but the third – and hardest question – was, after Jake had swapped the teams around, “Are animals better than humans?” and in the end the team I was on lost that one by six points, though this was probably due to half the team drawing pictures of monkeys on the whiteboard to try and do diagrams to try to make points instead of actually thinking hard! It was still immensely fun, and I would love to do another one in person! I have just started a one-year Environmental Management GCSE course with Jake, so I will be seeing him quite regularly.

This is getting rather loooong, so see you soon!

Hey Blog! Salut! Last post I said I would tell you all about what I did when in one of the many museums in Paris. Well, here you are!

We visited two museums in Paris. La première was the Musée d’Orsay, on the south bank of the Seine, and was designed to pick up where the art in the Louvre left off (the 16- 1700s), and cover the art of a more recent period. It is not the most modern one, as there is an entire museum which we didn’t go to dedicated to Picasso, who lived in the 20^th century; and there is also another one we didn’t go to called the museum of modern art – as far as I’m concerned, art is currently going very, very strange, with weird-in-a-confusing-way shapes and random everyday objects all piled together. However, I like the art from the Musée d’Orsay, it covers the impressionists and those to either side of them. This means there are great names like Monet, Cezanne, Degas, Manet, Renoir, Sisley… the list goes on and on.

If you’re wondering how I know all these names, it’s primarily because we have binge watched the entire set of ‘Fake or Fortune’ documentaries, where people with works of art suspected to be from one of the art world’s big names send in to the program and the experts try to trace it to the artist. There was also a specific reason for going to this museum instead of the Louvre, and that is to see one particular painting – the one I told you a bit about in the post about my drama performance. This is Cezanne’s The Card Players, an impressionist painting of two gents playing cards at a table with a bottle of wine. We incidentally saw a group of men doing just that as we walked to our hotel the first night! As I had portrayed it in the dramatic sketch, it was fun to find it.

The museum itself is in an old station building, and there are parallels to the Natural History Museum in London. There are also several cafés dotted around, and for lunch we went to one of these. Their baguettes were very good! But the other thing that was really important in the Musée d’Orsay was the special exhibition of Manet and Degas’s works, which was really good. This took most of the time in the museum, and showed the similarity and difference between the two artists. There were many examples of the latter, even though they lived in the same time and were both in the same community. There were some very famous paintings in there, by many different artists (though primarily the two the exhibition was focused on) and one of my thoughts was if someone managed to rob that gallery, they would be so rich they wouldn’t have to do a day’s work ever again! It’s hard to describe the exhibition; we went for both the Art value and the History value, which is not the same with all exhibitions! There was a lot of history to the impressionists, and a lot of art, generally in a kind of detached style, though sometimes realistic, with non-formal paintings rather than the stiff formal portraits of the previous centuries – they were groundbreakers at their time, but now they would almost be considered realistic, judging the standard of today’s art! I don’t know if the exhibition is still up, but if it is, it’s definitely worth a visit!

I have one more post to do about Paris. This will detail the exhibitions I originally went to Paris for – the Prehistoric art exhibitions for my Arts Award. See you soon!