with our exquisite corpse deviation into “botanical joy” we were tasked to make a 3 dimensional object . The hope would be a surrealist concoction form the mornings drawings.

looking for lost objects i was in Morley gardens. It was full of dried plane leaves, quite beautiful in the end, after the summer beauty.

I thought of the old country song “painting the brown grass green” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-W92Ux9GKAI. and the John O Hara short story, ‘The Last Leaf” https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/LasLea.shtml

also the white roses painted red in Alice in Wonderland

Crafting a box to stand the bamboo and a collection of painted leaves I built a tree cheating autumn, a return to summer, rather sadly for the tree, the jute string knots tying the leaves are obvious, and the contractor only had enough time and to paint one side of the leaves.

i was surprised by the delicacy of the finished object, it had an internal beauty although it was clearly ‘fabricated’ from parts and constructed, it appeared to have a ‘naturalness’ The colour green does convoy nature, calm, tranquility, the decay in the brown of the leaves, the found objects had the internal beauty found in nature, the fractal veins of the leaves, the repeating patterns of the plane leaves, the robust spray of the bamboo .

I documented the tree in the studio, it was however much more spectacular in the Morley garden. https://youtu.be/YH00629cI5c. Summer Cheat embracing an autumn breeze. a short film

the small pot was left behind by the painter who left in a hurry to paint white roses red.

I deliberately left the jute string knots long and untidy, the box unfinished, that is was a sham, a Potemkin tree

Reflection

It was intersting how driven I felt in the planning and construction for ‘summer cheat’. .I was probably off piste for the day of ‘exquisite corpses,’ although it was directly inspired by the days teaching and especially the film of ‘Saints Alive‘ using the very succesful application of Collage, Reflection ,Fabrication, Placement