Birds

Posted on January 11, 2026 by iansblog

Birds

Another New Studio

Two Crows November 25

One of the joys of the garden are the birds that I feed each day. I regularly see fifteen to twenty Pigeons, they gather on the neighbouring chimneys waiting for me to bring the food to the bird table at eight thirty each morning. While they are there, and before and after their arrival and departure, the smaller birds mill around the table, Hedge Sparrows and House Sparrows, Blue Tits and Great Tits. Occasionally a Black Cap or a Green Finch will appear and very rarely a Woodpecker or a pair of Parakeets. The garden will be full of Blackbirds from early morning until lunchtime and again from around three thirty as the sun begins to set. Magpies and Crows visit throughout the day, the Magpies chasing the Pigeons from the table and bullying anything they can see. There are at least three Robins that live at the top of garden near the house. If I venture up the garden I see all these and Long Tailed Tits alongside the charm of Goldfinches that fly up and down the gardens on this side of the street.

I have a feeling that I’m supposed to look for meaning in the things that move me and through that understanding develop a direction but I find myself continually thinking about the work having no meaning. Simply being.

Jackdaw November 25

Is it even possible to make something without meaning or purpose? Immediately I know that people will scoff at this, the world is full of stuff with neither meaning nor purpose! I suspect the truth is that some things lack either meaning or purpose but rarely, if ever, both. I don’t even know if this is what I mean. What I do is continually seek to limit the amount of editing I allow myself when I draw or build, I’m always looking for the minimal amount of me in any work. I am aware that editing is the activity I’m engaged in as an artist.

So I started drawing birds in November when preparing for the open day. I started with the Crows, the Gulls and the Jackdaw and went for the 1mtr square format to fit frames I already had. I made the support using three sheets of A1 cartridge paper stuck together with wallpaper paste and for these first drawings left unstretched. The surface afforded the quality of the air and be random enough to remain an active part of the drawing.

Gulls November 25

‘Scattering’ November 25

Pigeons Nov 25

I moved onto the big drawings at the same time, these were made at the same time as the sculpture ‘The difference between Birds and Trees’ and I used the leaf print to make the backgrounds before I drew on them. The pigeons references Milton Avery’s pigeons in Paris . The geese seemed appropriate for the time of year and the idea of the wind blowing the leaves.

Crows in Flight 1 November 25

Crows in Flight 2 November 25

These were accompanied by a few sketches of individual birds, loosely Crows in flight.

‘The difference between trees and birds’ Nov 25

Crows in Flight (maquette) November 25

The sculptural works were made to explore the idea of representing flight without being tied to making literal birds.

‘A Murder’ November 25

I also made a big drawing of a rookery, we pass one by the dual carriageway on the way to the pub.

‘More Pigeons’ December 25

The drawings are develop during any hiatus encountered when I hit a bump in the road. I might be thinking about where its all going or distracted by other considerations. In December I was greatly perturbed by the CAA Crit Programme I did with David Risley that threw me completely askew.

‘Three Crows, or is it Rooks’ December 25

The Three Crows were drawn while I was working on the ‘woolgathering’ VR piece that I have worked to a point where it needs to rest. There is a walkthrough video of the entire piece here and the executable file can be downloaded for PCVR here

I made a twine story to try to explain the VR.

‘Two Pigeons’ December 25

The pigeons were drawn because I felt I needed to look more closely at them when I stopped working on the 1m sq drawing and Christmas was almost upon us.

‘Pigeon’ December 25

‘Geese in Flight’ December 25

The second Geese drawing was made during the open days at the end of November as I had a big paper stretched and drawing is an activity that it’s easier to step in and out of.

‘Crows in Flight’ (maquette)

While I was away from the studio I made some small models of ideas for birds in my attic and then took them to the studio to develop.

‘Crows in Flight’ (maquette) December 25

They are very difficult to scan as they’re shiny black so I got some interesting versions for modelling.

These two were relatively accurate. I tried Polycam’s [LINK] new AI 3d scanning which takes a single image and generates a 3d form.

The forms you get are interesting and give opportunities for more interesting takes on flight than the first models so I’ve made them into STL files for 3d printing.

‘Crow’ January 26

The big single crow has been on the board throughout December and I consider it abandoned rather than finished.

‘Scaffold’ WIP

I want to build a kind of woodland, reflective of the ‘murder’ drawing earlier in this piece, and this is the first step towards that. There will be flight forms atop the ‘twigs’ at the top of the piece.

Drawing

I’ve continued to draw every day;

The December drawings can be seen here

Draw Every Day – December 25

Draw Every Day - December 25 Continuing to draw every day, finished Book 26 on 1st December. ...
See photo »

…and the November images here

Draw Every Day – November 25

Draw Every Day - November 25 Continuing to draw every day, finished Book 26 on 1st December. ...
See photo »

There is a link to the previous month’s Gallery on each page.

Or you can go the Galleries page on the top menu

The drawings are posted to Instagram each day.

Property

Posted on August 3, 2025 by iansblog

Property

“That property in land and liberty among men, in a state of nature, ought to be equal, few, one would fain hope, would be foolish enough to deny. Therefore, taking this to be granted, the country of any people, in a native state, is properly their common, in which each of them has an equal property, with free liberty to sustain himself and connections with the animals, fruits and other products thereof.“

Thomas Spence — Property in land every one’s right (Proved in a LECTURE Read at the Philosophical Society in Newcastle, on the 8th of Nov, 1775 ).

All of the work I’ve been doing over the last few years has drawn me towards questions around the nature of property and possession of land in all of its aspects. There is a strong case to be made for the nature of our relationship with land to have been formed through the application of the Inclosure Act of 1773 and the establishment development of Landscape Gardening that created the bucolic ideal we reference in our current defences of the naturalness of vistas that are entirely man made.

Somehow this thinking has led me to make a series of works that culminate in a way that I can only explain by outlining the process and identifying the influences that are inevitably applied at different stages of making.

You should always look down on a circus (maquettes)

In 2002 or 2003 I made a set of small maquettes, like these that I reproduced in 2021 but that might have looked a bit more like these.

Sketchbook pages from 2002/2003

From these wax maquettes I made two drawings, first this one

You should always look down a circus (drawing 2003)

And then this one

you should always look down on a circus (spaced)

I made these on Fabriano Accademia 200gsm Cartridge Paper, stretched to a big drawing board leaning against the sideboard in my living room. Which says nothing other than that we can’t always have easels or afford studios.

Moving on, life intervenes, work gets intense, other drawings inveigle themselves into your consciousness and drag you off with their peculiar indulgences. But at the back of your mind you know that this moment of oddness is part of something that hasn’t surfaced yet.

In 2004 I took a Masters in Creative Technology at Salford University having left work to do so and in 2019 after retirement I undertook an ACE National Lottery Funded Project in an empty shop on Scot Lane in Doncaster.

Then Lockdown!

emptying the shop for lockdown

In March 2020 I managed to move my kit out of the empty shop just before the Announcement.

Waste Ground

The following month I decided to clear and plant a patch of waste ground that I thought was unadopted rather than anyone’s property, at the back of the garden and that was where the next project began.

Patch dug over

This is the point where I started to think more deeply about my relationship with property and the notion of ownership of the natural world.

This first began to manifest itself through drawings

Balby Garden, April 2020

Made on site initially and developed in sketchbooks and small maquettes…

casting stones

Balby Garden Sculpture June 2020

I made a series of Garden Sculptures using casts from stones found in my pseudo allotment and using gold leaf and oil paints.

The set of these are on the website

Garden Sculpture Web Page

The quotations used as titles for the pieces are mostly from TS Eliot apart from “Fiction is not imagination” which is from Baudrillard’s ‘America’.

I had become concerned with the translation of sources from one media to another with the geranium project (the ACE Project) and it continues to be at the core of the work I do. Translation might not be the most precise word to use but addresses the primary motivation for the activity I engage in. The way I express myself is through the objects and drawings I make and they carry all the varieties of conversation, discourse, polemic, broadside, joking etc.,

One year later, March 2021, I dreamt about the circus drawings and then made a whole series of new drawings and new, simpler, maquettes.

You should always look down on a circus remade

New Circus Maquettes

These figures related to the garden sculptures and to the forms I was seeing in the garden, and imagining into the virtual space.

I gradually began to merge the figures into new sets of drawings. I should indicate here that I work on sets of drawings simultaneously and carry marks and textures and colours and patterns across the set as it evolves. The process involves copying, mono-printing, overlaying and waiting for surfaces to dry and can involve collage, usually of the drawings themselves as I search for the form to emerge.

Circus Drawings 2 of 4

I spent the next year working on a series based around tori (toruses) that is currently sitting in abeyance.

C-View Studio 2023

In May 2023 I moved into my studio at C-View.

Red Garden Three 2023

In October I returned to the garden to start working on the Red Garden Series of drawings and sculptures.

Three Trees, Red Gardens, in progress

These figures were based on forms of trees in the garden and the strangeness of the red films.

I spent several moths working on iterations of these sculptures using anything I had to hand.

Three Trees Half Size

Dancing Partners

Studio 30/05/2024

Having the space in the studio was what enabled me to build out into the garden, does that make sense? Perhaps it should be to build in from the garden.

All the time transferring these objects into the VR environment by scanning into Poly.cam and importing those objects into Blender, then to Unity.

Studio 03/07/24

Towards the end of the year I started to extend the world of the garden in VR and decided I needed to be able to play with scale in the developing environment. I had at this point been led to read much more about enclosure and how tied in to British Politics it was in the 17^th Century alongside the development of landscape gardens and the engineering of what we now regard as the countryside.

Flowerbed October 2024

The flowerbed drawings and sculptures came along at this point.

Flowerbed Sculpture 2024

You Should Always Look down on a Circus 2025

The sculptures from 2003 have been made at full size now and the VR world is all there, although there are still some refinements to do including sound issues and perhaps the start position.

Drawing

I’ve continued to draw every day;

The July drawings can be seen here

Draw Every Day – July 25

Draw Every Day - July 25 Continuing to draw every day, finished Book 22 on 16th July and ...
See photo »

…and the June images here

Draw Every Day – June 25

Draw Every Day - June 25 Continuing to draw every day in Book 22. I've continued to use the ...
See photo »

There is a link to the previous month’s Gallery on each page.

Or you can go the Galleries page on the top menu

The drawings are posted to Instagram each day.

Still in the Red

Posted on November 12, 2023 by iansblog

Still in the Red

Another New Studio

the studio in a convex mirror

Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush?

TS Eliot ‘Burnt Norton’

Despite my best efforts the concerns I had when developing the geranium project remain central to my practice and I feel as if I’m in a dialogue with the inherent nostalgia evoked, in particular, through the Four Quartets

The work I started and discussed in my last post led to me making the space to build a large sculpture based on the three trees maquettes I’ve been making. The sculpture must have spaces inside its mass that are inaccessible to adults because that’s the truth of the actual location (I am working alongside on a VR project that will express this better). In order to clear apples from the garden I need to get on my knees and that act immediately changes my relationship with the earth. I am attached more strongly to the ground, limited in my ability to move and given a different view of things. It’s this feeling I carry in to making and essentially try to replicate in the process. The object is the manner of its making.

The build process

In this case that starts with an external armature to which I can attach shapes based on those that have grown. Each of the stages is followed by a Polycam scan of the sculpture at that stage.

with the armature removed

When I’ve got the basic form I remove the armature and make sure the structure can stand.

with the armature removed

This, if you like, is the outline, and I can then build on this to fill out the form I envisage.

adding form

I used cartridge paper to do this and I’d normally make this more rigid with resin but my current studio arrangements don’t allow for this. It’s always worth noting that the material determines the quality of the form.

adding form

The form, once complete can be painted and in this case it will be red.

First coat of Red

The piece is about seven feet tall and will intially be painted using two shades of red. I’ve managed to put the first one on so far.

First coat of Red

I’ve found time to work on some of the drawings and my sketchbook, this is the third red garden drawing

Red Garden Three

Still not finished.

You’ll have noticed this at the top of the page, try to visit if you can, the other two are really good!

ian-latham.com

Paintings and Sculpture – Drawing – 3d modelling and virtual environments

Tag Archives: geranium

Birds

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Property

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Still in the Red

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