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I am a big fan of Windmill Hill Park in Hitchin. It's a steep incline that I sometimes see people running up, but which currently leaves me out of breath if I walk up too quickly. There's a rainbow bench at the top and you can look down at Hitchin's main thoroughfare Hermitage Road and then or up at the surrounding countryside.
I can't say too much about it yet, but it may get a mention or two in the Pottery show I am doing and every time I am up there it makes me want to draw stuff. I know so little about art that I wouldn't even know what medium to do the art in. I use words and occasionally clay.
I am not good at art, or at least have always felt that way because I wasn't in the top two or three at it at school. When I got my art folder back from middle school, I took it out into the garden and burned everything in it (including the folder). It stood for failure and my only recourse was to attack it with fire. I mean it says so much about me, that I hardly dare unpack that any further.
Having done the pottery show and also not being eleven any more, I have come to realise that it doesn't really matter how good you are at creating stuff - it's still fun to try. The pottery show was very stressful indeed, but also it was weirdly relaxing to give up hours of your day doing something that you would never usually do and just doing the best you could.
So anyway today I was looking down at Hermitage Road thinking about how I might capture it in art, if only I had some pens, pencils, paint, pastels and some sketch pads, when I spotted something a bit weird. Can you spot it?
Let me zoom in.
Sitting on a ledge above the estate agent was the figure of a small child. It's obviously not a child as it's entirely white and featureless and is clearly a mannequin. It is possibly missing some of its legs (though that might just be perspective) and it looks a bit like one of the plaster cast figures from Pompeii. Though I don't think Hitchin was ever hit by a volcano and it would be a weird place for a child to end up if they were trying to avoid the ash and lava.
It's like a Doctor Who monster impinging on my sleepy Hertfordshire home.
But who put it there and why? And why hasn't anyone made them take it down?
I think I did spot it a few months ago, but had pretty much forgotten about it. So it's been there a while. Just a slightly threatening and weird thing hovering over the largely oblivious people of Hitchin. Perhaps it's an alien. I can't say.
