6th November, 2025. A lucky misquote of the original, which suggested that building it would attract unspecified kinds of ‘he’, and that isn’t what you want in a back garden.

This building involves ponds, which I put in not long after I moved here. I filled them with water and, almost the next day, they were full of things that live in and around ponds.

Now they’re well established and contain no fish, courtesy of a heron whose birthday it must have been because it cleared the lot out over a single day. There are newts, beetles, dragonfly larvae, water boatmen, things that swim backwards, and once – a snake. The birds dip in, have a flutter bath in the small channel dropping from one pond to the other, and sometimes fall out of the tree above and spend the next two days in the garage because it turns out they’re newly fledged and haven’t quite figured out how to be a bird.

The more routine traffic consists of hedgehogs and foxes. This painting is of the latter and I would appreciate a round of applause for omitting the hog in the interests of composition and not posing the fox in the centre of the spotlight with a grin on its face. Thankyou.

I’ve made use of an old canvas with a rather desperate endeavour on it that wouldn’t be out of place in a Game of Thrones robing room.

Fox

The fox here looks to me like a cross between a marsupial and a rat.

This is the essence of the painter’s (well, this painter’s) problem – striking that balance between producing a recognisable image of something while not overdoing the accuracy at the expense of impression.

Tomorrow, the paint will be a little less wet and so a little more pliable in terms of managing those errant pixels. The canvas is 8×10″ so there’s not much room to manoeuvre in that hock/knee area.

I also want to smooth out the foreground so it looks less like a small sea and maybe tip the colour over towards yellow. Ideally this would be Naples yellow but the water soluble range doesn’t seem to have that and nor do I have the colours that would produce NY when mixed. What I have is a starter pack of 10 tubes of paint plus one large Titanium white because I ran out of that within a few days. Limited resources encourage dilution but there’s a larger pack on the way and I’m already heading for full-on impasto.

7th November. Looking at this in daylight and after comments from reliable friends, I’m inclined to follow the instinct I often ignore and make no changes at all.

© Suzanne Conboy-Hill 2025