The quail is an inconspicuous, hidden-living bird and is not as common in our areas as it used to be. The quail hen carries up to twelve chicks. In the picture I count only five chicks. Oh! Where is the rest of the children’s flock???
I don’t want to tell sad stories here!
So we move on to the sober material collection:
Favourite paper!
- As with many of my collages, I used a slightly structured hand-made watercolour paper made in France. It has such a wonderfully warm white and feels very pleasant, a bit sandy it grabs. The paper is extremely durable and does not yellow. I drew with watercolor, with fine drawing, pencil and crayons. I attach great importance to a fine drawer with light-resistant pigments in the finest stroke thickness for the small drawings! The entire collage measures approx. 6 x 7 cm.
Viewed in detail from left to right:
Stinks like soap!
- At the bottom left, an immature seed capsule of the glandular springwort. In this collage, a small snipe has become of it. Self-confident and determined, she prides itself on the picture. The springweed grows everywhere like crazy and I can easily pick the little i want to use. Perhaps you know the small pink flowers of this herb growing at the edges of forests and streams, which in some weather emits a somewhat unpleasant soapy smell. When the seed capsules are ripe, they jump on touch. I only take the little immature anyway. And when dried, the seed capsules don’t smell at all.
The Venus Trap is a carnivorous plant. Quails don’t eat them!
- The snipe hides under two withering leaves of the Venus Trap, which thrives in a flower pot on my window sill. After the leaves have died, I harvest and press the small leaflets. But only the really small ones.
I’m not interested in every rubbish!
- Top right of the Venus Trap: Cut-off piece of a blood sugar test strip, which can be found in all ways. In the distant future, archaeologists will probably be able to insimate the number of sick inhabitants in the corresponding age after the amount of test strips found in the soil layer studied. The future researchers will certainly postulate that the percentage of diabetics in the population around 2017 was particularly high in the Boberger dunes in Hamburg. These plastic strips are durable. I still stroll past the same plastic parts after weeks at the same places. I only find the blood sugar test strips with this pictogram of the butterfly pretty. On other test strips you can see nothing at all or just the boring logo of the manufacturer. I’m far from interested in every rubbish.
She flutters, the elm!
- Under the butterfly the nut fruit of a fluttering elm, which embodies in this work the central figure of the quail hen. It could also be a Kiwi. In some pictures this is the case. Some of these seeds are grown by fine silvery eyelashes. They really look like Kiwis. This nuts here reminds me more of a quail.
Small chicks?
- At their feet five seed capsules – I mean, of course – there the chicks scurry. These very small parts of the plant come from a short-mowed summer meadow.
Total sell-out!
- At the bottom of the picture as a side note the mirror fragment of a small disco ball. You know – these styrofoam balls glued with mirror squares. Years ago I found a somewhat repulsed specimen on one of my walks. Some mirrors were already missing. The rest I scraped off and still use this fund today. So slowly, however, the stock is actually running out. In many of my collages created over the years, these mirrors can be found. So best access NOW! The collages with the mirrors will soon be completely sold out!
Fall of an Admiral
- To the right of the picture is the miserable remnant of a butterfly. The admiral has sunk on the high seas. Only this little rest I could recover from the Baltic Sea, where it drifted on shallow waves before Scharbeutz. It was a windless day in September and I really enjoyed the late summer beach and bathing day. At home, an extensive collection of butterflies is waiting to be processed. For this picture, however, it had to be this one. Inconspicuous and frayed. A few times he was flushed out of my hands. Several color pigmets have washed away, some small places already completely translucent. But a delicate and at the same time impressively tough skeleton permeates the wing remnant and holds it together. On rocking waves. Shortly before the sinking he found his destiny – here he is now.