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This blog has been concerned mainly with graduates of the Scottish art colleges for the past few weeks. I am hoping that I also get to my final possible degree show at Grays in Aberdeen this coming week. I like to get to these shows; see what talent is coming through and see the new designers and artists before they get absorbed by industry etc.

I have had a strange and busy year so far and I have also broken my coccyx so I also have to have an operation this week which will hopefully enable me to sit down in comfort and return to some projects which have been on hold.

So here come the pigeons!

Laura Carlin IX

After Pigeon Pete and Nathaniel Mann wonderful sound project yesterday it seems perfect to share illustrations from Laura Carlin's King of the Sky, with their gorgeous layers of media and grain gritty textures. These illustrations have such delicate compassion and love, they glow and sing of humanity reflecting the themes of loneliness, belonging and home in Nicola Davies's story about a young Italian boy who having moved to the Welsh hills befriends an old man and his pigeons.

Nathaniel Mann and Pigeon Pete

Inspired by a display of chinese and indonesian Pigeon whistles in the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. Nathaniel Mann sought to discover the possibilities of composing sound using pigeons fitted with handmade pigeon whistles.

Pigeon Whistles: Nathaniel Mann from Nathaniel Robin Mann on Vimeo.

Working with homing pigeon breeder Pigeon Pete and his band of pigeons, the Birmingham Rollers. Nathaniel Mann developed a sound project called 'Pigeon Whistles'. 'Pigeon Whistles' is an expansive body of work which encompasses ethnomusicological research, musical performance, instrument design and construction, sound curation, storytelling and a series of encounters and personal relationships.

The project 'Pigeon Whistles' was developed under the Embedded Residency Programme 2013.

Pigeons I

I have been working on a new book since returning from Bologna and the start of this process has been many sketches and sheets of pigeons. As I love birds this is not a difficult task, it is a joy, including going out early in the morning armed with bags of corn to tempt them ever closer. 

Parisian Pigeons

I am wanting to share so much of my trip to Paris but I am going to start with a tiny project about Parisian pigeons and their elegant shadows.
It is strange what you notice when you go to new environments, not always what everyone else sees or acknowledges.
The joy for me is not the big picture, but the tiny unseen details that make up the whole. That's why I loved the sparrows nesting on the gargoyles of the Notre Dame Cathedral and the shadows of pigeons on the boulevard outside our hotel.
There is a secret magic that you can find every day, where ever you are.

Karen Suzuki

Karen Suzuki's street pigeons are fantastic, poor souls with missing toes and ruffled plumage just like the real thing, poor Glasgow pigeons!

Mark Hearld

Prompted by Rob Dunlavey and then Deb's posting of Mark Hearlds print, I revisited Godfrey and Watt and found these wonderful pigeon's that I had missed before.

Fancy Pigeons and Pigeon Fanciers

Fancy Pigeons by Fazal Sheikh. http://www.fazalsheikh.org/ I have had a wee thing about pigeons for a while now, it fits as I love producing pictures of people with birds. I really want to go and photograph Pigeon fanciers with their birds and do some drawings and paintings, this beautiful photo will spur me on to do something about it soon.