‘It’s the pictures,’ I said. ‘We love the pictures.’

I didn’t mention the author of Never Let Me Go was going to be there, interviewed by From Page to Screen film festival curator Jonathan Coe. That was a highlight for me. For Mr Grigg it would be anathema.

He was already accompanying this harem of village book lovers under sufferance, filling in for the outing organiser when she suddenly became a grandmother. The thought of a couple of literary luvvies stroking each other’s navels on the Palace stage would have turned his stomach.

And then a little voice piped up from the back seat: ‘It’s a very weird book, about cloning people for organ donations. I didn’t really like it.’

My neighbour, Mrs Warboys.

And then Mr Grigg remembered he was missing Champions League football on the telly. He almost did a handbrake turn and headed back up into the hills. Instead, he wore his grumpiness like a shroud for the rest of the journey, placated only when I promised him snogging in the back row of the movies if he was good.

Fortunately, we had to fill up from the front.

‘What are those two chairs doing on the stage?’ Mr Grigg said.

‘Oh, there’s going to be a quick talk about the film before it starts.’

He sighed as big as Devon.

And then author Kazuo Ishiguro came on with Jonathan Coe to rapturous applause.

‘I’m missing Spurs v. Real Madrid for this?’ Mr Grigg said.

I passed him his gin and slimline tonic and kicked his leg.

‘In the literary world, Mr Grigg, this man is bigger than Pat Jennings’ hands,’ I said, showing my age and also my ignorance of 21st century football.

Mr Grigg settled back and attempted to enjoy the insight of the interview. He warmed to Ishiguro and it was going well until Coe referred to the novelist as ‘Ish’.

‘It’ll be Angel Drawers next,’ Mr Grigg said.

And then Never Let Me Go began. We were spellbound by this beautiful film, which, despite its futuristic tone is a haunting story of love, friendship and regret as the protagonists gently make their way to their inexorable fate. It was beautifully acted, scripted, directed, photographed and lit.

As we filed out of the Palace, the editor of Black Beauty and Hornblower, who lives in Lush Places, breezed past and made a very intelligent comment I did not understand.

‘Yes, the lighting and cinematography did it for me,’ I said, turning to Mrs Warboys, who has very close links to a film director of international repute, and whose approval I seek constantly.

‘And what did you think?’ I asked Mr Grigg.

He wiped a tear from his cheek.

‘I liked it so much, I want you to read the book,’ he said.

Result.

I GREW up in ‘deepest darkest’ Dorset, several miles from any town, so the nights were truly dark, and the stars were bright in the sky, with just the sounds of nature, the wind and rain, and the strange noises of howling animals in the surrounding woods and fields. It was an unusual and magical childhood, free of television and pop culture and politics and the rest of the modern world. I didn’t know any of the TV shows that my friends watched, but I didn’t miss them either, because together we’d explore the world of trees and streams, in sun and rain and snow, as hunters and adventurers, and we felt like we had discovered something that the rest of the world had forgotten.

After school I went to London, in order to find like-minds and create a career as an artist. I loved the energy and excitement of the city, it introduced me to great art, and gave me a sense of the development of art and culture over the centuries. It also inspired my first serious works – an ambitious series of abstract paintings, through which I found my voice and developed my own language of expression.

But after a few years, and despite all of these amazing encounters and adventures, I began to miss the feeling of nature surrounding me, along with the deep sense of the sublime it inspires. And one day, while on holiday in Dorset I was introduced to an artistic community in Symondsbury, just outside Bridport, and within a month I’d moved back to live in the countryside. The following year I started a new studio in an empty warehouse on an old rope-making estate in Bridport, and St Michael’s Studios has now grown to become one of the most vibrant art venues in the West County. Our Open Studio events have become very popular, and I find it’s a great way for me to share my work, as it allows visitors to experience the gradual evolution of my paintings over several months.

Lewesdon Tree, May 2010, Kit Glaisyer

My recent series of landscape paintings are inspired by the landscape of west Dorset, particularly around the Marshwood Vale, and they are intended as a contemporary update on the historic tradition of landscape painting. While I love the work of the Impressionists and Expressionism, I feel that these styles ultimately led to the idea that anyone could make a painting, and so much of what we see now seems so lazy and stylised. I’ve followed a different path, one closer to post-impressionist Paul Cézanne, who left Paris to go and live in rural France and painted around Montagne Sainte-Victoire for the next 25 years. He said he wanted “to make of impressionism something solid and lasting like the art in the museums”, and desired to unite observation of nature with the permanence of classical composition. Cezanne’s dogged pursuit of these principles led to the birth of Modern Art.

I also return to the examples set by the great masters, who all demonstrated this conviction to a personal vision, also evident in the great works of the British artists JMW Turner and John Constable, who were in turn inspired by the Dutch 17th Century painters like Jacob van Ruisdael and Filips Koninck – some of the first painters to establish Landscape as an independent genre. Turner and Constable were associated with Romanticism – the complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th Century and included artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, Eugène Delacroix and William Blake. It also inspired the Hudson River painters, a mid-19th century American art movement of landscape painters that included Jasper Francis Cropsey, Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church.

One thing all these artists shared is a deep respect for nature, and a determination to do justice to the subject. They all set out to achieve very ambitious paintings, requiring many months or even years of work, as well as the development of accomplished new painting techniques, and that’s also the way I like to work these days – gaining confidence as I tackle ever more complex subjects.

I now feel like I’m beginning to do justice to my feelings for nature. I’ve learnt the necessary patience required to give my work the time it needs in order to capture the intricate subtleties of light and atmosphere, and to honour the incredible complexity and rhythm of this ancient landscape.

Liz Somerville in her studio. Photograph by Merrily Harpur

IT’S A good question: which village in West Dorset has the highest concentration of artists?

I would have guessed Nettlecombe, or perhaps Symondsbury, or even Chideock; there is much more to Chideock than speed cameras, traffic fumes, and signs outside The Clock House advertising its “ugly landlord”.

But then, lo, over the hills comes another contender: Cattistock.

Or Tate Cattistock, as the cartoonist Merrily Harpur suggests it should be dubbed.

Merrily is one of the five Cattistock artists who’ll be taking part this year in Dorset Arts Weeks (29 May to 13 June), but they are also holding a special preview event – with wine – on Friday 28 May from 6.30pm – 8.30pm.

And yes, if you’re reading this, you are invited.

So why Cattistock?

Merrily Harpur was brought up in Surrey, but says “when I saw Cattistock I realised I’d been trying to get here all my life!”

She paints, although she has no separate studio: “I paint and hang my oil paintings all over the house, and the framing I do in the kitchen.”        

I’ll let Merrily describe her Cattistock compatriots; I like her fragrant turn of phrase…

Virginia Day, photographed by Merrily Harpur.

“Vanessa Bowman and Nicola Butler are West Dorset natives who have chosen Cattistock as the ideal spot to live and work, while Virginia Day, who was born in Surrey, arrived there after a lifetime of travelling around Europe and America.

Liz Somerville is from remotest North East Dorset, but settled in the village square in 2004, with her studio – a converted cowshed – next door.”

All paint, print, draw and sculpt in different ways and their studios are equally varied.

“You take a walk down a garden path to Vanessa’s spacious and cosy shed, full of her subtle and delicious oil paintings of interiors and landscapes; while Liz’s cow byre – now utterly fragrant – is full of far-reaching views of the countryside and architecture around her, depicted in coloured linocuts and inks.

“Nicola is famed for her award-winning botanical watercolours. She shows in London galleries, but you don’t have to go that far to find her small studio at the back of one of the most exquisite cottages on the village square. It looks over her well-ordered garden which resembles the Chelsea Physic Garden where she trained.

“Virginia’s studio and enchanting enclosed garden, a short stroll up the street, have the calm of a Tuscan atelier – where she learned much of her technique as a sculptor as well as in the more hectic bustle of New York.”

More information on the individual artists and their work is available from the DAW brochure and from their websites:

Vanessa Bowman – www.vanessabowman.co.uk

Nicola Butler – www.nicolabutler.co.uk

Virginia Day – www.virginia-day.artparks.co.uk

Merrily Harpur – www.harpur.org

Liz Somerville – www.lizsomerville.co.uk

Bridport’s new Gig Rowing Club has organised the Beach Boats event on East Beach between 11am and 2pm.

Club chair Mike Carter will present a model gig to the maker of the judges’ favourite boat  at 12.30pm.

Club member Nancy Clemance said: ‘This is going to be a lovely, colourful spectacle for East Beach, and completely in keeping with the community nature of the club.

“I hope we meet lots of children and their families on the day.”

The event is being staged partly because the Bridport Club is due to get its first training gig very soon. This gig, made of fibreglass, will be called Bucky Doo. The club also wants to get a proper Cornish wooden racing gig.

More members would be nice too.

Ms Clemance said: “If we can recruit a few mums, dads, grandparents, aunts, uncles or friends to row Bucky Doo this summer then we’ll be in excellent shape for the arrival of our first racing gig next year.”

Ms Clemance, a freelance curator and arts outreach worker, moved to Bridport from Cambridge last year. She’s been rowing four times in gigs borrowed from other clubs.

She said: “If I can do it, anyone can.”

Gig racing is a fast-growing sport. Bridport’s club is the 55th in the South West.

Its informative website can be seen by clicking on this link. Photographs of the Beach Boats events taken by students at Mountjoy School in Bridport should soon be posted on there as well.

The Spirit of Bridport is the flaxen-haired woman sat, on a throne, working with twine in the murals painted by Fra Newbery inside Bridport Town Hall.

Francis Henry Newbery – known as Fra Newbery – was born in Membury in East Devon in 1855 but brought up in Bridport from 1858. He taught at the Bridport School of Art, which was based inside the Literary and Scientific Institute in East Street, and he went on to become Director of Glasgow School of Art.

He painted the murals inside Bridport Town Hall between 1924 and 1927, after he retired and moved back to Dorset.

The Spirit of Bridport is his idealised image of Bridport’s skill, beauty and importance.

As stated on Facebook: “This image used to adorn the road signs into Bridport.

This picture is reproduced from the Facebook campaign page. It was taken by Megan Cox, who - as a note on Facebook explains - took it about 17 years ago when she was doing an A-Level project into Fra Newbery.

“She wore out and highway chiefs ruled the Dorset town should have bland ones instead.

“This town deserves better – she’s beautiful and we want her back.”

The campaign has – at the time of writing this – attracted just over 40 fans (ie supporters).

More are wanted. “If we get enough fans, we can appeal to the powers-that-be for her to be restored to her rightful place… She’s beautiful and should still be the face that welcomes all visitors to this lively and quirky community.

“Why should we conform to blandness? Let’s make a bold statement and adopt her once again as our emblem.”

This would certainly accord with Newbery’s original intentions. As George Rawson has written in Fra H Newbery, Artist and Art Educationist (1996): “He sought to make art more readily available to a wider public, attempting to relate it to their daily lives and to celebrate the traditions of the specific localities in which the works were sited.”

What is more readily available than a sign welcoming people to Bridport?

To support the campaign, click here.

The display on the walls of the café and the foyer celebrates half a lifetime’s work.

Mr Smith, who lives in Bothenhampton, had his first cartoon published in the Evening Standard in 1976.

Before that, his sense of humour hadn’t always been appreciated. As a boy, he was asked to leave his grammar school in Ipswich because the head didn’t like him clowning about.  

But a wild streak of wit suits a cartoonist well.

“If I can make people titter, chortle and think about something at the same time then I’ve achieved something,” says Mr Smith.

On the evidence of the exhibition at Bridport Arts Centre, he’s achieved many, many things. Judge for yourself Tuesdays to Saturdays, 10am to 4pm, up until the end of May.

Or you can see and hear Mr Smith by clicking on this link.

News that stays news

THE ARTIST John Skinner, when he lived in Bothenhampton, used to say to me: “Why can’t we have the kind of news which says: ‘Today John Skinner finished a xxxxing fantastic painting – and here it is’.

“That’s the kind of TV news I’d like to see.”

I used to agree with him, firstly because it was easier to, and secondly, because, actually, I did agree with him.

To have a sat truck parked outside an artist’s studio, and a live broadcast done with the paint still fresh – why not? Ignore the easy answers that come scorning  in (it would cost too much, not enough people would be interested, the painting might not be any good, bleugh, bleugh) and ask again – why not? Think how startling and pleasurable it could be.

“Literature is news that stays news,” wrote Ezra Pound.

Art is news that stays news, says I.

I doubt it will ever happen, of course, but just to raise the possibility is a useful thought-experiment.

Save £5

For now though, in the pre-utopian meantime, we have this: a new exhibition called Portrait of the Artist – with accompanying book – opening at Bridport Arts Centre on April 17. It’s a group exhibition of 25 painters and sculptors meant to shine a ray of light on the Bridport art scene that’s developed over the last 30 years or so.

Idea: Kit Glaisyer

Photographs: George Wright

Interviews & words: Lu Orza

Lu’s statement: “For me this has been a fascinating process. Some of the artists opened up on a very personal level about their lives, while others concentrated on their work. What is noticeable is, there is no Bridport School; artists aren’t trying to do the same type of thing. They are very much individualistic in their approach to their art. The exciting thing about Bridport is that the art that’s happening here is so incredibly diverse.”

Painter Kit Glaisyer’s statement: “Artists are attracted to Bridport because this is a place where they feel they can be themselves and where individuality is actively encouraged. This makes it the perfect place for idealists, non-conformists, dreamers and all those who are inspired to follow their own paths.

“Lu Orza has dug beneath the surface to find the deeper intentions of the artists.

“What she reveals can be quite edgy and challenging, which is refreshing. She has avoided the temptation of the easy cliché in her writing.

“And George Wright has beautifully captured the romance and the drama of creative people and artists, there’s a theatrical element to his work that illustrates the adventure of being an artist. He has produced a stunning series of photographs that clearly evoke the excitement we all feel about the artists working in and around Bridport.”

Exhibition: Saturday 17 April to 10 May, open Tuesdays to Saturdays, 10-4pm daily @ Bridport Arts Centre (01308 424204) www.bridport-arts.com

Book: Portrait of the Artist, with introduction by artist John Hubbard, launched 7pm on 17.4.10 at reduced price of £14.95. Then available for £19.95. www.portraitoftheartist.co.uk

See you there!

Norman Saunders-White

Artist, librarian, teacher, performer, youth theatre and radio play director.

Doodlebug-dodger, office boy, great reader, Kitcher Sinker,  noise-maker, avant-gardist, Mr Punch, provocateur.

Eighty this year, a retrospective of his paintings is now on at Bridport Arts Centre; it should not be missed.

Norman Saunders-White was born in Paddington, in London, on April 9, 1930.

His parents met when his father Arthur, a lino and carpet layer in Westbourne Grove, saw his wife-to-be Mabel out cleaning windows on a second floor window ledge.

“You shouldn’t do that,” he said, “it’s dangerous” – and he knew what he was talking about, because when he’d been in service himself, he’d fallen from a high window.

Norman said: “He found a bird’s nest in the guttering and he reached out to get an egg and he fell off.

“When he was lying there on the ground someone stole his wallet, or so the family story always used to go.

“He was more or less left for dead – he was lucky to survive. He fractured his skull and had to have all sorts of operations.

“When I was little I remember seeing and feeling blue lines and little dents in his skull.”

Norman left school when he was 14 with no qualifications. He had been offered a scholarship at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in Holborn but this was 1944, the city was menaced by V2s and doodlebugs falling… and Norman’s parents also thought that he should get a decent job.

“Not bother with all this arty stuff.”

So, after mooching about for a bit, he ended up as a BBC office boy, and he served the Corporation for about 18 months until he realised one day that the guy on the door had been there since World War One. “I didn’t fancy doing 40 years and ending up as a commissionaire so I got a job in a library.

“I was always a great reader – I educated himself in public libraries.”

Norman moved to Herefordshire in 1957 to be a mobile librarian in the Ross on Wye area, then in 1963 he came to Dorset to run the Central Library in Dorchester. He worked his way up to be stock editor and Dorset’s chief assistant librarian but then one day he realised again that he must change.

Running out towards the audience

“My only progression was going to be up to chief librarian with its committees and its policies and its paperwork. It was too dry for me. I wanted to do something more with people.”

His wife Pat was already training as a teacher, and so, at the end of the Sixties, he too now went to Weymouth College of Education where he got involved with various artistic happenings, such as making the Head crawl on his hands and knees through a construction of chairs to see someone riding a bicycle, projecting films with people rushing towards the camera and throwing a blanket over it while simultaneously running  out towards the audience and throwing a blanket over them, and random readings. It wasn’t what Weymouth was used to or what lecturers like Dr Alan Chedzoy always approved of.  

“Cheddars used to come in and shout at us for making too much noise. ‘I’m trying to teach English in here,’ he’d say.

“But we’re still good friends.”

Ann Jellicoe

A big thing in Norman’s life became the Colway Theatre Trust, producing pioneering community plays with Ann Jellicoe of Lyme Regis.

She called him “a cultural catalyst” – which he was, and still is. Aside from Colway, he set up the Improvisational Business Company, shaped Bridport Arts Centre, worked with the Industrial and Domestic Theatre Company and Welfare State International, revived (with his wife) Dorchester Youth Theatre, and founded and directed Weymouth Pavilion Youth Theatre. He recently retired from the board of the Ridiculusmus Theatre Company, but he’s still on the board of Artsreach and he promotes events in Burton Bradstock, where he lives.

The most amazing connections

One feature of his new exhibition in Bridport Arts Centre is going to be an interactive project called People, Places, Projects and Events. Norman has mapped out his cultural involvements and connections in Dorset, and to the layer of his life he hopes that others will add their own strata, to build – in effect – a 4-D representation of decades of endeavour.

He said: “The most amazing connections come through.

“It’s not until you’ve seen all the different connections, and the quantum leaps between them, that you see how it all fits together.

“But there are gaps. Whatever happened to the Festival Players?

“I want to see what has happened to all the people who’ve ever been involved – and what effect it has all had on the culture of Bridport and west Dorset.

“So it’s not just personal. It will be a social document as well.”

To further this cause, a memory-raking, link-seeking series of discussions will take place between 3pm and 4pm on the opening three days of the exhibition. These discussions will be filmed by Bridport’s digital art-squad PVA Media, then shown as soon as possible as part of the exhibition.

The exhibition Norman at 80: a Retrospective runs upstairs in the Allsop Gallery at Bridport Arts Centre from Wednesday 31 March until Tuesday 13 April. It’s open every day. Entrance is free.

And the paintings! What about the paintings?

Ah, yes, the paintings. Nearly 1000 words in, and the paintings haven’t had much of a write-up. But then, if you’ve got this far, you’re surely going to want to go to the exhibition?

No?

You want more?

Ok, a bit more.

The show’s been given an Arts Council award. It includes work from private and public collections.

It covers everything from Kitchen Sink art of the 1950s to Abstraction and back again

It’s the biggest show of Norman’s work since Dreams and Realities at Dorset County Museum in 1998.

Many paintings are notable for their hares – poetically fascinating – and their Punch figures, the latter derived partly from an interest embedded in childhood by a whacking performance, partly also from Russell Hoban’s brilliant novel Riddley Walker (“this figure reminds us of things about ourselves that we have conveniently forgotten or would rather not hear”), partly also perhaps from Norman’s youth theatre experience of encouraging Gary Wilson, who went on to become one of the youngest ever Punch and Judy ‘Professors’. See? Connections…

If you fancy connecting yourself to a performance directed by Norman, click here

The artist Richard Harris has been commissioned to produce a permanent work of art in response to the construction of the Dorchester to Weymouth Relief Road. The Earthscapes exhibition at Bridport Arts Centre shows some initial ideas - and this is one

Notes on the Earthscapes exhibition at Bridport Arts Centre, curated by Sherborne House Arts

Part 1: The Project straightforwardly Described

A SCALE MODEL of a sculpture to be sited either side of the new Dorchester to Weymouth Relief Road has gone on show for the first time.

It’s on display at Bridport Arts Centre as part of Sherborne House Arts’ Earthscapes exhibition.

The work by sculptor Richard Harris shows some 28 boulders gradually rising on steel poles reaching to 3m (10ft) above the Southdown Ridge.

All the rocks ­- weighing between one and eight tonnes ­- are sourced from the 1.6m tonnes of material moved from the site where work on the road has been taking place.

If it gets the go-ahead, the sculpture will be on both sides of the road and will curve off up the slopes of the cutting following the natural geological strata.

Lines of stones are to be mounted on poles close to where they were dug up

An aerial view of the proposed public art work along the sides of the Dorchester to Weymouth relief road

The poles will curve up the sides of the cuttings

The excavated rocks are between 160 and 65 million years old and started being formed in what would have been a tropical lagoon. The concretions are formed around small matter such as a leaf or a fossil and steadily build up over millions of years solidifying by chemical processes.

Mr Harris said: “I was asked to consider the landscape, context of the whole road and having worked on several proposals for different sites ­ this is the idea that I feel is the strongest and most appropriate. Some of the geology has been exposed by the cutting but will eventually become less visible as the grass grows.

“This proposal puts the geology back where it was ­ but visible­ continuing up above the hill indicating where it would have been before it was weathered away.”

Mr Harris said he had been involved with the project since January last year making many visits to the site and consulting with geologists.

As if an invisible car was driving through in mucky weather and spraying up stones

He said: “This idea came in the late summer and only came about when the work had started and the stones had been revealed.

“The heavier stones will rise up from the ground and will get progressively smaller as they run through the air to the top of the slope.

Big stone...

... Small stone (fascinatingly coloured and shaped)

“What I am trying to do is give an inspiring image as people come into Weymouth and to reveal the geology in a dramatic way.”

 The idea of incorporating art in relation to the road was initially proposed in the Weymouth and Portland Commissioning Plan for 2012.

It stated that public art could be used to make the £87m road ­ which is due to open in Spring next year – more attractive for drivers.

The work is being supported by Arts Council England, South West and Dorset County Council.

Mr Harris is now working with Skanska, the contractors, Dorset County Council and his own engineers to develop the project. 

Part 2: ‘Earthscapes’ as an exhibition title

THERE AREN’T many better words in the English language than ‘scape’. It means so much and is so capable of forming suggestive associations. Brickscape, prisonscape, cityscape, mudscape, hedgescape, landscape, moonscape, earthscape… It’s a brilliant word for conjuring up an external scene or, indeed, an externalised one – as in moodscape or mindscape.

Then there is the word ‘scape’ taken by itself. It’s long been used as a shortened form of ‘escape’ –  ‘scape’ breaks away and soon ends up leading an outlawry of meanings: a ‘scape’ is a fart; a transgression due to thoughtlessness; an outrageous sin; a slip of the tongue; a clerical error.

Shafted / Scaped

‘Scape’ can also be used to describe the shaft of a column, or the long stalk of a flower  rising directly out of its root.

The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins used ‘scape’ to denote an impression or reflection of the individual quality of a thing or an action; its quiddity, its real nature or essence.

So you can start to see why an exhibition called Earthscapes is always going to be appealing, even before we get started on that titular coinage.

Why earthscapes and not landscapes? Perhaps because ‘land’ speaks too much of ownership and class, of power and authority – whereas ‘earth’ still escapes from some of those human forms? The earth, physically and mentally, is a space that none of us can ever truly hope to control – not forever – and space of course is an anagram of scape. At which point – at the mention of anagram – your mind can start to run away with possibilities (yes, to scape), because earth is also an anagram of heart.

So you can have earthscapes as ‘heartscapes’ or ‘heartspaces’ or ‘hearts paces’; pluck out the word art and you get ‘she art scape’, or ‘he art scapes’; and so on and on…

Part 3: The Relief Road Art Work as a Work of Art

You might regard everything written above as rather wild, but it is all relevant to the Dorchester to Weymouth relief road, and to Richard Harris’s initial models.

They’re fiendishly difficult designs to photograph, and if you’re interested you should go to see them for yourself, but I hope for now the pictures here show roughly what’s on display.

So, scapes: relevant how?

Firstly: in the crudest way, there will be people who regard what’s proposed as arty-farty nonsense – and, remember, ‘to let a scape’ does mean to break wind…

But let’s chuff on.

Secondly: look at the way the stones are upheld on shafts / columns / stalks – call them what you will – they are all ‘scapes’ and there are many different ways of viewing their form and layout. The stones for the real art work will come from excavations along the route. They will – you could argue – look like the severed heads on poles that used to be stood at the entrances to towns and cities (Dorchester once used to be gristled with the rotting heads of Catholic Martyrs who’d been hung, drawn and quartered). From that perspective, the two lines of scapes, moving down either side of the road, represent a triumphal assertion of power by Dorset County Council and its contractors.

Look what we have done! We have disembowelled the earth! We have built this road and routed our enemies!

Thirdly: and for what?

The stones curve like a sabre tooth, or perhaps a tongue

Or in these daubs like antennae or paw prints?

More still to follow: writer is thinking (when he gets chance)!