#Chalk Hill

[williammarksommer]

The poster for my Solo Exhibition “On The Road” with the Chalk Hill Artist Residency Gallery. 

[wine-porn]

Chalk Mountain

Charging out of the box with lush, Napa-like nuances, few spots in Sonoma can muster this sort of elegance, but Chalk Hill does it easily. Gone are the sometimes-coarse textures of structure Alexander Valley manages with aplomb, and in their place are rich velvet and deep dedication to gloriously-ripe Cab and conspicuous oak treatment. Nearly impenetrable black-ruby in the glass, the rim fading…

[webdiggerxxx]

ೃ༄ੈ✩‧₊˚

[geopsych]

One more from this day in 2018. I got to go out and walk the chalk hills that day with friends I’d never met and as we walked and talked they showed me flowers and identified butterflies. I saw a chalk horse in the side of a hill and climbed a big barrow grave at the top of another. It seems like a dream now.

[haveyouseenthisseries-poll]

[bumblingbriars]

Y’know because hobbits have smiths and often name their noble women after gems I’ve been wondering where they get these jewels. Trading? Do they have their own mines? Does anyone have answers lol

[vox-anglosphere]

A country walk in the Chilterns seems like an interface with heaven

[trivialsquid]

Some art I did to surprise my in laws, p excited

[mering]

fabric study~

[ratwars]

How is the wine?

I am intoxicated.

[williammarksommer]

On the Road - William Mark Sommer

Thank you everyone who made it out through the torrential rain to see my solo exhibition "On The Road" at the Chalk Hill Gallery in Healdsburg, California. I only had a quick chance to get one photo at the end of the exhibition, if you didn't get a chance to see it or can’t travel, I wanted to share the documentation and a video walkthrough.

Solo Exhibition opening

Chalk Hill Gallery

Healdsberg, CA

March 12th - May 16th.

[cat-appreciator]

It’s cold and I don’t wanna get out of bed so fuck it, let’s talk about the White Horse of Uffington.

There are a lot of hill figures in the south of England, in places where the topsoil is a thin layer of grass on top of a thick layer of Upper Cretaceous chalk. You just peel back the sod and there it is, ready to be a regimental badge, a horse, or a guy with a giant dong. In the case of the White Horse of Uffington specifically, there’s a bit more soil underneath the sod, so you dig a ditch and fill it with crushed chalk.

Most of these figures aren’t actually all that old, ~500 years old or less, because grass is an incredibly tenacious plant and it grows back over the chalk. If you want to keep a hill figure around it requires regular maintenance. The White Horse has been dated to the late Bronze Age or early Iron Age, meaning it could well be three thousand years old (there’s a technique called optically stimulated luminescence where scientists can tell when a thing was last exposed to light; they dug down to the bottom of the chalk filled trench and tested the soil underneath. The Horse dates to between 1300 and 550 BC).

Again - and this is the part where I get emotional and weepy - a hill figure requires regular maintenance. Without it, the White Horse would be invisible in a few decades. So every seven years, the villagers of the surrounding communities get together with their baskets of chalk and hammers (and, in more recent years, knee pads) and pound fresh quartz into the trench to prevent it from being overgrown.

With some interruptions during modern times (the Horse was covered in sod during WW2 so it couldn’t be used by the Luftwaffe for navigation) the scouring of the Horse has taken place every seven years for three thousand years. The original builders spoke a Celtic language, or possibly a lost pre-Indo-European language. They didn’t have the same culture or religion or worldview or anything to the people preserving the Horse today. We don’t know what the Horse meant to them. And yet for three thousand years, every seven years, Roman Britons or Saxons or medieval peasants or Clive from down the way have faithfully got together to scour the Horse, to carry it forward from an unknown past to an unknown future.

It’s a tradition even more remarkable for the fact that there’s no point for the Horse’s existence except the fact of the Horse’s existence. This isn’t some high ritual (like the rebuilding of the Ise shrine in Japan, which is connected to the imperial family) it’s a bunch of farmers crushing up rocks. Empires have fallen, gods have faded out of memory, but the Horse continues.

[hazeltailofficial]

HALLOWEEN FLASHBACK

Anastasia Beverly Hills HyperColor Hair Powder in In The Pink

hazeltail on youtube / hazeltailofficial on tiktok / hazeltailofficial on ig / @hazeltailofficial

[spidermanifested]

They all say 'older and fatter than canon' but he is old and fat in canon

true!!!!!

[jesterjamz]

[ecaloshay]

There are several other chalk hill figures including the Long Man of Wilmington and the Cerne Abbas Giant. They are lovely to see and I encourage you to if you have the opportunity.

All of which are maintained by hand and lead to exchanges like this:

Image is of a tweet by Stephen Fry saying “I think we can all agree that this is a fine headline” in response to a headline by UK news outlet Metro that reads “Giant's erection to be polished by hand for two weeks”. To which the National Trust responds: “Hi Stephen, our top priority has always been taking care of our members.”

Source: @stephenfry.

For reference, the National Trust continued serving excellent puns and innuendo in the ensuing thread.

im having feelings about the uffington white horse again