Chris Amies art

Barn owl (Tyto alba). Watercolour on paper. I like that I’ve fadedout the detail in the background and allowed the owl and the stump to be prominent.

But why did I call this owl (who may be male or female; barn owl females tend to be larger, but they’re otherwise similar) Hermann? It goes back a long way, to primary school if I recall correctly. In a craft lesson we were given some scraps of material and told ‘make a picture of an owl.’ The material in question was hessian. So we only had hessian (presumably because the school had some and might as well get the children making something with it) and it had to be an owl. For me, the phrase ‘hessian owl’ came to mean something with unnecessarily restrictive parameters.

So in 2025 here was an owl picture – not obligatory, but it was a challenge picture, which you are invited to paint during the month – and having done it I recalled the long-ago Hessian owl. So this owl – is it by chance Hessian? From Hesse? So should we call it Hermann?