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bright days

Posted jane -->on 24th Mar 2017

March has been a sunny month with only one seriously wet day so far … I made myself do my round walk this week to take photos for painting material, but it was really a bit too much. is it just old age that’s making it so hard to get my strength back after all this long viral infection, or is this virus really more aggressive?

still very sad not to have my woolly little grey shadow with me, she ghosts my walks, such as they are.

at the bottom of Blood hill (apparently there was a civil war action there) there are ditches smothered in primroses

a wet part of the village, where a small shallow valley begins and the wood fills the wettest parts

you look up the hill to a horizon that hides the houses, where the rubbish scattered on the fields of a Romano-british farm turns up as pieces of worn ceramic.

I saw three large hares still in their thick winter coats

I am very sad that this track may soon disappear now the land belongs to a big agribusiness firm. once this huge open field was a patchwork of smaller ones, with trees and hedges, but “improvements” in the sixties removed all that.

cakes lane trees border the plough, there’s a painting in that.

closer in, the pattern of the trees and hedges and the lines of the plough are seductive.

in the green lane there are violets

and more flayed hedge. closer in, this photo invites a painting too.

my current “thing” is all the jackets of ivy the trees wear. it turns them into anthropomorphic shapes in the winter.

there’s a family group here ….

and the primroses are perfect.

another temptation.

here is the beginning of a cakes lane ivy tree painting. I have been using a warm tan base colour for the last few.

a layer of strong blue to help the sky

thickly painted with a knife at the top, green in the sky;

then over again with more blues, and the foreground/lower part very lightly brushed in with thin washes. where the paint is thick it has marks carved into it with the knife.

this scene is from the opposite direction of the first painting I did of the lane after it was flayed – the holly tree was the focal point.

always first the charcoal drawing, to get the feel of the tonal values and the shape of things.

which is simplified in the first pass

here it is, finished.

a close-up of the passage between the holly tree and the hedge tree – skating over previous brushwork with the palette knife …

mark-making and layers of colour

zooming in – the heart of the painting ….

at home, I have snakeshead fritillaries on my table, pots which I will plant out in my tiny wildflower meadow – in imitation of Magdalen college’s famous water meadow in Oxford.

 

primrose path

Posted jane -->on 16th Mar 2017

today felt like spring – I walked up part of cakes lane to find the primroses

there was a chiffchaff singing

and patches of primroses revealed by the recent cutting back of the hedges and scrub lining the hedges

at the fish shop

I bought the first crab of the season

caught on the chalk reef off Weybourne

where the special habitat makes them exceptionally sweet

then they have to walk all the way to the Humber estuary to breed.

I worked in my shed studio, which due to the sunshine and mild weather was warm enough without any heating – drew this charcoal up to prepare for a painting.

I hope to make it as near abstract as this one, completed yesterday.

working from photos it’s very tempting to try for realism

but starting like this helped develop it a bit differently.

this one, painted on Monday is not so abstract but has different more mysterious qualities.

here’s the working environment in our Village Hall for the monday painting group. in a group there’s a different dynamic, and it’s easy to be influenced by an atmosphere where realism and painterliness compete with difficulty.

the photo today’s drawing comes from has an architectural quality, where the trees, bare of leaves but full of ivy, become towers with different shaped cone tops

or even strange figures semaphoring early spring signs.

Lumbo den

Posted jane -->on 4th Mar 2017

another set back. writing this from sick bed in St Andrews. am christening the bug New Persistent Variable Virus. it needs lots of rest, weeks of rest and patience.

but, before symptoms recurred I did manage a wander around Lumbo den, the tree-filled ravine the burn runs through just round the corner. it is a beautiful spot, trees left to manage themselves.

they grow and they fall

their canopy fills the sky above my head

beech mostly

fallen trunks decomposing

beech trees, which are common in these lower parts of Scotland, must have been planted in the first place, since they are not native to Scotland

there are also sycamores which will have turned up by themselves I expect,

and ash trees, plus some oaks.

the beeches look to be the oldest and are certainly the most beautiful

they live to over 300 years, so perhaps some landscape improver put a few in here in the seventeenth or eighteenth century –

this is an ash, which is also quite common in the Lowlands.

at each end of the den there are ancient willows next to the burn; this one has a huge hollowed trunk, mostly dead, with what is still a very large tree sprouting from one side of it … the remains of a pollard.

I have walked through by the high path

so I return by the low one along the edge of the burn, which booms and chuckles over its rocky bed

one wonders if there’s been any landscaping done here at some point; the stream definitely seems to fall over a series of rocky steps, all the way down past the houses, which are relatively new, late sixties housing estates.

it’s a sunny afternoon and the trees cast giant shadows, the sun on my back.

very early spring – there’s a robin singing, great tits calling, crows’ conversations and jackdaws.

I see a grey squirrel – though someone I meet says she saw a red in Spinkie den, the next one along.

the trees next to the burn reach out for the light sideways, as there are few trees on the other side – mostly thorn bushes and tall tangled flowering plants

several have fallen across the burn

vulnerable with their balance tilted

this one may have fallen this winter

the grip of their roots undermined by rain wash down the steep slope

it makes for a rich habitat though

somewhere to wander and feel as if the real world is a hundred miles away.

at any rate a little wilderness where deer come and the birds thrive

guarded by its wrecked multiple trunked willows sprawling across the channels of the burn at its gate.