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back to acrylic

Posted jane -->on 21st Sep 2018

early autumn can look a bit dull – tired leaves that are still green, recently ploughed stubbles

and the weather has been warm enough to kid you that it’s still summer. now the seasonal thrashing/flaying of hedges has begun, though many which were done in early spring are safe

or are in the two yearly cycle. the blackberries have been amazing; our walks punctuated by stops to grab handfuls, bear fashion.

B is not interested in blackberries, she prefers small furry creatures, as the poor little baby bunny she pounced on in the ditch on quite a busy road and despatched immediately. our walk home disgraced by the grey furry little ears poking out from between her jaws as she carried her catch in triumph firmly clamped in her mouth.

views with newly seeded rape fields show us what next April will look like

but there is plenty of autumn texture

and inspiration for painting

back to the small square format and acrylic paint – I have so much I certainly can’t switch completely to oils.

also when painting in the village hall with the group, acrylics so much more convenient. so the usual start of throwing runny paint about, helpful on a white canvas …

I am back to using a brush more, principally for the sky here

getting there but something wrong with the composition. relatively cool weather meant the paint didn’t dry too fast, so I scraped some off and changed the shape of the cultivated field

seed heads and stalks of knapweed in the foreground indicated with blips and blobs of dark paint and scratching through paint with the point of my little pointy palette knife. I had been looking at Joan Eardley again, and I think this shows her influence.

we’ve been back to Bayfield recently, the cooler weather had banished the flies.

the conservation/bird seed planting is changing colour. this plant which looks like millet has some bright orange ochre heads and some a strong red.

surely another painting!

but last Monday I took this in bayfield woods by mistake – hipstamatic allows double exposure and sometimes I find I’ve slid the control across by accident. well, too tempting not to try to paint it.

on an old plywood board this time, a re-used one.

syrupy paint and an attempt to get the pale green light behind the main tree. as always, an earlier stage looks rather more exciting in retrospect.

both these squares are 40 x 40 cm (16″)

I am signed up for a plethora of writing courses this autumn, plus two week long residential courses. there will be writing in bed early mornings!

plus plenty of this of course.

 

the end of summer

Posted jane -->on 2nd Sep 2018

BIms and I have been walking at Morston twice in the last couple of days.

Bayfield, although beautiful, has a lot of flies at the moment; I find them really annoying.

on Friday I had an appointment with my nearest bit of coast, a collaborative project with Coast to Coast to Coast, the hand sewn poetry journal I’ve had a poem published in twice.

lots of poets whose work has been in any of the five issues went to their bit of coast and wrote two to four lines which will be used by Maria Isakova Bennett for an installation during her residency in Aldeborough’s Lookout

an unbelievable sea of cars was parked at Morston on Friday morning – the seal trips doing fantastic business on perhaps the last day of a lot of people’s holiday. we walked along past all the boats motoring up and down the channel, and out onto the saltmarsh.

we went again this morning as the weather is still perfect, and for Bims it’s great at high tide – the area she can run in is limited, and she can have a great time sploshing around on the edges of the tide. she’s wary of deep water – although she did fall in a big creek this morning and got nice and wet all over. and she meets people and other dogs in a neutral situation where there’s plenty of room.

although it was warm she had the opportunity to cool off

and pose while sailing boats cruised up and down, and all the birds were perfectly safe from her

we haven’t been there much but I think in future will make more use of it.

I haven’t done any painting this August, the writing has taken over a bit, but I have been making up some big canvases, reusing stretchers, and this painting started in 2002, has resurfaced.

it already has some areas of very thick oil paint which have cracked

and interesting textures over the foundation size of rabbit skin glue

I have had it up in the studio for a couple of weeks while i thought about it/avoided it

today I got myself together and decided that it would be less intimidating flat on the table

and like that it proved much better for gestural mark-making

pushing the brush around with thick oil paint

and working over the old surface with limited colours.

a bit of scratching back through with the palette knife

thinking about fields of sunflowers and constellations and sun/moon

and long grass and blue reflected sky at Morston

so here we are. 46′ x 60″ or 116 x 152 cm. now I can let more colours and textures get into my head for some more big paintings. tomorrow we have a demo of working with pastels in the village hall – I’m sure that will help as we are to have a go ourselves.

a few butterflies

Posted jane -->on 11th Aug 2018

I’d not seen anything in the way of a colourful butterfly this summer until we had some rain

then after the drought broke a couple of weeks ago with storms there were two commas in the garden, but nothing more except various whites until earlier this week

the commas were back

and two small tortoisehells

but they don’t seem to visit my garden often

the buddleias will soon be over

so I took several photos

but at the end of July, after the wind and rain, I found these butterflies again on the edge of the wood

the silver-washed fritillaries

I was quite surprised that they had survived our awful contrary weather this year

I counted about ten

feeding on thistle and knapweed

they are the biggest fritillary, and glide and swoop around the edge of the wood into the conservation grass

with closed wings they are very well camouflaged on the dead thistles. I look forward to finding them here again next year.

the thistles themselves are wonderful subjects

using the hipstamatic app on my phone makes them look even more dramatic.

on the Bayfield estate there are some fields of mixed planting, for pheasants but also wild birds and insects. chicory seems to be a thing too.

we walk round the “bird walk” about once a week. there’s a lot of shade if you’re early when it’s hot.

and the Glandford ford for a paddle

I feel a few paintings coming on from these fields

meanwhile some of us in the village hall painting group had a go with oil paint. and it’s true, it’s much nicer to paint with than acrylic. I still have usable oils from 20 years ago and more – including flake white, made of lead carbonate, which you can no longer buy unless you are licensed as a restorer.

I was inspired by Richard Scott antiques, where they have very pretty flower arrangements amongst the antique porcelain and glass.

but for the time being I am thinking of doing some big landscapes on some canvases I stretched and started fifteen years ago. watch this space!

 

 

 

 

orchids and swifts

Posted jane -->on 10th Jul 2018

in June we remembered the orchids at Warham Camp, and made a date to visit while they were in flower

we had timed it perfectly

there were common spotteds

and pyramid orchids

covering the south and east sides of the huge rampart banks

built of chalk dug up from the layer of it that is just under the subsoil here in the middle of north Norfolk

so that this iron age fort has a very special fauna and flora, including chalk-loving and drought-loving plants .

it is surrounded by conservation grassland, the river Stiffkey (a chalk stream) was straightened in the eighteenth century and cuts against part of the ramparts, and even the arable fields have wide nectar headlands, so the insect life is healthy and varied, and so is the bird population.

a beautiful flower beetle on a scabious flower

we saw common blue and chalk hill blue butterflies (the caterpillars of this feed on horseshoe vetch).

this painted lady was in the churchyard as we passed through on our way

most of the flowers are quite small versions, due to the thin dry soil.

in the centre of the circle of banks and ditches thistles dominate. more details of the archaeology can be found here

linnets and whitethroat were singing in the hedges,

swifts, swallows and martins swooping over the nearby fields and the central dish of the fort.

there was quite a breeze so you may want to turn the sound off for this scan of one of the banks and its orchids

the impression I was left with of the birds and the landscape with its flowers resulted in two paintings. one of the swifts at Warham, and one of swallows hawking green barley after rain at Edgefield.

I made a start

remembering the chalk and the clouds, then left both alone for a week

last week I took the swallows hawking one, and did some quite radical things to it

but after a couple of hours it had settled into something more peaceful and less abstract.

so yesterday I took the Warham one and chucked lots of runny blue paint down it, ran some red and some burnt sienna around it,

worked back in with a big brush and gesso and some greens,

then I had to get those  mounds of the ramparts back in, without losing the sense of the river and the sky

 

but I left quite a lot of the blue watery stuff,

put more opaque pale greys into the sky, with the diving swifts

and added the pyramid orchids, that strong pink, and just a couple of butterflies

there’s a lot of movement and colour. I think it has something of the day in it.

 

print and words week 2

Posted jane -->on 29th Jun 2018

so when you have strips like this and your tutor says she thinks you should slice them into even narrower strips …

you think for two minutes and then you take the risk ….

and stick words on and fold …

and then the print looks even more like manuscript illumination

and you cut up your poem

and find the words are so much more brilliant isolated on their long narrow pages

like jewels

and you print more in an afternoon of adrenalin

and more ideas are offered

that you need days more to explore

and at home

you tear and fold what you printed

and cut up another poem

that you are in the middle of writing

hoping this process will clarify

its labour-pains

and then

you have two more concertina books a little more resolved

being pressed between boards

to flatten and many thoughts towards more.

print and words week 1

Posted jane -->on 29th Jun 2018

I’ve just taken part in two workshops with Tara Sampey and Jonathan Ward (he leads the Writing Outside courses I’ve been doing at the Cley Wildlife trust visitor centre)

these centred around a walk through fields and a holloway in Edgefield, Jonathan’s home patch.

we collected words and plants

and chatted

sharing a sense of wonder at the small details – overnight rain had collected on these funnel spider webs and turned them into a constellation of shining drops around the black hole of the spiders’ traps

it seems that we have not had rain for weeks and weeks, but there had been some showers (that was about ten days ago)

and the swallows were hawking low over green barley fields

linnets and whitethroats singing in bushy hedgerows

a sad very dead pair of elms loom over a small meadow pasture full of insects

the hedges full of pattern making us greedy pickers beautiful things to print with

back at the hall we were shown how to roll ink onto the gel plates to make monoprints

the mind-bending part is how to make use of the negative image produced by the first print, and the delicately detailed positive which comes after you peel the plant material off the plate

some of the images reminded me of medieval manuscript illuminations

the really exciting part is when you start printing a negative in a different colour over the positive, off-setting

and generally playing about with part of the plate …

so we went home excited, to play with words at home and make some texts which could be combined with the images

a (common) ringlet festival

Posted jane -->on 28th Jun 2018

yesterday morning I decided to run the tick gauntlet and

dive into the long grasses along the bottom of the big field

ending up with boots, socks and turn-ups full of grass seed

luckily there are none of those very dangerous barbed grass seeds that get into dogs’ ears and paws

although inland there is a heatwave, here near the coast we have the benefit of the low cloud and mists

off the North Sea, and of the slight dampness that comes in with the mists, so we are not as thoroughly scorched as other places, although grass that is cut too short looks awfully straw-like at the moment.

in the long grass of the new meadow, set as conservation grassland by Henry Carter a few years ago, there are plenty of wild flowers, like this tufted vetch

and common spotted orchids which are spreading around the dampest parts,

invading from the woodland that used to be a water meadow

there are marsh thistles

a lovely assortment of grasses, with wildlife paths in them

ragged robin

a lot of orchids, and meadow vetch

the general view. there’s also lots of fleabane and hemp agrimony waiting to flower

but the main thing was that this long grass was full of common ringlet butterflies just starting to warm themselves up as the sun gradually came out

no sign yet of the silver-washed fritillaries I saw last year, but they really prefer a lot of sun, and bramble flowers which are mostly just in bud

more orchids

and more ..

a ringlet just coming up out of the grass

and a small skipper on the jack go-to-bed-at-noon clock

there are always lots of those at this sunnier end of the field

then we waded through Cakes lane, which is not so bad at the lower end where George Harcourt cuts it often

but at the top it is head high in bracken, hogweed, grass and docks with the odd bit of bramble. all us walkers are doing our best to trample a trail though it, but it’s quite hard work, and one knows there are ticks lurking! sadly the council have completely stopped cutting it, although it’s a green road that’s not the responsibility of the neighbouring farmers. luckily the Hotblacks usually take pity on us and give it a cut later in the summer.

this morning’s walk took us past Bullfer Grove, where the uncut edge of the bank is host to plenty of insects, including this lovely speckled wood butterfly

in my garden there’s a bit of a shortage of insects, despite the wildflower meadow effect. I did find this beautiful brown carder bee on the knapweed flowers this morning. it (she?) is a little old and faded compared to the bee identification pictures at friends of the earth’s website

accompanied by a flower beetle – one of those beautiful shiny green creatures. I would expect to be seeing more butterflies – small copper, comma, red admiral, peacock, small tortoiseshell in my garden, but perhaps the drought or the cold May weather is making them later. we saw a painted lady two weeks ago, and the odd red admiral in the lanes, but only two gatekeepers and a ringlet or two in my garden yesterday.

at last, back to the kiln

Posted jane -->on 24th Jun 2018

I have had nine big pots sitting unfired in my workshop for nine months, waiting for me to pluck up the courage and energy to fire the kiln. this might sound strange, but having an insulated box at 1280C with gas pouring into it is pretty terrifying if you think about it. and the door is only bricks with no cement. also my knees were quite bad, and kneeling to pack it, and to clean the burners out, take them off and re-bolt them in, was not a nice prospect. but now my knees are so much better, and the evenings and early mornings are light, I finally decided it was a “go”.

I had it reducing from 950C with a big red flame coming out of the flue (reduced oxygen in the kiln which pulls all the impurities to the surface of the pots and makes them much more interesting. then the gas that has not burnt in the kiln catches fire as it comes out into the air and makes the flame)

it takes about 18 hours to get up to temperature this way – slow is best, it evens things out.

and here are my cones afterwards, yes, 11 is over, which means the pots had the equivalent in heat work of about 1300C.

when I opened the kiln it was at about 90C which may have been too soon as there was an ominous cracking sound, and indeed the big one behind the one at the front was very thoroughly cracked

but maybe it would have been cracked at the bottom anyway.

otherwise everything okay, and some stunners, especially this one with the looping combed decoration.

it was not a blue firing, like some in the past – I’d not got the chun glaze on thickly enough for that – except on this

where the double dip had made it thick and it was in a hotter part of the kiln. despite the 18 hours and cone 11 over, it probably was not quite hot enough in most places.

but I am happy with the way the black oxide wash has come through the slip and shows under the glaze.

this one is the same wash, slip and glaze but because I put the slip and the glaze on in the same working day, the pot didn’t have time to dry out and did not absorb much glaze. however the iron oxide wash has done some great things with this lovely rust speckle over black areas.

I had a few small pots and they all came out well

also this porcelain sculpture where the glaze and slip almost peeled off, but didn’t and is firmly attached, like leaves or petals

these two little porcelain bottles are re-fires, with a cobalt mix glaze over the top of the already fired barium glaze – I particularly like the one with the ink black, where the glaze was really thick.

this large bottle is quite dramatic

with the heavy crawling and the oxide wash

here’s a full photo of the porcelain sculpture

and another of the small ones, which is currently on its way to Delaware in the US.

a full photo of my favourite, which is in the Bircham gallery with the two above the Delaware bottle,

and a few others, including this

a shino jar which has become much more beautiful because I used it as the core of a bundle when eco-printing with leaves, and the eucalyptus leaves have stained it, and even left a couple of leaf prints on it.

I still have a kiln’s worth of pots to glaze and fire – in a couple of weeks perhaps.

 

the colours of May

Posted jane -->on 29th May 2018

most of the wild flowers in May are creamy white – cow parsley, guelder rose, bird cherry – with blues – the bluebells and the forget-me-nots – and red campion, although there are still plenty of yellow dandelions of course. but the fields are dominated by the strident yellow of canola, or rape-seed, through April and May.

accompanied by the sickly sweet smell, and much spraying of chemicals

however, I decided to make the most of it and managed a couple of paintings that are almost pure colour.

the first a small board, an old early painting gessoed over – lots of nice texture. starting with the horizon and my new regime of runny paint ..

I arrived at this, fairly free with marks and spots of balancing reds and blues

and scrapes and scratches

the brightest colours more or less hidden – cerulean just peeping through the yellow in a close-up.

 

meanwhile Cakes lane has been a froth of green and white

here is the bird cherry, almost like a wild lilac, with its own scent

although last year I was reluctant to engage with all that green in paint, I thought I’d give it a go this time.

starting with some drawing

all those wiggly branches and the blue sky …

hard to know where to start on the greens ..

but I used a lot of other colours and contrasts and textures .. quite happy with this. it’s a canvas 50 x 50 cm.

as for the bluebells – isn’t it frustrating trying to photograph them! the blue always looks so faded.

what I love is the wood with the pale green light between the tree trunks and the soft new beech leaves

I tried to paint them last year, and got an interesting abstract design but too dark and formal, not enough happening with the paint, so I got it out, threw various things at it and worked back in

I have so many more tools on my belt now.

all that blue called me back to the yellow, and a bigger version of the canola/rape field. more colour under it, bolder!

I really had fun with mark-making and with the colours I put back in over the yellow at the end

close-ups show you better

it would be an abstract if it wasn’t for the horizon strip

I saw this a week or so later when the yellow had abated

might be the next painting. meanwhile however I am trying to finish a load of pots I made last summer – have managed the bisque firing, and am glazing for a firing this week. then there will have to be another later, there are plenty of bisque pots up there.

looking back at April’s big painting

Posted jane -->on 28th May 2018

somehow I have been too preoccupied and more than a month has gone by … so now I need to catch up

the April landscape looks so bare

and even now at the end of May this field is not covered by growth.

so this painting – the huge canvas I was talking about at the end of the last blog – reflects the bright skies and the bare land of April. here it is outside on a hot day, having paint thrown at it from the brush and paint pot. first of all Bimba christened it by walking about on the back of it, and the wind blew it over a couple of times, so it gained some soil texture – perhaps a worm cast or two

the hedge still has blue paint on it, and so do my old Whitestuff linen long-shorts

after that I took it back up to the pottery workshop and my studio easel.

Bimba got some blue paint on her too.

I had a fair old tussle with this over a few days. true to form I had the horizon too high and too dark.

so whatever I did it just wasn’t right

and I didn’t want it quite that realistic

so I started putting white back onto the horizon

and scribbling – sorry, mark-making – back into the sky with the water soluble graphite crayon

covering, or veiling the electricity poles and wires with runny grey paint, getting the right flavour and colour of italic scrawl

introducing lighter colours, and covering up the text I was unhappy with

so “touching” and “distance” are separated

the cloudy bits have scratches through them as well as the poured paint

and at this point I knew if I did any more I would mess it up, so I stopped. you can see this at Cley18, the exhibition that’s in Cley church and surroundings, on the beach and at the Norfolk Wildlife trust study centre from 5th July to 5th August. my painting will be in the south aisle of the church.

you can see the pots that need finishing on the bench at the end – that’s another story.

but I didn’t stop painting – this photo inspired a small square board

just a small part of the large one

40 x 40 cm. quite pleased with this one.

and here’s my studio assistant, between bouts of sunbathing

and wildlife spotting …

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