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summer’s been and gone

Posted jane -->on 27th Jun 2021

but no doubt it will warm up again. the rain has been a huge help to all my seedlings. watering them is not the same. they don’t mind cool June temperatures it seems. I don’t either, it’s much better for my long walks.

our weekly beach walks at Tentsmuir are still an inspiration

the alder pools are full of birds, and the marsh orchids in bloom. this painting on paper Kinshaldy Alder Pools/Willow Warbler.

the tide always seems to be out.

somebody, person or persons unknown, keeps making these ephemeral sculptures with the trees and branches that get washed up.

they make me think of refugees landing on beaches, drowning on beaches. this painting on paper, Ariadne’s Beach Shelter, is one of a series of Ariadne paintings, ongoing, sparked by the idea.

the drama of this beach makes any object into a sculpture.

a face loomed up in another small painting on paper

 

Ariadne in the Wood

some of the fields have wildflower edges. others have been sprayed, I can’t see what good it does.

around this small quarry up on Garlie Bank a forest of foxgloves.

highblown summer

along Ceres Moor path

the recently cut grass fields – for silage – are such a pale green.

the barley is beginning to turn almost the same colour. another farm, the one on the edge of Cairngreen Wood, is growing proper hayfields, softly pink with grass in flower.

from Cairngreen looking North. when there’s snow on them you can see the Cairngorms, but they blend into the distance in the summer.

the daily scribble in my hand-made pocket sketch books keeps me fluent

I finished this diptych at last. It received a runny libation of greens to begin with and then I could get no further, but last week took myself in hand with the greens … Ariadne’s Naxos/Cairngreen Wood.

a fan of ferns and the dog’s head

the foxgloves are wonderful. I will sneak some seed later in the year.

I put a finishing touch to this one, top right hand corner

now it is rolled up with the other big unstretched paintings; I bought some plastic pipe to roll them around, which keeps them safe and uncrumpled.

then there are some small paintings turning up in wardrobes and other storage spaces which need finishing. this was just two shades of grey before – Paths in the Wood/Hold the Thread – a reference to Ariadne –

suddenly they can be resolved. the painting on paper on the floor activity is a tremendous help – as with the small gouaches I did in St Andrews when I had no studio, things happen spontaneously and I’ve become more confident. This one is High Tide/Morston Salt Marsh/Reflections. all these paintings can be seen in much more detail on my website

after all the rain, the preferred walks were in the woods where there’s not so much dangling vegetation to soak one’s legs and boots – in fact I’m back in my “barefoot” trainers having developed a painful blister – this is a marvellous old field maple

in the field next to the lower entry into Kemback wood. it must be ancient, I have never seen one as big as this.

elder flowers, beautifully scented

and wild raspberries, the flowers attended by buff-tailed bumblebees

by this deer fence kissing gate. Cairngreen has six of them, only one is not redundant, as the deer fences are no longer necessary to protect the trees.

in the wood the mosses are still brilliant emerald

so another beginning, on the floor with the elongated brush, a box canvas, 120 x 100 cm.

a drawing ripped up

and collaged onto the now splendidly dribbled initial marks

I tackled it with the aim of covering all the white. here I’m using a kitchen tool, one of those big plastic scrapers for dough. quick and quite a different sort of mark.

and fingers

some finger, some small brush for this spatter of marks

and words, from a poem I’ve just written for an ethnopoetics workshop with David Caddy of Tears in the Fence. his workshops are fantastically fruitful and informative. so Rumgally (the name of an old house/castle just below Cairngreen) gallowglass, a type of mercenary warrior from the Western Isles, hand in hand from the witches in Macbeth

as you can tell, quite a Scottish poem. the words in the painting are obscured, as usual.

and then suddenly I feel if I do any more I will lose it. so that’s it. kind of sad as I was expecting a few days of working on it!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

working on paper again

Posted jane -->on 15th Jun 2021

after making three large paintings in a row I started a new one

but then began a week of caution, working small on paper instead of tackling the canvas.

I produced several paintings of A2 size on 220 gsm paper, a reasonable quality cartridge, bigger than my series made during the winter.

working on the floor with my long handled brush

thinking about shapes on Kinshaldy beach

and generally letting paint flow a bit

also I worked over an old less successful painting. this can often be quite releasing

and after walking in Cairngreen, those four larch trees …

all the ferns are unrolled now

buckler fern in the wood

and the much more upright male fern

this seems to be the scaly male fern, it’s quite shaggy

this speedwell seems to like the low light of the beech woods

and I found this, which turns out to be grass of parnassus, around a sycamore tree in Cairngreen, and also where the wild garlic grows in profusion in Tarvit gardens next to the ice house.

the deciduous parts of Cairngreen have wonderful fern groves

walking up and down the paths there feels a bit like playing snakes and ladders

you are never sure where you are going to pop out, onto a ride, or a deer fence. the mountain bikers build jumps on the steepest trails; coming up them, climbing over all the tree roots is like scaling a ladder.

tree roots or the drifted trees on Kinshaldy beach? I bought some new paints, two greys, several yellows, and this iron oxide red in vast quantities. and pthalo blue, which I always found too strong before.

this has the kissing gates, the ferns, the douglas firs and all that ….

getting looser

meanwhile some of this paint was landing on the big canvas, also I stuck on some tissue paper, pink and gold …

and I was thinking of the shimmering glittery wet sand

and wide pools of shallow water at low tide

so the next move was some of the words from my notebook written on the beach

shilly-shallying in the shallows

shimmer

and kinshaldy and glitter and glimmer

and some pieces from a copy of the Guardian (2012)

Lytton Strachey and Virginia for the glitter

Taliban so it’s not quite so shallow

ditto

but here’s the swinging bit .. and reflecting my career in fashion. just a little bit of autobiography …

and then all this blue, and grey, and white

some details

this very strong blue is pthalo blue. CuPc (copper phthalocyanine) was first prepared in 1927 by the reaction of copper(I) cyanide and o-dibromobenzene, which mainly produces colorless phthalonitrile as well as an intensely blue by product. it certainly is intense, but also quite translucent, so all the underpainting shows through. if I mix it with zinc white the resulting paler blue is also translucent. with graphite grey it’s not too opaque either.

I did this one while trying out the blues and greys, 30 x 30 cm, a much painted over linen canvas with great texture.

gradually doing the shimmer …

and then the deep blues

arriving at this yesterday. it will have to be stretched by a framer and then the cream edges will all be folded back and it will look like this

last night I watched a film about Jean-Michel Basquiat and thought right, it’s finished then. love that man’s paintings.

and also I think I should make much more of my writing and use the words in my paintings.

however I must go back to smaller canvases!

 

 

 

blue painting and bluebells

Posted jane -->on 6th Jun 2021

the end of May turned out wet and chilly, and spring flowers have been very drawn out. on Monday (31st May) I went to Kemback wood, which was a treat, the bluebells still out.

as they were on the Balcarres estate on the Saturday

both these places have a lot of white in the mix too.

with the rain the Balcarres old sawmill waterwheel chute was at full charge

I was very happy to find marsh marigolds in a tiny burn alongside a stone wall above Colinsburgh, part of the folly foray five mile walk.

this fairytale neogothic gatehouse looking even more romantic with the clematis

I am hoping this chunky pergola (douglas fir from the sawmill at Newburgh) will soon be draped with white flowers too.

I’ve planted this clematis which has big white flowers, and a white montana, and I have a star jasmine on order, which is evergreen, except it will be ever bronze in the winter, and should cover the woodwork eventually. plus behind that bit of fence is a winter flowering jasmine … so I have put the tit box up in the top of the pergola, hoping to encourage lots of denizens and make my garden a bit more of a jungle.

the prairie seedlings are all doing well, everything is now potted on

but the older ones are rooting through the bottoms of the pots so I need to get a move on and prepare some ground. the intention is to sheet mulch part of the back lawn with cardboard, topsoil and farmyard manure, and to fence it off from my enthusiastic hole digging dog. it looks like we are in for a dryish week or two and I am already spot watering the front lawn where I’ve planted cowslip and harebell plugs, and having to water the old flowerbed in front of the house where I’ve sown seeds for oxeye daisy, field scabious and wild carrot.

I’m continuing to draw out in the field, not so much for information, but for the feel of it

it loosens things up

here’s another big painting, the blue on it a bit of a surprise. on the lines, it was a blue I had mixed up a week or so before, and it needed using up – I was amazed it was still viable – and after that it took over.

still quite translucent, and some of it with a lustre

plus some pink got going

an echo of these rather beautiful exotics at Balcarres

pink balancing act

so it ended up with more blue and more bright light green, and the peachy orange …. and it was Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday, because of which I’d bought his most recent album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, so this is called To Give Myself to You/ Blue/ Green/ Pink/ Orange Spring, and it’s 160 x 176 cm.

more pink

and that pale yellowy green – a different kind of fern. I am looking at my grasses, sedges and ferns reference book, but it’s very hard to tell. this could be an ostrich fern, of the hard fern family, not native but it says cultivated and sometimes naturalised – which would fit this artificial habitat, along with the rhododendrons and azaleas. next time I am at Balcarres I’ll have to look for some other clues, for the two kinds of fronds, and the erect rootstocks.

all the woods here are full of ferns, rather than the bramble and other impenetrable scramblers and nettles I am used to in Norfolk. as the woods here are generally on high rocky ground, rather than the swampy places they generally occupy in Norfolk, I suppose it could be to do with soil and drainage. they are a beautiful sight, especially when just uncurling.

scaly male fern is generally cited as present in woods here, I think along with male fern. I need to look more carefully to see if there are buckler, lady fern or any others. adders tongue is present in Tentsmuir forest, but I haven’t noticed it anywhere else. many of the male or scaly male ferns have huge stumps and must be very old.

back in the studio a somewhat ferny painting, a diptych consisting of two birch ply panels set on deep frames so there is a nice three-dimensional element to them.

I put it up on the painting wall, attached a brush to a cane with some tape, and painted it very much from a distance with loops and splats of this soft green.

some marks were added with aquarelle crayon

“Outset/ferns/gravity”, acrylic and collage, 41 x 82 cm.