Jane Wheeler's Blog books

back to Totleigh Barton

Posted jane -->on 4th Oct 2016

two weeks ago I was at the Arvon retreat, the old farmhouse at Totleigh Barton in Devon, for the excitingly named Poetry as a Controlled Explosion creative writing course with Jane Draycott and Jack Underwood

this was different from the Ann and Peter Sansom course, in which we wrote in eight exercises each morning and generated masses of material.

instead we looked at how to make our poems more explosive and then how to control them (to some extent) and the exercises were two or three a morning with more time to work the poems out.

I have at least six good ones, I think.

we were luckier with the weather than in May. early mornings were misty, and developed into days of sun and cloud

which allowed sitting outside to write and eat lunch by the end of the week.

I think I have more idea about how to push my poems in different directions

the Devon landscape is inspiring, but so were the people on the course.

there were a couple of young mentees of the Poetry Business, both at Oxbridge, and three other youngsters, and three published poets.

some spectacular writing was done

and some bonding

a lot of walking, along the banks of the Torridge

into Sheepwash, the nearest village

I think this is an addictive experience and I am very likely to visit Totleigh Barton again next year.

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barley fields and more

Posted jane -->on 12th Aug 2016

I have just put up the fruits of my almost four weeks of painting in the village hall on the walls of said hall, to share them with the users of the hall, and anyone else who wants to see them. so tonight we have our monthly fish and chips night and it’s a bit like a private view, and I’m feeling rather nervous!

things have moved on since my last blog, I’ve mostly gone forward with the same sort of idea as the painting of the barleyfield and the blue horizon trees, or at least I have tried to, and made my painting as loose as I can, closing in on small portions of some of the other paintings,

(this is from one I painted back in late winter)

or working more loosely from photos. on each one I am learning more, how much I need to simplify, but draw convincingly with the brush

letting the brush strokes themselves tell the story

trying canvas again after fifteen or so years, this one had its own special difficulties

but this little tree worked

this is a coarser canvas which is quite problematic to work on if you want loose brush strokes to work. I think this is too much dark too early

but I arrived at this, eventually and I’m pleased with its overall simplicity

this one started simple

ended up a little overdone

going for more simple

after painting this one, they both have their good points, I think …

a bit different, from a very dark photo which allowed me to invent more …. but the red came from the original image, I kept it because it’s so strong.

then I revisited the barley field with the blue trees, pulled out this oak from the soft and smoky background, it’s on a linen canvas, which is SO much nicer to paint on, an old painting, I just restretched it with the back uppermost.

it’s great to see them displayed together, with a couple of older pieces

framing makes them look very much more grown up

I haven’t got as far as framing any more (huge expense)

the canvases at least don’t absolutely need it like the ply panel ones

but at least the white paper background helps a bit.

fourteen altogether. so now, what about all that clay, and coil pot work waiting to be done?

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painting norfolk skies

Posted jane -->on 31st May 2016

in our village hall we have an art group designed to help fund the hall, run by Duncan Thomas, who although rejecting any claim to be a teacher, is in fact a marvellous one. he has enabled several people who had never picked up a brush before to paint very well, and encouraged others to change habits and find different ways of working with tone, drawing, and then colour and acrylic paints, which he sets out for the whole group.

as you know if you follow this blog, I take a lot of photos of local landscape, but have never felt I could translate them into paintings. I had been joining in the art group to support the village hall and for the company, and some time off from my main concerns.

mostly I had been playing with watercolour, ink and folded pen in the same mode as the wonderful course I did with Larry Thomas at Newburgh last summer but eventually I succumbed to curiosity as what Duncan was getting with acrylics seemed to work, and I remembered my old music teacher at school, Ian Houston’s painting career, following in the wake of Edward Seago … so perhaps I could do that after all.

we had some wonderful skies and I chose this photo for my third attempt, having ascertained that I needed to work on board not canvas and found some things that did and did not work for me.

there were no square boards cut so I had to crop. “another snow shower coming over”

I learnt that having a focal point, like the wind turbine, helps push the horizon into the distance. this is a field I keep coming back to. it is high up and you can see multiple hedges and trees.

looking for the dramatic skies all the time I started taking slightly different photos. this was my next subject.

ebouche or blocking in the under colours very thinly (using water, not medium – this is the delight of acrylic, no nasty white spirit or turps, washable mess)

not quite finished here but I’m finding sky much easier to paint than land

final version. obviously I found more in the foreground than is visible in the photo.

next one a slightly different version of the same field, including some tiled roofs which are bale hall farm’s converted barns

now something different, technically more complicated, still Bale but not that wide open space

something looser, wilder. the changes to the photos – taken on my iphone with an app called hipstamatic – in terms of colour translucence and brilliance, and in tone, are a huge help. an ordinary photo is flat in comparison, and hipstamatic lends mood.

after that a bit of a break, i was busy with Paris, going to Spain, a week or so in Scotland. when I got back I pulled out an old book from a Monet show at the RA in 1999 which has very good detailed photos of texture, paint application and colour. also Duncan gave us a talk on colour harmony – stuff I was taught back on foundation at Yarmouth art college but had never really applied.

looking at a similar photo to this I could see strong harmonies between magenta pink and a light green with some cyan going on (check out your printer cartridges)

so here is the base

and details of what went over the top

I was a bit timid about painting over that translucent magenta

except in the foreground where it got very Monet

so this is the finished painting. (these are all 40 x 40 cm, by the way)

the next attempt was a total failure which I am not showing you!

then I got braver – this is preparation for potato planting

pink and green being my harmonies this time

with a huge amount of help from Duncan. this took about twice as long as the other paintings and it was a hot day in our village hall, the acrylic dried out on the palette (paper, tear off) very fast and it was hard. but I’m very pleased with it, I learnt a lot and am much more confident as a result.

the next week I was captivated by the cow parsley in the lanes and attempted something different again

putting more detail into the underpainting

and working up gradually through layering

and then highlighting with loose brushwork

to something I think works, and I understand what is making it work.

but massive thanks to Duncan who has such a structured attitude to painting and is a great critic. I am also a convert to acrylic, once you get the hang of it it is so much easier and cleaner to control in terms of paint getting on things, the smell, and the clean up. maybe one day I will go back to oil paint, but not just now. so I have become a Monday painter.

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a downloadable book from the blog

Posted jane -->on 25th Oct 2015

I just uploaded this ebook, to blurb, it’s the photo essay from my blog, an ebook version of the expensive one I made with Milk books (see previous post) with the spanish chapters taken out and replaced with Norfolk ones. it’s also available as a print on demand physical book, 7″ square with 116 pages, not cheap though, between £ 21 and £34 plus shipping, depending on whether it’s soft or hardback, here book

I do wonder whether I should edit the number of pages down and do it in a larger format (this is seven inches by seven inches)

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my flip book

Posted jane -->on 23rd Oct 2015

this is just a short post, I thought some of you might be interested in a flip book from a book I put together from the blog a couple of years ago here, you can read it online;

http://www.milkbooks.com/flip-book/default.aspx?ProjectId=d279eccd-99bd-49bb-a52c-d6590c5353d4&OId=227665&OLId=1282705

it is actually available as a beautiful physical book from Milk Books, but it is really expensive.

enjoy!

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the Larry Thomas workshop

Posted jane -->on 18th Aug 2015

a week drawing – a drawing retreat … but hard work mentally. this was a wonderful experience otherwise only available in the states and I have to thank India Flint and Hat in the Cat for being bold enough to ask Larry to travel to Scotland to teach.

we were an interesting mixture of textile and fine art and ceramic artists/students, most or all of us not allowing these perameters to fence us in.

for myself, I have been lax about keeping my drawing up over the last twenty years, though recently an art group in the village has encouraged me to start up again. but what Larry got us to do was a whole new ball game of mark-making and of drawing from memory and off piste, abstract marks.

he had brought a marvellous collection of pens and brushes, and we made more from canes and aluminium sheeting that he brought

a thing called a cola pen, made with a piece of thin metal sheet folded and fastened to a stick makes thin and very wide lines

a piece of cane or reed with its end hammered makes special marks

bamboo or reed pens can glide or stutter

this must surely feed into what I do with clay

(maybe I will move away from the clematis stems I have been relying on)

but what I ended up with was several folded narrow sheets of thick cartridge paper to work more on and make into a very tall accordion book (or one which lies flat on the table its pages making landscape views) related to the river and the reedbeds.

reeds in a whispering curtain, the tide pushing little waves, the light reflecting a different way every hour

and the reed canes, so good for drawing

other students produced wonderful outcomes

I think this origami sculptural book was my favourite

books were popular – stitched

folded ones

inventive use of paper

always with a three dimensional element

we all got a huge amount out of it, and things rubbed off one another too.

I’m not mentioning names because this sort of work is about process and therefore not finished so I’m showing the work as examples of what fellow students found possible, plus I didn’t manage to take photos of everything, there were more very interesting things.

Larry will most likely be teaching another drawing workshop next year at Newburgh – get in line! he is the most generous and gentle teacher, and he will turn your expectations of drawing in all sorts of new directions.

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Scotland for me

Posted jane -->on 29th Nov 2014

a trip to Fife and I’m in love, going back for Christmas.

St Andrews is of course quite special

Firstly the beach, which goes on and on out past the golf course and round the corner towards the Eden estuary.

Enough visual stuff to keep one happy for a month

A lovely little secondhand bookshop where I found lots of poetry

Including a little pamphlet style book, Situations Theoretical and Contemporary, printed in 86, poems by Tom Leonard which contains this sadly ironic gem;

Scotland has become an independent socialist republic.

At last.

Eh?

You pinch yourself.

Jesus Christ. You’ve slept in again!

And it is now the home of my daughter and her husband, he’s running Waterstones and she’s teaching film at the university and little Em is happy to be running on the beach, eating kelp and sleeping the rest of the day in a quiet house right on the western edge of the town.

we had a trip up to Killiecrankie, past Pitlochry in Perthshire

It stopped raining about when we got out of the car, but the cloud and mist stayed around

Dramatically steep valley sides all clad in trees

More leaves, I did pick a bagfull of sessile oak leaves off the forest floor.

All the lichened tree trunks and wind-soughing branches

And impressive tall pines

Clouds sunk down between the ridges

Impossibly romantic and Caspar David Friedrich-esque

Tangling branches, trees black with rain

And very historical of course, plus bungee jumpers diving off that terrifyingly high bridge.

Next day was sunshine and Tentsmuir forest and beach.

A bit like Wells beach in Norfolk but without the miles of sand, instead the Tay estuary just around the corner.

The dogs found a ball amongst the kelp and driftwood

The dunes aren’t as big as ours but there isn’t as much sand on the beach, so …..

Lots of pine needles. Some wind fallen green clumps found their way home with me too.

Friends, family and a special country are going to keep me coming back.

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a picture book

Posted jane -->on 25th Jul 2014

this is my first attempt to put together some of the blog photos in a print form – I get one book, but you can read it as a flip book on line here, and it even makes page turning noises.

all photos taken with the hipstamatic app on my iphone ….

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a new blog

Posted jane -->on 22nd Jul 2014

I’ve started a new blog, just for the occasional poem. if you are interested, it’s here

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grand ideas, inspiration and temptation

Posted jane -->on 7th Jan 2014

a beautiful hand-sewn silk dress, made and dyed by Australian artist India Flint, and reproduced here by her kind permission. she used her leaf bundling technique to dye it, including some shibori tie-dye, and a huge kelp stem which seems to have been twisted round the outside to help with the colours.

a photo taken by Australian artist Kaz Madigan as it was unrolled after boiling then cooling.

my efforts up until now have not been quite as exciting

these are some sample pieces I tried out eucalyptus leaves and some native leaves on

but I have been inspired to hand-sew some dresses with silk, silk jersey, and silk and merino jersey, and taken the plunge;

rolling this one up with eucalyptus leaves given me for christmas, and in this case with ivy berries, which may or may not give a pale sappy green, and a piece of old iron chain from the old pig sheds in my garden

to make this bundle, boiled in a copper bain-marie with red onion skins and a splash of vinegar.

and this one, a dress made from the tube of silk and merino jersey, bundled and boiled up on my woodstove with eucalyptus leaves, more scrap iron and a splash of vinegar

which I unbundled today, and found, to my huge excitement, the most marvellous colours and leaf shapes, plus the piece of ilex oak leafy twig I had popped in came up as a purple-grey spotty leaf print, and the black outside of the bundle as a square “bib” on the chest, back and front. I am not sure where I am going with all this but it is huge fun, and addictive.

guided by India’s blog and her books, Second Skin, and Eco Colour I bought a book on Shibori, Japanese tie-dye, and I have tried out two of the methods – this one, pleated-on-a-rope Yanagi, resuscitating a hand-knit cashmere shawl which had been at the bottom of the stock box for several years

and this one, mokume, on a Katherine Hamnett silk top from the eighties which had been lurking in my chest of drawers, unloved, for rather a long time. these were boiled together on the wood stove with eucalyptus leaves, scrap iron and vinegar. I think the fact that these are cooked in a better casserole with a good lid, hotter, and probably for a bit longer, may account for the more definite colours. but I haven’t opened that onion skin one with the ivy berries yet … patience! time makes all the difference ….

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