Jane Wheeler's Blog General

the buttery blues of April

Posted jane -->on 24th Apr 2017

somehow April has been an odd month, cold and dry, but all I have done for days has been walking, getting fitter again, and making poems from found words. a bit of a rebellion going on there. the first week was in St Andrews, birdsong and family and trees and streams.

back in Norfolk before Easter, the weather was sunny and really quite warm, blossom and flowers everywhere

ash trees still holding back

but plenty of oaks with catkins out.

blackthorn dropping petals

soon the pattern of branch and twig will be obscured

in Bale wood primroses compete with brambles now that so many trees have fallen

sun and shadow painting the lane.

this greenery covers up the ditch that runs from the old moats and fishponds lost in the wood

and inspired a less accurate, more abstracted landscape

really I should make a very small painting like this, but that is what is under

the first one, left without all that copious greenery in the end.

the second playing with layers of paint and marks scratched through and even a bit of oil pastel for some darker marks.

I was quite pleased, but have been a bit stuck for further inspiration

tree shapes are not so easy to make into abstract paintings, even with the brilliant yellow of rape seed crops in huge blocks.

the bluebells are riotous in Bullfer grove

so, I thought I would have to make myself tackle them with paint in some non-traditional way.

firstly the blue has to be under almost everything, although the ground colour is green again, with plenty of medium to thin it.

more layers, more marks made with the palette knife tip

finished, lots of thick blue and thick green paint

popped on with the tip of the palette knife

scraped through with the palette knife

all over layers of thinned down paint brushed on with the biggest brushes I have

a bit of action painting …

looser than before. now I’m feeling braver!

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august

Posted jane -->on 26th Aug 2016

there’s something special about august, it’s late summer with a tinge of regret, but at the same time it’s school holidays and beaches and sand-between-the-toes and silly season.

the verges are full of seed heads and dry flowers that have finished, or the grass and plants are cut down and drying.

the oak trees in the hedges are dark green, some full of pale acorns

mornings are darker, misty and cool

some evenings there is a harvest moon before the sun has gone down

or there are wonderful displays of cloud

our short evening walks always a pleasure

I went on a bat and moth watching evening at Natural Surroundings on the Bayfield estate

saw and heard wonders – five kinds of bat, including the one we heard but couldn’t see, Daubenton’s bat, which skims the lake there. more different kinds of moths, trapped the previous night, young harvest mice in a big aquarium ready to release, and slow worms, a whole shiny taupe wriggling mass of youngsters and one adult – which we released in the dark under a sheet of corrugated iron.

morning skies are also a delight

though some mornings we are up too late and the sun gets up a bit too fast and hot for us

and tree shade is always welcome

Cakes lane has more shade, but where the sun comes in it’s trapped and there’s no wind.

mostly it is quite overgrown and the lower part a green tunnel

flowering thistles

too beautiful to cut

Miss T has caught so many sweethearts in her coat that she’s looking exceptionally well groomed at the moment

in the garden the chicory has outgrown the salad bed

and ripe damsons fall

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and it’s back to the clay again

Posted jane -->on 25th Aug 2016

it’s been quite hard to switch back to clay from my painting binge. in between I went to Art in Clay at Hatfield, which was good for making me think about what I want to do.

so I started coiling again, perhaps a little aimlessly

trying this beautiful butter pat maker for texture. it’s not really the right tool for clay but it’s a lovely thing in itself.

in the end it grew a double base and I got very hands on with some wet clay

from making that one I got some ideas. the weather being so hot, the clay stiffened up quickly and this piece grew rapidly

I’m using white St Thomas stoneware clay, it is lovely to work with and you can get a smooth finish.

but again I decided I didn’t want smooth

these are closed forms, so after a bit of time drying, during which it’s easier to handle them because of air pressure inside, I make a hole underneath and the extra air whooshes out

this one is more problematic, because it insists on looking like first a truncated torso

and then like a shape with breasts

I’m trying to see it as two joined forms.

now joined by the stem drawn around them.

back to simpler things

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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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snowdrops

Posted jane -->on 10th Feb 2016

snowdrops thick amongst the woods

on the banks of the last British stronghold – I’m trespassing here (only it was twenty five years ago, so peace, all gamekeepers and property owners) to see them on a February Sunday afternoon, hoping the gamekeeper is snoozing in front of his tv after roast pork or pheasant and yorkshire pudding.

we duck under the wire, cross the plough, and climb the steep sides, delicately treading in between the flowers – they cover one section of the massive ramparts of Stanwick fort, thrown up as the Romans advanced, which run for at least four miles around this tiny hamlet, lumps and bumps everywhere – goodness knows who planted snowdrops here, they are as much incomers as the Romans, but have stayed and become as British as the robin.

nearby they line the banks of the Tees at Whorlton, where it flows under the old suspension bridge

and past the lido; when it floods there are loose bulbs everywhere and I admit to taking a few for a friend’s garden.

a delicate honey scent when you bring them indoors

I think of monks (but here I think my imagination runs away with me) planting them “in the green” and my own garden edged with nodding white drops this month, perhaps the best they’ve ever been, under the trees I put in fifteen years ago – hard work squatting or kneeling in wet grass, clumping them up – they like best to be in company – though when the clumps get big you should split them up.

woodland flowers needing shade and rich leaf compost.

further information on snowdrops – they are not native, and were probably introduced in the early fifteen hundreds – making it just possible that monks would have planted some –

from Wikipedia …..

The genus Galanthus is native to Europe and the Middle East, from Spain, France and Germany in the west through to Iran in the east. It has become naturalized in other parts of Europe (Norway, Sweden, Great Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands) as well as in eastern Canada and the United States.

Galanthus nivalis is the best-known and most widespread representative of the genus Galanthus. It is native to a large area of Europe, stretching from the Pyrenees in the west, through France and Germany to Poland in the north, Italy, Northern Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine and European Turkey. It has been introduced and is widely naturalised elsewhere. Although it is often thought of as a British native wild flower, or to have been brought to the British Isles by the Romans, it was probably introduced around the early sixteenth century and is currently not a protected species in the UK.

Most other Galanthus species are from the eastern Mediterranean, but several are found in southern Russia, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Galanthus fosteri comes from Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey and maybe Israel.

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skeletons discovered

Posted jane -->on 5th Jan 2016

Two skeletons were found under the floor of the former Angel and Oak pub in Bale during renovations there this December.

My neighbour John knocked on my door to let me know why four police cars had been parked outside when the first one was discovered, more excitement than had occurred in Bale for many a day, and the event was blazoned on the EDP advertising board outside the newsagent in Holt a couple of days later.

It turned out that the burials were either in a part of Bale Churchyard connected to, or a separate burial area belonging to a medieval chapel, dedicated to St Botolph, and previously suspected to hold burials, as other human bones had turned up in the past.

Kelly’s directory states that until 1776 at the north east of Bale church there was a building formerly called St. Botolph’s Chapel which received bequests in pre-Reformation Will bequests. ‘In this town was also a chapel dedicated to St Botolph, in 1421. Richard Brown gave by will in 1510 13s 4d to the repair of it’. the chapel is mentioned in both Francis Blomefield’s History of Norfolk 1805, and M J Armstrong’s History and Antiquities of The County of Norfolk 1781.

Chantry chapels, which I presume this was, for the care of souls whose owners could afford to pay for it, were abolished at the Reformation, in 1539; usually they were sold off. In the above writings there is no mention of the actual position of the chapel, and it has disappeared so completely that it has been suggested that the pub, which first appears in records in 1781, when it was sold, and the first recorded licensee appears, was built on the site. However the pub is more East North East of the church than North East where it was supposed to be.

A little mystery, especially since the archaeologist who took the bodies up (for later reburial in the churchyard) thought that these two had been buried rather later, in the sixteen hundreds, especially as there were a couple of pieces of coffin remaining on one of them.

There were traces of other burials remaining as stains in the sand, an acid soil which destroys most remains over the centuries. Possibly there would have been earlier burials further down; these two were only just under the floor level, and were found when the builder broke up the concrete floors. I wonder if the consecrated ground was used as overflow from the churchyard after the Reformation.

The archaeologist was able to give us villagers some details about the second person, Time Team style. Probably female as very slender boned, though narrow hipped, died in her thirties, had a long term bacterial illness which left marks on her bones (would that be TB?). Perhaps she never achieved her potential size because of the disease.

Sadly the front of her skull was damaged as that was the point at which she was discovered. The other, more obviously female, died in her twenties. The head of the first and the feet of the second had disappeared as they were built over. So close to the surface – surely the original builders of the pub must have uncovered them, and quickly covered them up again!

At the moment the bones are in separate clean sacks, waiting for reburial in the main churchyard.

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part five the Loire

Posted jane -->on 13th Dec 2015

from St Jean de Luz I drove to a small village in the Loire valley region, Candé-sur-Beuvron, to stay at the Auberge de la Caillière, a small hotel with a very good restaurant, where I had a gourmet meal for a very reasonable price. from there only one and a half hours drive to Le Mans where we would stay before getting the shuttle at Calais.

there was time to visit a couple of Loire valley châteaux, which I’ve never done before.

this is the Château de Cheverny, an iced cake of a building with a big hunting pack of hounds kept in the grounds.

it’s difficult to tell quite what period this architecture is,

it was originally built in the seventeenth century and renovated in the eighteenth, lost at the revolution but bought back by the family at the restoration in 1824.

on the way to the next planned château visit, I passed this one which is in the middle of its village.

this looked much more romantic and thoroughly medieval

with towers and turrets and small windows

and small gardens rather than a big park

it was shut because it was lunchtime, so these are just from the street.

then we arrived at Chaumont sur Loire, which is a pretty spectacular château. this is the toy farm belonging to it.

all nineteenth century

it was founded in the tenth century by Odo 1, count of Blois, rebuilt in the fifteenth century and then extensively renovated in the nineteenth century, so I would say most of what you can see is nineteenth.

there is a big focus on garden design and landscape art in the grounds, which is exciting.

it is perched on the edge of steep banks above the Loire.

and has a real fairytale glamour.

the wonderful stables are nineteenth century. each stall and box has a horse’s name above.

it was in the stables that I first discovered the installation art which is a special feature

vertical garden art …

and all sorts in the park

it was very cold, a piercing wind

but a fascinating walk, worth getting frozen

we found a dog cemetery in a little grove

I think this was my favourite piece

the textures and lettering burnt into these attenuated figures make them fascinating close up.

by then we were very cold and unfortunately there was no café or tea room. we wandered through the toy farm, the donkey house, and then the winter gardens

which were a little warmer

the cactus house was the best

then on to the rather mundane but extremely comfortable and well known to us Ibis hotel on the outskirts of Le Mans.

the next day our return to the UK was uneventful, there didn’t seem to be any extra security at the shuttle, Tilda’s paperwork was all correct, and the car got us home ….

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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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two firings, very different

Posted jane -->on 3rd May 2015

I’ve been making work for a second show in Japan this last two weeks, having shipped off thirty three pieces for the first one, at Pragmata Gallery, last week. it’s horribly last minute especially as the last firing was a bit of a shocker.

I used to have more of this when I first started using the black iron oxide crackle slip combination, and I suspected that I was pushing it. but I was trying for deeper blues and that requires thicker coats of the chun glaze. as you can see I overdid it.

glaze flowed more than I was expecting

a shame because the blues were indeed beautiful

but some pieces were exceptional and are on their way to Pragmata gallery. the exhibition there opens on the 8th May.

in the way of things I was perhaps overcautious on the next firing. I was pretty sure that the crackle slip would have calmed down and not open up like this

it is only really a crackle slip when freshly mixed.

and I was right. also I didn’t want it to cover up the imprints of leaves and stems pressed into the fresh clay when I made the pots, nor the runs and layers of the iron oxide.

so the thinner layer of slip gave me these lovely watercolour effects.

this very spectacular bowl came from the first firing.

this from the second. I was rather surprised. was the difference due just to the depth of the chun glaze, as the oxide under it was the same as before? or did the early reduction that I had been chasing, to get the clay feet of the pots toasty, somehow change the action of the oxide with the glaze? we will see what happens in future firings.

at the back of the kiln the blues were much stronger. I have no idea why.

these were at the front. I have to say that what I have been doing works one hundred percent better on a grogged dark clay. this is a relatively smooth white stoneware.

but here is a red grogged stoneware, the pot is very lovely but it could have been much bluer at the back of the kiln.

I have four large bottles from this firing which I’m very pleased with, and eight small pieces, bottles and caddies.

plus around eighteen from previous firings. all to be shipped off on wednesday to Oz Zingaro Gallery in Tokyo.

then I’m going to get experimenting.

meanwhile, this beautiful photograph taken in the highlands of Scotland by my daughter encapsulates a lot of the things that happen in the glaze slip oxide clay relationship in these pots

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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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