folded woods in January
I’ve not been able to get to the village hall painting group this month due to a succession of horrible colds in the head and a lingering cough, so once my head cleared a bit I took strips off my lovely roll of cartridge paper and worked on some folded books.
I made myself go to the writing outside sessions despite the feebleness encroaching –
the first one was on the shingle ridge at Cley in a bright sunny gale. I found a nest of marram grass clumps sheltered from the forty mile an hour north westerly wind and was overawed by the brightness of sun and reflection of light in the flooded marsh after a very high tide.
as well as the piece of writing, a piece of stitching resulted, on a strip of old wool blanket, in the same form as the tsunobokuro bags we made in Orkney
it’s still waiting for plant material and a bundling.
winter skies dominate here, particularly on the coast.
coming back to watercolour and paper, after the writing outside session in the wood last week –
looping branches, bark texture, leaf-litter, light, colour, all inspired the large painting, which folded down into a book.
I’m also using them as notebooks out on the walks we do. this one is folded from a strip of the paper underfoot in our improvised studio in Orkney, so all the paint on it is actually contributed by the group.
I’m finding the separate interstices of this type of book really inspiring for making these sorts of notes.
I bought a set of kid’s rubber stamp letters and made text in the book folded from the painting in the first image, words and phrases taken from what I wrote after walking in the woods last week.
you would have to be very clever to make this quite crude alphabet come out looking like properly printed text. I like the way it jumps up and down and some letters are bigger than others. lack of control is good.
today was very misty
it thickened as we walked down to Bale wood, and I just caught this photo as the sun almost came out again. in the etherial light there was a curlew calling, shadowing us as we walked up the green lane, behind the hedge.
wandering in a winter wood
most of the trees have dropped all their leaves now but this oak still has plenty. it’s on the edge of the wood by the bottom of the green lane
the hazels have their catkins all ready to expand as soon as february or before if it’s mild
there’s a section of the wood that seems in a state of collapse. it is mostly elm and ash; the elms get to a certain height then the bark boring beetles find them and spread the fungal disease Ascomycota. the tree reacts by plugging its own xylem tissue with gum and tyloses, bladder-like extensions of the xylem cell wall. As the xylem (one of the two types of vascular tissue produced by the vascular cambium, the other being the phloem) delivers water and nutrients to the rest of the plant, these plugs prevent them from travelling up the trunk of the tree, starving the tree of water and nutrients, therefore, eventually killing it. but the roots are still alive and send up new shoots, so there is a continuous cycle of growth and death in the wood.
at the moment there seems more death, and rafts of dead trees block the old paths.
on the other side of the wood the spring-fed pools are still dry. at the end of the winter last year this was a large pond. the water bubbles up from the bottom when the spring runs.
the bare branches catching low sunlight. there were long-tailed tits, and then another bird I wasn’t sure of, possibly pied wagtails, running along the high branches, with a “plink plink” call.
oaks
and beech predominate – there are some monsters
holly in the lower storeys,
making domed hallways
while hazel grows in these bushy forms, flexible and sometimes trapped into archways
and ancient carcasses sprawl across the woodland floor. but no ash in this main part of the wood.
the wet nature of this land with its springs, sumps, swamps and little stream
means it’s not suitable for agriculture, though I worry the owner may want to exploit it for growing trees for biomass – hopefully the expense of draining would prevent that. terrible idea anyway.
it’s quite easy to get lost in here, paths entice and bring you only to bramble patches and more fallen trees
as there are so many deer – red, roe and muntjac – I wanted to see if young trees were growing. I recently read an extract of Oliver Rackham’s book on the ash tree, in which he said that woodland oaks were not reproducing due to oak mildew, and hazels due to squirrels. deer nip off young growth too.
I found several young beech trees but no oaks, and plenty of hazels.
our hedgerow oaks had bumper crops of acorns this year. most oaks grow from forgotten jay stashes.
I’m standing in the soft peaty earth and leaf litter of the dry pond.
there are many standing elms, some dead and some alive, protected by the other trees.
down here in the almost forgotten centre of the labyrinth I try to find my slow way home.
a Welsh setting
and a quite extraordinary week for me, really quite out of my depth.
this is Ty Newydd, the National Writing Centre for Wales, also, David Lloyd George’s last home. he lived there for the last three years of his life and died in the library in 1945, overlooking Cardigan Bay; he is buried a little way down the road into Llanystumdwy near the river Dwyfor.
it’s a beautiful place, both the lane and the river, and the woods that surround them.
tall sessile oaks and ashes line the drive
the garden is full of trees – here a huge maple
and the light everywhere mellowed by autumn leaves
it seemed to me a very colourful landscape
here enhanced a bit by the hipstamatic app on my phone
but still, there was a glow that I’m not finding back in Norfolk.
the course I was on, Heightened Speech, was sub-titled “a Spell on the Tongue” and was just one in an annual series of storytelling courses that have been going on for about twenty years, led by Eric Maddern and Hugh Lupton. almost everyone had been on one before, some people have been attending them for years, and are professional story tellers.
as I haven’t even got one poem by heart I did feel a little bit of a fake.
here’s the back of the house, looking out over the lawn to a small gate where there’s a footpath to the sea, about a mile and a half away. some of the accommodation is under the same roof as offices, libraries, kitchen, dining room – which is the medieval heart of the house, the old hall where we did a lot of the work – warming up body and voice, and taking the oral tradition up its “ladder to the moon” from riddle and nursery rhyme, to the heights of invocation and praise-singing
via Lloyd George himself, other speechmakers like Martin Luther King
curses, charms and spells,
prophesies, song, poetry
and storytelling. stories were told from the Welsh Mabinogion, from native American and First Nation Traditions, Aboriginal Australian, from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, from India, and further east.
the course was a rich smorgasbord of magical worlds and the voices are still in my head
the end of summer
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.
the colours of May
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.
radically expressionist landscape painting
the last couple of paintings have been the result of a leap into the almost unknown –
the braver I have got in my sketch book/art journal
the bolder the paintings themselves. this is the ultimate study for the catalogue image for Cley18. it started out as an old canvas from the studio of my friend Duncan, who horribly suddenly and sadly died in August; a bit flimsy to be honest, and a coarser weave than I like to use, and horrors! cotton … which doesn’t ping back at you like linen. but that freed me up to be a lot more experimental, because I wasn’t so self-conscious about the beautiful object, a nice linen canvas!
my main aim to start with was to try to cover the weave texture. a lot of this is liquid acrylic paint scrawled on straight out of the little pot it comes in.
then all went horribly wrong – horizon too high, flat sky, tree too big, no recession of horizon
so I painted over the sky and lowered the horizon, did some work on the foreground, and started in with the liquid paint again, and my new water-soluble graphite crayon
taking this further with the scrawled title – ‘Touching Distance – and funnily enough as soon as I got that cerulean, cobalt and creamy white on the horizon it started to recede
then I got the kitchen implement out, a rubber spatula, and gallons of sticky cream and grey coloured paint mixed up, and pulled that about over the top of the colour, wet on wet
working into the paint with the edge of the spatula
while everything was still wet
I’m really excited by this
the text is thoroughly embedded and only half legible
this is something like 70 cm by 50 or 60 cm, I forgot to measure it. the final painting for Cley18 will be 78″ x 48″ so there is a good deal of work needed to get this kind of thing operating on that scale.
one more painting got done before I left for Scotland. this is on a canvas covered board – a kind of support which I have not used for about thirty years!
the base coat (I am working on the white primer coat now, no pink underlayer) quite liquid paint, drawn through with an old biro
lots of water soluble graphite. and then to finish I attacked the sky with the spatula and greys and creams as on the larger painting.
now I won’t be able to paint until the second week of April or so, but I’m happy to have made these leaps in the past few weeks.
back to landscape
more efforts painting landscape –
this is a detail from the winter ashes I painted two weeks ago. one of the things I have brought from the still life painting of the last few months is this pink ground. I’m finding it more helpful than the green I was using, warmer than grey and brown which I have also tried. it’s a very translucent pink, and I mix it up from translucent white with some ochre and a little red.
I’m also using thicker paint, and a gloss glazing medium when I want more transparency, and working wet into wet (you have to be quick to do that with acrylics)
for Cley18 I’m going to be producing one large painting, six foot six inches wide, so I’m beginning to make small studies
one of the possible subjects is this wooded hillside, on my projected line from Bale to Cley; last week I painted this little study, 30 cm x 30 cm.
I want to keep to this time of year, or early spring, before the trees have any leaves,
so you can see the bones of the landscape
today I had a go at a version of this, which had sun and cloud lighting up some of the trees
it’s a start, at 70 cm x 50 cm, and also incorporates some text, which I want to add to the paintings now, it’s become such an important part of what I do.
this is actually from a Farrow and Ball ad ….
but it seems very apt for Cley18
I stuck a print-out ripped-edged on the canvas (acrylic makes this easy)
and painted into it, then partly over it, so it’s well embedded into the texture. believe is the clearest part.
I’m hoarding phrases to do with distance, viewing and perspective. Spitting Distance is one I like.
collecting skies too
this is looking west from the western edge of the Bayfield estate. the trees on the horizon are the shelter belt of conifers on the eastern edge of the Holkham estate. not the right direction for this project, but I think there’s a painting here at some point.
another around my line on the map.
Bayfield has so many gorgeous little hills covered in trees
but Bale can answer back with this …. and I think I am going to have to try to do less, the last two paintings when I look at the photos of stages, I’m persuaded that I should have stopped well before I did!
ploughshares
October pushes us on into autumn
more trees are turning, gold and the odd touch of russet red
even a wet grey day has its pleasures
fallen leaves glow
reflect light upwards
wet always makes bracken fronds more colourful
and grey old stalks in the hedgerow stand out as skeletal sculptures
quite a busy time for farmers, a new growing season, winter wheat, autumn barley, rape is up and flourishing, and it is sugar beet harvesting season
I found the so empty field being ploughed and cultivated on Monday
the cultivator is pulled along behind the plough, detached at the end of the row
and cleverly caught up again as the tractor returns to the furrow, leaning into the deep edge.
a great subject to attempt
the shape of the coulters, blades or what-have-yous so flower-like as they are tipped up, steel polished by earth and red paint flashing like teeth, or flower petals
a complex painting
tussling with proportion and perspective,
painterliness and colour
in the end had to stop myself fiddling with it. now I’m looking for a simpler subject for the next one
the buttery blues of April
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!
