Jane Wheeler's Blog General

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.

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radically expressionist landscape painting

Posted jane -->on 22nd Mar 2018

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.

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back to landscape

Posted jane -->on 19th Feb 2018

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!

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ploughshares

Posted jane -->on 20th Oct 2017

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

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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 gifts 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, 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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