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the vernal equinox

Posted jane -->on 21st Mar 2020

two days ago this thrush was singing so loudly in my garden I heard him over the Sibelius the radio was playing, and rushed out of my studio to record him.

now we are self-distancing, and in my case, being ten days off seventy, self-isolating, I am spending more time enjoying the spring light, and some of the time sunshine, in my garden and studio, as I’m not off to art groups and writing workshops. I’m very happy at home at this time of the year, the cowslips and primroses are coming up in the garden

I’m not restricting my dog walking;

we have these beautiful violets in the lanes

especially Clip street

and overflowing clumps of primroses, both in Clip street and our moss-lined road, and of course in Cakes lane

the fields have dried out at last, enough for tractors to be ploughing and harrowing on every farm this morning

there is a second later flush of blackthorn blossom

and some oak trees have thickening buds

the chiffchaffs are back in Cakes too, and a yellowhammer in ensemble in this clip, though mostly minus his wheeeze at the end of the classic “a little bit of bread and no cheese” song.

the sun strong enough to compensate for the blast of cold easterly wind today when walking, but not if you are just standing around,

and dazzling in and out of tree shadow

the primroses are not so obvious in the bright light as they are on a grey day.

the pond in the wood is still quite full – I love the reflections of the oak trees that surround it. a strange and spooky scene  ….

we have been walking at Holkham twice a week too – I should say galloping in Bims’ case – finding the western side quieter

yesterday there were heavy showers scudding in from the east

making theatrical reflections on wet sand

luckily we weren’t caught out by them. it was a refreshing and energising walk

they are fencing off the areas where oystercatchers and gulls nest now

but there’s plenty of room for us to keep away

on the foreshore and the dunes. Bims is more settled once she’s let those powerful muscles and long legs do what they are meant to.

I had the usual battle with this painting (don’t you love the pink chair! from an app which puts your picture on the wall of various unfeasibly smart rooms)

I think I’m quite settled on it now (Hilly with branches, 76 cm x 60 cm). there is something  female and landscapey about it which is all to the good.

now I’m not dragging all the equipment off out two afternoons a week I feel more committed to the studio and have been having a tidy up today. see the crap on the floor under the table –

well now you don’t! a wheelbarrow full of ceramics detritus gone into the grey bin.

and some paintings up here instead of in the “gallery” (my old office)

I do love this little one, it was very quick  to do but it’s enough and I managed to keep my paws off it somehow. Paintings which have got to the paws off stage are all for sale, just email me from the link on the website www.janewheeler.co.uk – I will have to be more pro-active about selling online, now that Open Studios is cancelled.

 

ways of seeing landscape

Posted jane -->on 1st Mar 2020

today’s walk in strong sunshine and stronger wind was from Kelling Reading Rooms up Muckleborough Hill,

chased by winged cloud shadows which flew out to sea.

it didn’t feel as windy up there as I expected, perhaps that was due to my own puffing after climbing up a bit over sixty metres.

in Norfolk it counts as a hill – in Scotland not so much – but it commands great views of the coast, and has a Bronze Age “bowl” barrow on the seaward slope,

somewhere in the trees and scrub. it shows on aerial photos taken in the 1940’s and 50’s. and there are awesome imaginary views of Doggerland, the area between Britain and Europe which was dry land until about eight thousand years ago, populated by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who migrated with the seasons, fishing, hunting, and gathering food such as hazelnuts and berries.

after returning from time-travelling, and after contemplating the wind-farm turbines and the racing clouds we turned downhill, through oak woods, and crossed the coast road to Kelling Heath, via Weynor Gardens, a seventies housing estate with a permissive path behind it through to the heath.

the camera on my iphone flattens things out, and the budding honeysuckle that’s climbed up a small dead tree is hard to read in the way that my eye read it. there are tree shadows that are confused with the branches that cast the shadows.

there are many wonderful trees on these slopes, and I walked along appreciating them, partly thanks to watching every Idris Murphy video I could find on the internet.

I’ve captured a few images from his website. this is Riverbed Ross River, 44.5 x 44.5 cm.

Idris Murphy works en plein air in the rather wonderful Australian landscape on smaller boards, the size of these three, and from the experience of working on those (some of which are completed out doors, and others worked on in the studio) he paints his larger works in the studio.

Waterfall cloud bank river-front, acrylic on board 65 x 69.5 cm

Views Walking Killcare, acrylic on board, 45 x 45 cm

as he says, using photographs to paint landscape just does not work, as they look flat like the photos, which as I pointed out above, are very flat, and especially with the wide angle type lens on my iphone – it just takes all the interest out of the picture.

Black emu evening and hill-side, Mutawintji, acrylic and collage on board, 65 x 65 cm

Murphy brings his extensive knowledge of ancient Aboriginal cave paintings, a spiritual sensibility and awareness of the meaning and history of place to his landscape paintings, which have nothing to do with exact realism. as he says, it’s all about making a picture – it’s very interesting to see his process in  several videos on the website 

hipstamatic helps to make my photos a little more interesting

but they can’t do anything like a painting. Here’s a big one of Murphy’s – Luminous green waterhole, 120 x 130 cm

the abstract qualities of this are gorgeous. Murphy’s colours are true to the Australian outback, the reds and purples of bare earth, and then the sudden greens after rain. the white gum trees stand out in many of his paintings,

yes we do in fact have white trees in Europe, but only in winter do they stand out as here against all the dead bracken,

and old oaks have the feel of spirit guides in these sandy hills by the coast where the Neolithic and Bronze ages still feel accessible and you can imagine Doggerland out there under the North Sea.

but I M is right about photography it really does not hack it compared to what one sees and one did not have time to stop and draw as the dear Galga certainly would not like it! perhaps minus dog when the weather warms up and before the green begins.

meanwhile I continue to paint from somewhere inside my head. this was something I thought complete a few months ago. I got it out yesterday and skated some paint around on it so that what was underneath was partly visible .. and it IS a landscape but a composite of things in my memory, partly from walks in Fife, Scotland, and partly Norfolk.

these details show how the thin paint allows what is underneath to become mysterious and suggestive

and in some parts completely covered

painting-over is often much more satisfying than starting from scratch

on our walk the gorse beginning to look like spring

and as usual the steam train’s morning trip from Sheringham to Holt passed us

 

chuffing and huffing up the gradient deep in the cutting, so that you can only see the smoke and steam and hear the engine. nearly as much as my huffing and puffing to scramble up the steep path to the level top of Kelling heath.

up there large numbers of Mesolithic worked flints and waste from flint-working were recovered from in situ deposits. some of the flints are now thought to date to the Upper Palaeolithic. this landscape has a long history, not least in its geology, but without the timescale and continuity of memory that the Australian landscape has.

walking from Kelling

Posted jane -->on 27th Oct 2019

at last a clear day after so many rainy and very gloomy ones

this bourbon rose still flowering and beautifully scented by my gate; I am astonished, because summer rain turns the opening flowers of this particular rose into tiny brown paper parcels and they don’t open. it’s a climbing version of Souvenir de la Malmaison.

we were on our way out for a walk from Kelling reading rooms to Kelling heath and back, via Muckleburgh hill; a walk that involves two big hills and wonderful views of the sea.

Just B and I and the sunshine

Muckleburgh hill has low growing oaks around its double crown, stunted by sea winds and poor soil.

you think you have reached the top and then find there is another higher point

the view is better from the second one

so up we go

looking over and down slope to the North Sea. interesting to think that 10,000 years ago after the ice sheets melted, you would have been looking at dry land down there, low chalk and sand hills, chained by marshy rivers and lakes, wooded and full of wild animals, what archaeologists nowadays call Doggerland. a rich environment for a sparse population of mesolithic human hunters.

East across to Sheringham and Beeston bump

West over the saltmarshes and shingle ridge to Blakeney point, Salthouse church and Walsey hill

down again through woods on the Weybourne side, easy to get lost, until we find the gate to the coast road, along the road a bit and through a gap on the opposite side, through tunnels of low ivy and woody groves up to the eastern edge of the heath. here it’s not really a heath any more but a wood.

rather soggy traveller’s joy, old man’s beard, or whatever you want to call wild clematis

Telegraph hill is the name of this steep slope, perhaps it had a signal tower or pole at the top for semaphore communications, which were used during the Napoleonic wars by the Admiralty, though I’m not sure that there was ever a chain of them in Norfolk.

here we are climbing up the Holt-Cromer ridge, which is composed of outwash sands and gravels deposited by rivers at the glacier edge, during the last Ice age. a steep northward-facing slope which would have been the glacier margin. probably Muckleburgh Hill itself is a kame, like Beeston Bump, a steep-sided mound of sand and gravel deposited by the melting ice sheet.

bracken turning all colours, some very pale. looking out across the fields here I spotted the snowy white steam cloud from the local Poppy Line steam engine chugging hard to pull its coaches up the gradient to Holt from Sheringham

the footpath crosses another road, and then very quickly turns up Holgate hill to the railway line, the most punishing slope. at the top you are higher than the railway line which is down in a cutting. I think I sounded like a steam train puffing up the last and steepest bit.

 

lovely steam train coming past, hooting for the pedestrian crossing then slowing for the little halt at Kelling, downslope. I couldn’t see a thing through the screen because of the bright sunshine, so I was trying to watch and film at the same time, hence the wobbles.

before diving down the steep footpath to Kelling village again I met some people with a lovely basket of fungi; the main collector a German woman who couldn’t tell me the English names of what she had found. one was as big as a loaf of bread, slightly bigger than this. I’m waiting for a Collins fungi book to be able to name it. we agreed that the ceps are over. that’s about the only edible fungi I recognise apart from field and parasol mushrooms.

this brilliant and perfect fly agaric was a neighbour of the edible one.

this one a few days older and already beginning to melt back into the earth.  they coexist with birch trees, and like most of the fungi we only see as “fruiting bodies” in the autumn, have extensive networks of hair-like threads which tap into tree roots, providing minerals and taking sugars in exchange.

the landscape changes as you walk down the path

at first bracken hangs down from high banks

and the slopes are steep and wooded with silver birch

as the slope becomes less steep there are small paddocks and large grass fields, oaks and a lot of ash trees, none of which are very old, probably dating to the disuse of the heath for common grazing. recent rains, some extremely heavy – Weybourne recorded over seven centimeters in one afternoon, where in Bale we only had just over three – have scoured out some sandy gullies at the top, and dumped sand on the path at the bottom of the hill.

back home in my garden there is more autumn colour than I saw near the coast – this guelder rose is full of berries and the leaves are turning very pretty colours

the hornbeam which is only nineteen and has got quite tall now has a lovely display

and the rowan

all berries gone, a delicate and elegant garden inhabitant. I put a new one in on the other side this year. I don’t really have room to plant any more trees, there are too many already, but my garden is a little oasis of wilderness amongst more conventional spaces and the industrial agriculture which we need to feed the country. though I must say growing potatoes for crisps is not the best way to do that! nor are crops to feed intensively reared livestock.

a quick burst in the studio, to start base layers on some ready-gessoed panels I just bought. 40 x 40 cm.

it’s lovely to just slap on some colour with a brush

and then some coloured texture (marble dust mixed into paint)

last week this one emerged, also 40 x 40 cm

.

and then this, which is just over 60 x 60. I’ve called it the Rain’s Voice. probably those bright things above will need more layers, but I think I will try to keep them bright, a bit of cheer as we continue towards winter.

 

 

 

October colours 2

Posted jane -->on 19th Oct 2019

I wasn’t entirely happy with the last painting, although close up bits of it work really well – I think I need to simplify.

I went back to the kind of thing I did in the last folded book

where I used watercolour pencils in combination with the new handmade watercolours I’d bought

 

making myself allow this clean simplicity which is easy to do on paper with these materials

when the watercolour granulates and runs it does the most perfect things all by itself

so I took this one as my preparatory drawing (it is a section of a painting)

and worked off it in acrylic. there’s lots of texture because under the gesso is an old landscape painting I’d done about three years ago and decided to delete, so to speak. it’s 60 x 70 cm.

various bits of it look like good starting points for more paintings

using the watercolours for colour reference was interesting. I don’t mix the watercolours much because I bought a range of about 6 greens.

now I have to think up a good title!

the same day I put these final coats

on two small paintings, 30 x 30 cm (that’s 12″ x 12″) also basing them on sections of the watercolour.

I have this one to think about

here’s a pretty crucial watercolour, mostly using the pencils, in a square Khadi paper sketch book (it’s stitched, flaps right open, which is very useful, and its spine is about and inch or two cm thick.)

the marsh is a pretty good source of ideas too

these simple shapes of creek and tide

and reflection

feeding into the pencil gestures

as well as the textures of seaweed and stones on the mud

something about paper standing in for light

and windblown grass in stabbed lines

and lines coming through

so here is this one, as far as I’ve got it today, maybe it’s finished. a bit bigger, 60 x 82 cm   – perhaps “Wind through the Marrams”

using a graphite stick that is water soluble

thinking of these marks on paper with crayon

and much scratching with the point of the pointy palette knife

this pale pink reminds me of pink plaster

under this was an abstract painting with lots of blues and I have allowed them to come back under the paint around the edges and in this corner

now I feel I have a stronger language to explore, that’s related to landscape. we shall see.

 

 

 

 

 

 

October colour

Posted jane -->on 19th Oct 2019

firstly I have to squeeze in a succession of photos from the last day in September, really worthy of a separate post, but I put it off, so this is a catch-up

on Monday 30th September we arrived early at Morston knowing it would be a big tide, but after an overnight blow from the north-west the water had not got out of the lagoon behind Blakeney point between high tides and had risen right over the marsh

giving an impression of how things may be in a few years? decades? when more polar ice has melted

even the coastal path was impassable without waders or a boat

and B got several cold wet surprises leaping about in the long grass

but it was peaceful and very beautiful

and I took a nice clean dog with me on my taxi run for my good friend who has just had a lung transplant.

only two days before

I was taking photos of autumn on the edge of the marsh, where the samphire has turned all sorts of lovely colours, from maroon to shocking pink.

the sea asters are over but the sea pinks survived the inundation

inland colours are mellowing. here is an ivy bee, a specialist wild bee species that’s become more common recently

a little bit of bracken bronzing

and early leaf fall – at Holt Lowes it’s mostly the birch

of course Bims is a nice autumnal colour herself

the dartmoor ponies will stay out all winter, they have great resistance to cold and wet and are able to stay fat on very little

pools reflecting sky and leaves

as for painting I found these colours in a book of Diebenkorn paintings, this abstract done in 1951

and happily tried to transfer them

but my painting seemed so dull when I got it indoors I went back into it

with lighter versions of these early autumn shades

these details give me points of departure for new paintings

in the meantime I visited the original church of Edgefield, near Holt, in the 1880’s most of it was taken down and incorporated into a new church in the centre of the village. they left the Saxon octagonal tower

and some of the doorways and windows

the churchyard is full of hawthorns, bloody with haws – our visit on 1st october, the anniversary of Mary Tudor’s coronation – and some late tombstones

in heavy rain I took this photo of the biggest remaining window arch

which inspired me to add the shape to my painting

 

 

changeable september sea-light

Posted jane -->on 28th Sep 2019

and it’s almost a month since I last posted ….. perhaps being so devastated by the cutting down of all those irreplaceable oaks has put me off. anyway, quite a different subject – equally important environmentally – the saltmarsh at Morston on our beautiful North Norfolk coast. since the birds have finished nesting I’ve been taking Bims there in preference to the beach at Wells – it’s quieter, and better for her feet

and more fun, cross-country jumping over little creeks and pools. and for me a beautiful place with curlew, oystercatcher, redshank all calling –

at high tide when it’s early and still un-busy it’s very beautiful, I just long to be out there on a boat on a morning like this with no chop and hardly a breeze

though I’m a poor sailor and have never done much almost getting my bum wet and all that stuff. I did love having my tiny Mirror dinghy, but could hardly ever take it out, it was always too windy for me!

this was last week in clear sky weather

then later in the week with the tide lower. it’s all starting to look quite autumnal. funny how these salt-tolerant plants – samphire and sea-blite turn orange red or maroon. I’m not sure what the process is, as they are not about to drop leaves or anything.

the pools reflect the sky, so double the light, it’s all around you.

and a riffle of wind coming across this one

here’s B doing her thing, zoomies, round and round. she doesn’t go far from me

cooler light yesterday, and the tide on its way out. this perfect row of Cockles (or is the one on the right an Oyster – my initiation into this place more than thirty years ago involved a real clinker-built wooden Oyster – these are all fibreglass replicas) sitting upright in the mud.

this is the special place we used to come to by boat at high tide for picnics all those years ago, when our daughter and our friends’ middle daughter were only three … Morston Freshes and a side creek off the Stiffkey where it comes into the lagoon it shares with the Glaven

this morning’s sky

we were there earlier, so caught this lower sunlight and silvery sky

quite wet from all the rain

and the tide still on its way out. I have a sore foot so the saltmarsh and soft mud are kinder to walk on, and Bims gets to run as much as she wants. we may be doing this as our regular walk for a while.

as she was here yesterday she’s not needing to run around like a complete looney

sea-aster everywhere. the Elizabethans valued this as a garden flower. it flowers all along the margins of this coast in september and october

still quite a lot of thrift/sea-pink in the pink

and artemisia (sea-wormwood) silvery everywhere. I was lucky that B did not roll in the small dead seal which is decomposing slowly alongside the path. it looks like a young common seal. they pup in the summer, whereas the grey seals (the ones with long noses) give birth and mate in November, haunting the place with mournful calls.

the sun on the dunes and beaches of the spit, just for a moment ….

and a little bit of painting chat to tuck on the end of this watery post

I’ve tried glueing fabric onto my canvases, specifically pieces cut off linen shirt sleeves

they echo what I’ve done on fabric with stitches. but the problem is that getting past this seductive stage is rather difficult.

the unprimed fabric is absorbent and takes the paint quite differently from the canvas

here I could have held back too, if the surface quality of the canvas wasn’t a bit repellant

so a couple of layers later (the joy of acrylic paint, you can white over what you did that day, and have another go the next) this one is waiting to see what happens next

here’s another which looks interesting like this, but it still wasn’t enough

so here it is, finished (for now) 60 x 70 cm. the pale blue was a freebie with a paint order!

it has lots of texture and “Mirfak” scratched into that blue socket. Mirfak is a star in the constellation of Perseus. they have amazing Arabic names from the thirteenth century when astronomy was forging ahead in Islamic countries.

 

 

 

 

 

early blues and a smaller splash

Posted jane -->on 19th Aug 2019

back in Scotland after an eight hour drive through rain and wind (only on the M6 and M74) and surface water yesterday.

wind this morning but with it light and shadow and clarifying blues

early morning walks at West Sands beach are rewarding, both in terms of cobwebs blown away and in sheer beauty

also in the opportunity for my running dog to run – difficult in the summer in North Norfolk where beaches are crowded and the temperatures a bit much

with the tide out this morning there was plenty of room

she was completely blown after a second session – not a teenager any more

though the energy seems endless.

all along the high tide mark there are clumps of sea rocket flowering

it’s a salt resistant sand loving plant that responds to sand blowing over it by vigorous growth, and it has a deep tap root to keep it in place and find moisture. there’s a lot along the edge of the sandy beach at Blakeney Point, and it’s typical in the Hebrides – in fact all round the British coast where there’s sand and dunes.

I was delighted and astonished to find more harebells growing in the sandy grass than I’ve ever seen before, probably altogether more than I’ve ever seen in my life.

I think this grass must qualify as machair, though it’s not in the Hebrides or any Western Isles. harebells love a chalky soil, and one of the characteristics of machair is a high lime content of the soil, due to shells breaking down on the beach.

lots of rosebay willow herb too

but the harebells were just stunning

thickly spread blue, lighter and more airy than bluebells

those of us who walk in birkenstocks with bare feet …..

and more blue – this was the product of the leftover oil paint during last week, a smaller canvas, 50 x 50 cm.

it has something of the drama of the beach and sky this morning in its contrasts

and textures

but it does remind me a little of the splash detail in Hockney’s swimming pool paintings, so “A smaller splash”

meanwhile B is on her hols and I have brought some new watercolours to see if I can do the delicate thing for a change.

Ty Newydd again

Posted jane -->on 13th Aug 2019

Back to Ty Newydd, the National Writing Centre of Wales for a nature writing course with Mark Cocker and Kathleen Jamie (with Horatio Clare as the guest writer/reader) last week. when I was there in the autumn it was late October and quite a different feel to everything. and this was such a different course to the rather alternative storytelling retreat with Hugh Lupton and Eric Madden.

last week it was warm and we had a lot of sun

the lavender in flower and filled with bees – honey, and several different bumblebees

I think this is a carder bee

and this is a white-tailed bumble. One of our morning workshops with Mark had us looking hard at the bees for at least fifteen minutes to write something really concentrated about them.

there were also dragonflies – this is a dead one found in the house

and a few moths. this rosy footman was stranded in the house overnight

having entered and become confused by the glass the night before. there are so many moths with wonderful names; it was great to have someone (Mark) who is an expert on insects to share information.

this time I managed a walk to the beach almost every morning – the circular walk is just over two miles, taking in small paths

through tree-edged fields of grass

under the single railway line

past brambles – ripe blackberries one morning for breakfast –

bracken, grazing cows

a deliciously tarry hut

down to where the river Dwyfor comes out into Cardigan Bay

and along the coastal path

beside burling water (burly water described by Norman MacCaig) that in spate into a high tide must be quite a sight –

but the tide was out or going out in the mornings last week – and one morning a heron flapped across low to the little waves

there’s always a special light in the mornings

and back up to the house, David Lloyd George’s last home

a lawn full of self-heal, and the semi-circular porch and window echoed by lines of flat pebbles set on end raying out in another semicircle before the grass starts

the house is surrounded by mature trees, but this walnut is my favourite, its branch across the stone steps down to the kitchen and utility part of the house.

I omitted to take photos of the wood and the river where we spent one morning making notes, leaving me with a few close-up portraits of Himalayan balsam flowers – extraordinary sexy glutinous objects.

full of thoughts about my own writing and about the very good insights into the poems we worked on, from the whole group of writers, and from Kathleen Jamie. I drove home in a gale, shreds of leaves flying across the road. these damsons blown early off the tree in my garden went into a cake. the next lot will be gin.

those blues seem to have got under my skin

yesterday I tackled a large oil painting (48 x 48 inches) which has been waiting for me to know what to do to it. the large emulsion brush turned out to be the key.

it’s good to have a break from something like painting. doors open, just like that!

 

 

 

butterfly day

Posted jane -->on 30th Jul 2019

after the heat, the rain and grey glum damp weekend, the sun is back and it has brought a new crop of butterflies with it.

today in my garden there were at least six painted ladies on the buddleia

plus a peacock and two red admirals, and more of the gatekeepers and large whites/veined whites which are the most common.

in the rough headland by the wood there are plenty of thistles which feed all sorts of insects

 

this beetle is a harlequin longhorn (Rutpela maculata), at least it seems to conform to the description here with its very long stripy antennae which you can just see, and its wasp-imitating yellow and black wingcases. It’s not in my insect book, or there with another name.

as in my garden, painted ladies consort with red admiral, gatekeepers and large whites

Bimba and I wade into the long grass and flowers (including these splendid marsh thistles) to see if the the silver-washed fritillaries are flying. it’s a perfect hot morning for them, and here there are thistles, knapweed and hemp agrimony, all three favourite food plants.

the hemp agrimony loves damp places and this is a soggy bit of land. once it was ploughed and there were big ruts full of water at the edges here. now it has a wonderful range of wild flowers which are spreading out from the scrub wood which was once a wet meadow.

and here they are, leopard-spotted and large, flying and feeding together with the painted ladies

I was here ten days ago and there were none

I didn’t see as many this morning as last year. it was only 9.30 am so maybe a little early in the day.

think I saw about six. and several painted ladies.

there were also a couple of common blues. missed it with the camera, but there was one on this st john’s wort.

fleabane here. maybe I should try rubbling in on my skin as an insect repellant. three horseflies had a go. last time I was here one did get me.

after the richness of butterflies off the beaten track, the lanes seemed barren and empty. even this once-tarmac lane which is full of field scabious and st john’s wort had very few butterflies this morning. not enough thistles, and the grass field next to it has one kind of grass only, no flowers, just a little patch of clover at the opposite corner.

it was a bit hot for Bims this morning. one needs to be very careful with dogs, they can easily get heat stroke. when we got back she immersed her front legs in the deep water bin I keep full for her, and had a good drink. never mind that she comes from Spain; they don’t have this high humidity there.

last week the Holt festival had a little exhibition of Lucy Rie’s pots and I took a few photos.

they are like exotic butterflies, delicately thrown in porcelain

or stoneware glazed with “volcanic” effects

I love her tall forms, they inspired my “listening pods”

perhaps when working on this painting at Art Group this week I was subconsciously inspired by that zinging yellow bowl. there is something butterfly like about the shapes too. never mind that stripy beetle!

both these are 50 x 50 cm. square canvases make painting abstracts easier, I’m sure. I’m building up layers and scratching through with the point of a small palette knife. in hot weather it’s much easier to get the acrylic paint thick but I have to be quick to make the scratch marks.

 

a february diary

Posted jane -->on 28th Feb 2019

so much has happened this month, I’ve been busy writing, painting, walking, and I’m going to attempt to squeeze it all into one post, or at least most of it.

most of my walks are mid-morning these days, after a writing session first thing, but a couple of times a week we get out early. on the fifth it was sunny but still frosty at eight-thirty, and we caught sight of four roe deer out in the sun on the rape field. these three went in one direction, and one more back into the wood. another early morning we saw seven just outside the wood. I’ve never seen so many together before. hares have been quite evident in the same huge field, despite the bird-scaring cannon which makes us jump. B is on the whole very good, she seems to have accepted that I won’t let her go and chase all these creatures, and merely stops and stares.

we have had several trips to Wells beach, so that she can run full blast, and one to Morston for mud-running.

through february it has been very pleasant to open the curtains just before dawn and catch the eastern sky colouring up.

different days give different colours

but this was the most lurid, halfway through the heat wave, presaging the three wildfires that have made the news in this last week after over two weeks of dry scarily warm weather. with very little regrowth, winter moorland can be extremely dry I suppose.

on the first two tuesdays I joined a group of writers and Dr Jonathan Ward for the last two in a set of six “writing outside” sessions based at Cley marshes NWT centre. on the last one we walked from Kelling village down the green track to Quag and the shingle ridge, which is marked “Kelling hard” on the map

here there is an interesting juxtaposition of arable, marsh, wetland pools, high dry sheep grazing, and the beach with all the old WW2 defences and the Muckleborough collection’s anti-aircraft guns sticking up ominously on the skyline. just to make the atmosphere even more threatening, a pair of military jets were grinding round and round above us, leaving thick grey vapour trails.

the old pillbox has at last been destabilised by wave and shingle and has come off its brick base. I wonder how long it will take to break up.

for these outings I have made my own notebooks, folded from thick cartridge paper and prepared with abstract watercolour marks. this obviously has an effect on one’s notes, which are made between brush strokes and in the interstices of the pages which fold back on themselves. more about these in another post.

I’ve also been painting, mostly in acrylic and working on abstracts, with layering and collaging. but I had promised to give the art group in the village hall, of which I am a member, a demo and workshop with oils. I bought these anemones and put them in a beautiful georgian cut glass jug for the subject. the idea for the demo had come up last July when three of us had been inspired by the Winifred Nicholsons at Kettles Yard in Cambridge to paint flowers in oils in her manner, thick paint and loose mark-making.

the painting I did on the day was not completely successful – I don’t think anyone paints that well while showing others what they are doing! I had a lot of paint left over, so I painted this the next day. paint in its raw thick just out of the tube state. everyone had a small board and I cut down the anemones to give a small simple subject for a workshop that lasted a couple of hours.

some pleasing results

the anemones came home and adorned my table for a few days

outdoors, February is the month for snowdrops.  these were at Smokers’ Hole, a place where the footings of a building and snowdrops from a long since treed over garden adjoin a bridge on a footpath, over the river Glaven. I’ve always been puzzled by this place – the lane to it from Hempstead is called Mill lane – so was there a mill here?

the snowdrops in my garden increase every year. the warm weather has finished them off rather soon though.

irises and croci have appeared through the grass where I planted bulbs last year.

my distorted hazel has lots of magenta tasseled flowers – I always think of the nature lesson in D H Laurence’s Women in Love when I see them. will I get any nuts this year?

blackthorn – in the hedges a few blossoms – so many hedges have recently been flayed that there’s no chance of flower, but some small trees are smothered in white flowers. they are always very early.

on our walks we have been to Kelling heath, Muckleburgh hill, Wiverton Downs, Blakeney Downs, Cockthorpe common, Holt Lowes – any one of which deserved a blog post, but in company I hardly got my phone out for pictures. must try harder.

in the village I take a few on my usual green lane walk

this morning – but the warm dry weather has made so much of it look even more wintery and dried up.

Cakes lane has had its biennial haircut and is not very pretty; the primroses just starting to come out.

Bims caught in a halo of sunlight

so, a clutch of small abstract mixed media paintings. trying to allow the gestural. “land after”

“sleepless paths” with text and texture – the dense black is an acrylic paste of paint and particle.

“hidden guitar” all these are twelve by twelve inches. square seems a good shape for abstracts.

then this layer eventually ended up as this

“of breath turning” I used “super heavy gesso” for the white paint, which happily feels more like lead white oil paint than runny acrylic.

“thousands” this one is sixteen by sixteen inches, not quite so densely painted and allowing more gestural brushstrokes. the ripped newspaper collaged under the paint is parts of articles about the schoolchildren’s climate change protests.

“stooped” a late stage – this one might be finished, it has several layers, and is twenty four by twenty four inches.

then, the weather being so warm, I can work in my old pottery studio (originally my painting studio in fact) and I had a rethink on this large canvas. I’ve rubbed it down with a rag full of linseed oil house paint – very runny stuff – in a beige colour. just to see what would happen really. I think it’s better. this sort of painting is all about process really. there comes a point when it’s better to stop than go on! it was called “sun, stars, and constellations” at one point.

 

 

 

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