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a few butterflies

Posted jane -->on 11th Aug 2018

I’d not seen anything in the way of a colourful butterfly this summer until we had some rain

then after the drought broke a couple of weeks ago with storms there were two commas in the garden, but nothing more except various whites until earlier this week

the commas were back

and two small tortoisehells

but they don’t seem to visit my garden often

the buddleias will soon be over

so I took several photos

but at the end of July, after the wind and rain, I found these butterflies again on the edge of the wood

the silver-washed fritillaries

I was quite surprised that they had survived our awful contrary weather this year

I counted about ten

feeding on thistle and knapweed

they are the biggest fritillary, and glide and swoop around the edge of the wood into the conservation grass

with closed wings they are very well camouflaged on the dead thistles. I look forward to finding them here again next year.

the thistles themselves are wonderful subjects

using the hipstamatic app on my phone makes them look even more dramatic.

on the Bayfield estate there are some fields of mixed planting, for pheasants but also wild birds and insects. chicory seems to be a thing too.

we walk round the “bird walk” about once a week. there’s a lot of shade if you’re early when it’s hot.

and the Glandford ford for a paddle

I feel a few paintings coming on from these fields

meanwhile some of us in the village hall painting group had a go with oil paint. and it’s true, it’s much nicer to paint with than acrylic. I still have usable oils from 20 years ago and more – including flake white, made of lead carbonate, which you can no longer buy unless you are licensed as a restorer.

I was inspired by Richard Scott antiques, where they have very pretty flower arrangements amongst the antique porcelain and glass.

but for the time being I am thinking of doing some big landscapes on some canvases I stretched and started fifteen years ago. watch this space!

 

 

 

 

orchids and swifts

Posted jane -->on 10th Jul 2018

in June we remembered the orchids at Warham Camp, and made a date to visit while they were in flower

we had timed it perfectly

there were common spotteds

and pyramid orchids

covering the south and east sides of the huge rampart banks

built of chalk dug up from the layer of it that is just under the subsoil here in the middle of north Norfolk

so that this iron age fort has a very special fauna and flora, including chalk-loving and drought-loving plants .

it is surrounded by conservation grassland, the river Stiffkey (a chalk stream) was straightened in the eighteenth century and cuts against part of the ramparts, and even the arable fields have wide nectar headlands, so the insect life is healthy and varied, and so is the bird population.

a beautiful flower beetle on a scabious flower

we saw common blue and chalk hill blue butterflies (the caterpillars of this feed on horseshoe vetch).

this painted lady was in the churchyard as we passed through on our way

most of the flowers are quite small versions, due to the thin dry soil.

in the centre of the circle of banks and ditches thistles dominate. more details of the archaeology can be found here

linnets and whitethroat were singing in the hedges,

swifts, swallows and martins swooping over the nearby fields and the central dish of the fort.

there was quite a breeze so you may want to turn the sound off for this scan of one of the banks and its orchids

the impression I was left with of the birds and the landscape with its flowers resulted in two paintings. one of the swifts at Warham, and one of swallows hawking green barley after rain at Edgefield.

I made a start

remembering the chalk and the clouds, then left both alone for a week

last week I took the swallows hawking one, and did some quite radical things to it

but after a couple of hours it had settled into something more peaceful and less abstract.

so yesterday I took the Warham one and chucked lots of runny blue paint down it, ran some red and some burnt sienna around it,

worked back in with a big brush and gesso and some greens,

then I had to get those  mounds of the ramparts back in, without losing the sense of the river and the sky

 

but I left quite a lot of the blue watery stuff,

put more opaque pale greys into the sky, with the diving swifts

and added the pyramid orchids, that strong pink, and just a couple of butterflies

there’s a lot of movement and colour. I think it has something of the day in it.

 

print and words week 2

Posted jane -->on 29th Jun 2018

so when you have strips like this and your tutor says she thinks you should slice them into even narrower strips …

you think for two minutes and then you take the risk ….

and stick words on and fold …

and then the print looks even more like manuscript illumination

and you cut up your poem

and find the words are so much more brilliant isolated on their long narrow pages

like jewels

and you print more in an afternoon of adrenalin

and more ideas are offered

that you need days more to explore

and at home

you tear and fold what you printed

and cut up another poem

that you are in the middle of writing

hoping this process will clarify

its labour-pains

and then

you have two more concertina books a little more resolved

being pressed between boards

to flatten and many thoughts towards more.

print and words week 1

Posted jane -->on 29th Jun 2018

I’ve just taken part in two workshops with Tara Sampey and Jonathan Ward (he leads the Writing Outside courses I’ve been doing at the Cley Wildlife trust visitor centre)

these centred around a walk through fields and a holloway in Edgefield, Jonathan’s home patch.

we collected words and plants

and chatted

sharing a sense of wonder at the small details – overnight rain had collected on these funnel spider webs and turned them into a constellation of shining drops around the black hole of the spiders’ traps

it seems that we have not had rain for weeks and weeks, but there had been some showers (that was about ten days ago)

and the swallows were hawking low over green barley fields

linnets and whitethroats singing in bushy hedgerows

a sad very dead pair of elms loom over a small meadow pasture full of insects

the hedges full of pattern making us greedy pickers beautiful things to print with

back at the hall we were shown how to roll ink onto the gel plates to make monoprints

the mind-bending part is how to make use of the negative image produced by the first print, and the delicately detailed positive which comes after you peel the plant material off the plate

some of the images reminded me of medieval manuscript illuminations

the really exciting part is when you start printing a negative in a different colour over the positive, off-setting

and generally playing about with part of the plate …

so we went home excited, to play with words at home and make some texts which could be combined with the images

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.

my violet delights

Posted jane -->on 17th Apr 2018

back in Norfolk for a week of rain or mist or fog and a galga with a foot cut on broken glass in newcastle on the way home … then at the weekend at last the veils lifted, hesitantly at first … my garden full of flowers which have raised their heads since the sun came out:

lots of hellebores which have been biding their time in the cold weather …

the grass as usual dotted with cowslips

the blackthorn doing its duty, but so wet last week I’m not sure if any of these flowers will have been pollinated, and now the petals are falling, white confetti …

and the rowan well on its way to flowering.

the hellebores are actually not as full of flowers as they were last year, but there are a couple of seedlings up as well.

at last B’s foot closed up enough to risk a walk … she has been belting round the garden so I thought about time to get back to normal. there were two small but deep gashes under the biggest pad of her foot; she’s had a course of antibiotics, but the fuss made about saline washes was ridiculous, water all over the kitchen rather than on her foot.

primroses in the wood

 

although the rest of the undergrowth cleared out by the deer, they must not like primroses

cakes lane has big mounds of them

yesterday a lovely day, sunshine and big clouds

I am inspired for more painting

but still looking at the ground for the wild violets in Clip Street … they are profuse in places

from proper violet colour

to white, and you can smell their sweetness

when the wind doesn’t blow it away

on the banks

I think B more interested in some mouse or mole here …

the big clouds dominating the landscape

are just what I need for my Cley18 paintings

yesterday was our Village Hall painting group day

I have been watching Lewis Noble’s youtube films of painting outdoors in the peak district  so I took a board and  canvas outside and flicked paint and water (treated with flow improver – plain water disrupts the pigments) with a brush.

in the sun they dried very quickly and provide a great background to work into , keeping the paint fairly translucent

now I have a way to get into starting the enormous canvas I have prepared for the final version

I ended up with this on the board, today I’m going to work into the canvas and see if I can take it further with more paint. tomorrow when the wind is less aggressive I will haul the big canvas outside and throw jugfuls of wet paint at it.

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.

 

 

the great snow sky

Posted jane -->on 1st Mar 2018

it’s been a Siberian week – we are used to these cold easterlies in Norfolk,

but usually they don’t bring snow – and are not quite as cold. though I do remember two weeks of wind frost when working with horses on a farm near Swaffham in my mid twenties. carrying water in buckets for forty horses probably started my arthritic neck vertebrae!

yesterday was beautiful, pristine whiteness and sun between snow showers, though starting to drift .. today is grim and cruel, a grey wind full of cold damp blowing at forty miles per hour, and a few places in the village blocked off by snowdrifts

Bimba kind of thought the drifts were fun, but on the whole much too cold for her poor toes …

I’ve had a burst of painting over the last week, inspired by Betty Krause … keeping a sketch book is something I haven’t done for a long time … but I’ve taken a leaf from her “warm-up” video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOqXB7KB01Q&feature=youtu.be  

things have loosened up and I’m finding the benefit of multi-layering

the brush is back!

and the paint is on thicker

 

the finished painting – 70 x 50 cm on linen

at one point it looked like this which is pretty scary

also these are now officially mixed media as I’m using crayons and oil pastels. that does sound better than acrylic ….

more sketch book, or “art journal” I think that’s probably an american term – going for a walk in the snow showers. I used a stencil for the white blobs, cut from a sheet of newspaper.

and the same day I painted this – snow showers on Monday morning. 60 x 45 cm on board

this was the next day’s journal

and stages of yesterday’s ….

almost there but the blue too strong

based on this photo from yesterday morning

so today another painting on board

a scary early stage. working with it flat on the table

more work needed on the sky

“the great snow sky” 60 x 45 cm

and today’s sketchbook

progressed to this … but I think I’m leaving it as a totally abstract thing

more photos to work from – this cloud is wonderful

more of the drifting snow

all very exciting. especially as I can’t walk more than to the edges of the village without uncomfortable depth of snow/slippery icy roads/deep drifted snow, and I’m not driving anywhere until things get better. all the more time to paint!

 

 

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!

snow, gales, sunshine

Posted jane -->on 13th Feb 2018

candlemas has been and gone, the snowdrops now at their best, though they started to poke through the leaf litter in early January

and the snow has been and gone

the first lot thawed almost as soon as it was down, rivulets pouring out of field drains

pools lying on other less well-drained fields

Cakes lane still flooded at its entry

the snow freshens up the poor old browny-grey landscape at this end of winter

and for a few hours or a day or so the reflected light is glorious

every muddy lane is magically transformed into a pretty picture

a scene I painted without snow

suddenly demands rethinking

but the temporary transformations soon dull to slush and mud.

Bimba’s first snow was exciting at home in the garden

but now the grass is cut up into muddy paw sized pockets

and the frost and wind have taken over, drying the land up a little at last.

 

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