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the fortress of the high powers

Posted jane -->on 28th Oct 2018

the last day of the course at Ty Newydd was a trip into Snowdonia, hill-walking with storytelling and heightened speech.

we drove up the Nantlle valley from the coast on the Anglesey side

through the pass to a high reservoir

where we stopped so that two of us could deliver their invocation/heightened speech in the spirit of place

the weather collaborated and while the utterances were in progress we were enveloped in a hail storm.

we stood close together like penguins keeping warm in a snowstorm. reading from an ipad covered in melting hail was quite a feat, having climbed up a very steep little hill.

although the weather was uncomfortable at times, it would not have been so atmospheric without the huge fast moving clouds and intermittent sunshine.

we drove on to Beddgelert, refreshed and warmed ourselves, and those able to march up hills and scramble over rocks continued to Dinas Emrys, to encounter dragons and fortresses.

it’s a National Trust site. I am not normally fond of carved wood things on walks, but this dragon bench is very fine. the scales on its back stood up five inches proud of the spine, its tail, with similar scales, made a a complete three hundred and sixty degree turn at the other end of the seat, and huge claws splayed out at each end. Here Eric (Maddern, one of the course leaders) began his tale of Merlin’s prophesies at Dinas Emrys, taken from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. the story features the welsh red dragon defeating the saxon white dragon.

we walked on through woods on mossy paths and up and down stone steps

the hill we were walking to is probably a volcanic plug; it sits between the higher mountains – on the west side Moel Hebog, which blocks any view of Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon) itself, and on the east, Grib Ddu with Moel y Dyniewd higher behind,

in the valley of Afon (river) Glaslyn

we passed waterfalls – this the biggest, with its pool of blue stones

and a huge quartz block, a pulpit stone

then more stone steps as we climbed higher

through wood

and pasture

higher

with views of wooded hills

and bare mountains

until we reached the narrow neck of land

and the steep path

connecting Dinas Emrys

a very defensible precipitous path, looking down to the Arfon Glaswyn valley

coming down, after the rain which began soon after we got to the top, I slid on my bum over the steepest rockiest part, it seemed safer.

here the view of the lake

looking down to Llyn Dinas

at the top at last, to sit in the square of what are probably the foundations of an eleventh century tower, and listen to the last part of Eric’s re-telling.

below the tower is a hollow place with a pool, a natural amphitheatre. it was choked with rush and the ground covered with bracken, but Eric has been clearing it, and now the eye is open. in one of my favourite children’s books, written in 1959, the Lantern Bearers by Rosemary Sutcliff, this place is reimagined as the mountain hideaway not of Vortigern, but of Ambrosius, the son of the leader Vortigern betrayed when he brought in the saxon warbands led by Hengist and Horsa. she uses the name Dinas Ffaraon and translates it as Fortress of the High Powers. Emrys is the Welsh version of Ambrosius, but it also means immortal one. her description of the approach, from the lake, although it’s not the way we came up, has the same feel of mystery and magic. “The path squeezed its way through, and plunged on upward. In the softer and more level places it was a slithering quagmire, at others it ran out onto bare, mist wet rock” and she places Ambrosius in the hollow place at the moment of meeting the main character, Aquila, “on the edge of a little hollow with the gleam of water at the bottom of it” Aquila hears the notes of a harp from buildings in this hollow, and finds Ambrosius within.

re-reading this book I get the feeling that Rosemary Sutcliff was quite an influence on my own writing; her strong sense of place, and detail of plants and animals make her fiction intense and vivid.

as we searched out fallen wood for our fire, and Eric dug away rush and turf from the stones, it began to hail. nevertheless the fire was lit and we ten uttered our heightened speech to our chosen entity; to the lost eagles of Snowdon, to the Green Man, to Pan, to Rhiannon (that was me), Artemis, Myrddin, Math, Sophia, Thor, and Taliesin.

although we couldn’t see Snowdon from the reservoir because of the cloud, when I left Wales the next morning I caught a glimpse of it, covered in a light dusting of snow, from the Porthmadog bypass. it’s on the very left edge of the photo and soon the cloud covered it again.

a Welsh setting

Posted jane -->on 28th Oct 2018

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

writing outside

Posted jane -->on 12th Oct 2018

the autumn writing outside course led by Dr Jonathan Ward has started at Cley Norfolk Wildlife trust visitor centre, accompanied by the sounds of returning migratory birds – especially the pink foot geese.

we went to the beach and the marsh at Salthouse. the last swallows were there, swooping over the grazing. Also a marsh harrier.

and sea asters everywhere. Aster tripolium has fleshy leaves to retain fresh water in its brackish environment. my Reader’s Digest complete spotter’s guide (the go-to reference book on my shelves) says it was a popular garden plant in Elizabethen times. it also supports a solitary bee, not mentioned in the afore-said guide, the salt-marsh bee, which feeds exclusively on sea aster, leaving a larder of pollen in each tiny burrow it lays an egg in. I came across entomologists catching them and a parasitic fly which lays its live larva in the burrows on Sunday at Morston.

the tide was very low, exposing sand at the bottom of the shingle bank

etching fern-like patterns as the waves sucked at the steep edge.

the marsh grazing supports all sorts of plants and animals, in the sweet ditches and the brackish channels.

we’ve also been to Wiveton Downs, which I have never got around to visiting since I was a teenager living in North Walsham. it’s one end of the Blakeney esker, a famous glacial ridge formed by a sub-ice-sheet stream first excavating a channel in the glacial till and then dumping sands, gravels and water-worn stones until it becomes tens of metres higher than the surrounding land after the ice sheet (itself up to a mile thick) melts. so this is a remnant of ice action which ended 10,000 years ago. I went there on a school geography trip some time in the 60’s. there is a clump of tall beech trees near the road which reminds one of Paul Nash’s paintings of beech clumps.

between fortifications of gorse one can see 360 degree views of the North Norfolk coastline. picking up snaky gorse roots, I was reminded of the other name for this feature, a Serpent Kame, for the meandering shape the stream cut.

interesting dwarfed flora on the dry sandy, stony soil up there. this is a blue type of fleabane, Erigon acer.

we also found a tiny geranium, stork’s bill, Erodium cicutarium, with its long pointed bill-like seeds.

the esker has been quarried for its sands and gravels, and its cobble stones, but is now a site of Scientific Interest, and grazed by cattle to keep the gorse and scrub at bay.

this week we visited Blakeney Eye, an island of shingle and sand in the marsh which has got so close to the shoreline that it will be eroded away in the not too distant future.

the channel of the Glaven has been moved to the landward side of it now, but it was the subject of an archaeological investigation recently. probably not a chapel but some kind of medieval  building, and earlier activity, including a Saxon bracteate gold pendant, a typical early germanic form of personal decoration. are those eels?

the marsh grazing behind the saltmarsh,

and the reed beds, are semi-wild places perfect for spotting birds – we heard bearded tit with its wire-string pinging call, saw a reed bunting, and a mixed flock of brent geese, probably with some greylag, by the sound of it.

the salt marsh has dry spots, like this hump of marram

and an odd space like a sea garden, shingle floored, and sheltered by the high bank. I have to miss the fifth of these wonderful outings, as I’ve got five days in Wales, at the Ty Newydd writing centre, for a story-telling course, which I will immodestly tell you I won as third prize in the Rialto/RSPB Nature and Place poetry competition.

but two more to go. delightful, and with a lovely group of people most productive. you can see the writing from the summer one near the loos in the visitor centre.

 

the end of summer

Posted jane -->on 2nd Sep 2018

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.

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

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!

field light

Posted jane -->on 25th Jul 2017

Field Light – a walk through five fields

butterfly light

at the top of the flint-walled ivy tunnel into a bright dry hay field, bramble hedges sop up the summer sun, the gate kept, guardian wings flicker orange brown.

sea and lagoon light

through the kissing gate a field of strong sugar-beet plants – dark green, juicy leaves, not needing hand-singling with a hoe, along the path

scarlet pimpernel, common fumitory,

field poppy, bugloss, wild radish, toadflax, bindweed,

hedge of tall alexanders with umbels of tarry seeds, sand spurrey, the ivy-grown brick bunker above, rusting dock spires, redshank, mallow, bird’s eye speedwell, knot grass,

procumbent pearlwort, knapweed, toadflax, cat’s ear, mayweed, mugwort, agrimony.

barley light

steep blackthorn hollow-way, loose stones on the path, tread carefully and take the left fork, birds calling in the tangle could be willow warblers,

soft and silky reflecting spring barley, a little green still in the stalks shimmering like velvet,

tramlines double stitched, the path swoops down through the middle of the crop,

flattened by last week’s thunderstorms, rises again into the wind,

its dogleg white blonde, rustling silk skirts, blue-white flints embedded in the chalky soil, each beaded barley head tight plaited, crab boat dances in the white tops, a plane rumbles its propellors, lark not so high.

chamomile light

an arch of hawthorn in the hedge,

in the deep ploughed furrow beside the grassy path sunspurge, pink and white convolvulus, white wild radish, wild oats tall and ticklish,

on the bank alexanders, no leaves – dying stem and umbel architecture, dark red docks, tractor below mowing grass on the marsh, small fields, high tree hedges, autumn barley dry and ripe, heads folded down on thin stalks.

corn marigold and poppy light

burdocks a dark furry entrance,

looking across towards Walsey Hill and Cley saltmarsh dotted with galloways,

small and wilted sugar-beet full of marigold,

poppy,

bugloss, overlooked by dour and dark heathlands higher up, a brooding skyline,

turn round,

flower-strewn barley and blue sea at the top,

four larks rise up.

 

paintings, family and dogs

Posted jane -->on 24th Jul 2017

family has been staying, and I’ve been busy with a writing course run by Dr Jonathan Ward, Writing Outside; these are my excuses for not being very diligent with posts.

Bimba is gradually settling in. she had her first run off the lead on a beach on Sunday, carefully organised on an almost empty Burnham Overy beach, early-ish morning, with a steady dog she knows well, and she had an amazing time, zooming hither and thither, coming back all the time. eventually she got a little frustrated with dear Louie’s quiet behaviour and started trying to play pretend (ish) biting, so we put them back on the lead. my main fear that she would startle and just run, totally unfounded.

here is Sal on a Northumberland beach about twenty years ago. I was completely unworried about having him off the lead.

and as for this one, she was off the lead far too much. oh well. she had an amazing time.

Miss B expressed a desire to learn how to eat knitting – we dissuaded her

she continues to be very cuddly and loving, to try to chew books, knitting, cushions, not so much the furniture, so that’s a definite improvement.

the person being cuddled (above) blew through my house and possessions and persuaded me into various rearrangements which involved four binbags of clothes to the charity shop, the discarding of everything to do with videotape, and various items of furniture changing places up and down the stairs, so now I feel unburdened, and the house looks bigger. we found quite a few nice old photos.

meanwhile I have managed to continue painting once a week

a further attempt at weeds, held in a pot made by Sabine Nemet

then I decided the pot should feature more – this is one by Nic Collins – and I started to deal more with the light coming in from the window.

next week it was a jar by Svend Bayer, with horsetails and valerian, and a lot more light.

which led by natural progression to today’s painting, featuring five of my pots and even more light.

 

painting the hedgerows in a jug

Posted jane -->on 22nd Jun 2017

I have a squirrel buster sunflower seed feeder! I have had a bumper spring -baby bluetits, great tits, starlings, blackbirds, robins, chaffinches and woodpeckers being fed at my feeding station. but also squirrels and wood pigeons, and the squirrels had chewed off all the plastic bits of the sunflower feeder, the only one not protected. this squirrel buster is great, the weight of the squirrel (or woodpigeon) closes the feeder.

sadly found this beautiful baby great tit, no idea what killed it. all that work the parents have put into growing this bundle of bones flesh and feathers gone in an instant.

also you can see one plant of the wonderful display I have had of foxgloves, still going. lots of purple flowers.

and this jugful of wild flowers has mallow in it, the same purple – picked up by the cottons I’m getting rid of from the stock room …

I wanted to paint the local landscape in a different way and thought of cutting the tall weeds from Cakes lane, as I was pushing my way through the towering growth the other day. in fact, I have most of them in my garden, or in the lane just outside my gate.

the canvas a little smaller than that huge mass of vegetation in the jug

the hogweed leaves are full of pattern. I’ve sprayed some of the background with gold, for a change

keeping it loose. palette knife mostly.

finding it an adrenaline high, needing some relaxation in between to recover.

left it at this yesterday, glad of a slight cool down in the weather

then this afternoon I added in a few densifications

and some sorrels from the garden

and some clarifications …

really enjoyed this, I’ll have to do some more.

 

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