Jane Wheeler's Blog writing

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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post open studios

Posted jane -->on 18th Jun 2017

I enjoyed Open Studios – I have a tidy-ish garden, the office turned into a decent space – and I had reasonable amount of visitors and sales – well actually sales were just as good as at Hatfield Art in Clay, even the second time I did it which seemed like a roaring success – without the cost and effort.

I have left most of the pots out, they suit the garden and the garden suits them.

my vegetable plots are being undermined by a mole – I thought I had sorted moles out with my underground wine bottles – but it seems I’ll have to get the pest man in.

the difficult thing is to get myself back into the swing of making. it seems I am either loafing around, writing, gardening, messing about with the dog

or over-producing, whether painting or making pots.

so this has been made into my painting space, mostly, though there is still some knit and office stuff going on

and I am just putting off touching that canvas, but the idea is to paint the plants of cake’s lane and all the wild parts of walks in the jug, a flower painting, of sorts

though the hogweed is most unhappy and one of the docks fainted too. however the intention is to make it quite abstract. you can see the office stuff going on behind … the imac is back, and some parcelling up going on …

having not been at all inspired by the rush of green growth,

I took Bimba round the Hard Farm paths and suddenly realised that the way to approach it is close up, texture and thick paint,

a bit Joan Eardley

however the heat is making me opt for indoors and the computer, as you can see ….

but I have lots of lovely summer photos of the sorts of things I want to paint.

walking with La B has been interesting, getting calmer,

we are getting to know each other

she likes to stop and sniff a lot, which means that I have to stop too, no way can she be off the lead.

but I am getting new angles

catching more details (a speckled wood butterfly)

feeling more like translating these field textures into paint textures.

the hot weather means the house is open to the garden

she is more relaxed, has learnt to cope with the stairs (she thinks my bed the best place in the house but as she’s still very puppy and likes chewing things I certainly don’t leave her upstairs on her own, and she’s quite happy in her own bed in the kitchen at night)

she’s worn a racetrack through the long meadow grass

and likes to play football by herself with a tennis ball.

the roses are over more or less, early; they started very early, except for the rambling rector which has made the plum tree and part of the sycamore above it white as with a fall of snow.

there are humming bee hawk moths around (see, rather blurred, above, on the valerian), but no swifts nesting – occasionally some screaming parties fly over but they are from the farm, ditto swallows.

this morning we paused on the path next to Bullfer Grove, on the bank under the big oak trees and I recorded this – thrush, chaffinch and crow. 8.30 am June 18th summer wood birdsong

such a short season before the birds stop singing and everything starts to be a little dull and over-ripe.

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archaeology

Posted jane -->on 21st May 2017

I’m clearing the old office out, to make it into a summer studio and a gallery for Open Studios, which starts next weekend (27th May). I’m opening studio and garden for 3 days the first weekend, as it’s a bank holiday Monday, then the next two weekend just Saturday and Sunday. I had the old photocopier removed for recycling (expensive!) and amongst the old paper carrier bags and wrapping paper tucked behind it was a watercolour I painted in 2001.

I painted a series, and when I looked in the plan chest I found five more, two red, and two blue the same size, and bigger square red one. I remember enjoying how the pure colours behaved on the paper, sometimes drowning in water, sometimes very intense, and planning the bare paper areas. lovely paper to paint on too.

four are mounted, the first red one has gone to the framers. it is going to be very expensive, using clearglass because it makes such a difference to the colour.

then I found something much older. I went to Norwich Art School for summer school in 1985 and got very involved in the print department, especially etching. they had a fantastic etching studio, with a very big press, and I was liberated by two weeks of life-drawing before I started on these.

the three make a triptych. obviously Picasso’s Vollard Suite was a big influence too, but previous to this I had made a huge painting on a roll of brown paper of human figures with animal heads, more influenced by Assyrian bas-relief.

these three coloured etchings are one-offs, artist’s proofs, but I also have an edition of 25 in black.

I have to mention a particularly pleasurable outing, in The Rialto, one of the most respected poetry magazines. This is the cover, which is lovely; they always have great covers. I have FOUR pages and a mention on the back! wholly amazing and wonderful. I would encourage anyone interested in poetry to buy the magazine, and subscribe, not because I want you to read my work especially, although of course that would be very nice, but because it is a wonderful and beautiful publication, and the Arts Council’s support depends on there being more subscriptions and sales.

meanwhile I’m still walking solo, although in six days that will no longer be the case. as she will be on the lead you won’t see Bimba trotting ahead like Tilda. we shall see how her recall and attachment to me progresses, but when a dog goes off after something it’s seen, one’s heart is in one’s mouth, and I am less prepared to take the risk this time. This photo interestingly echoes the stormy etchings above.

I caught a few drops that time, but this cloud looked like soaking me for most of the walk.

lastly, a rare find in the churchyard

meadow saxifrage

rare because there are so few unsprayed meadows with ancient turf left

after a very dry spring we have had rain at last and there are plenty of puddles reflecting the sky!

even so the ash trees are only just coming out.

a weeks ago the oaks had very young leaves still but now they are well covered

in my garden the buttercups are replacing the cowslips

for Open Studios most of the pots for sale will be in the garden. I hope to see plenty of people. Bimba is arriving on the first afternoon, which will be interesting – she is an easy dog, sweet and affectionate, so although I will have to keep her on a lead while I have the gates open for visitors, it will be good to have her meeting lots of humans.

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a month wiped out

Posted jane -->on 11th Feb 2017

post Tilda walks have been more thoughtful and exploratory, but far and few between as I have had a very unpleasant and recurring virus for four weeks, still haven’t got my sense of smell back. it’s really knocked the stuffing out of me and next year I will be getting the flu jab, no more cocky “I never get flu or colds”

before it really got going I had a day drawing and painting at our village hall art group

working from a December photo (usually I get enthused about a very recent image)

cropped into a small rectangle of MDF 12″ x 16″

then I missed one week and the next week was a holiday week anyway, thank goodness, so I didn’t miss anything. at this time of year, when my studio is cold, even with the woodburner, the village hall Monday group is a lifeline.

we had some very grim cold weather, but perhaps it just felt worse with a temperature and a sore head!

just over a week ago I thought “I’ve got to beat this” – the weather was really quite balmy for a couple of days; I got a hundred snowdrops “in the green” and planted them over Tilda’s grave to join the many hundreds already in my wild garden,

along with the aconites under the old plum tree.

the mistle thrush was singing every morning, and it was beginning to feel like spring.

I ventured out for a long-ish walk – in fact more or less my usual circuit, but through the wood instead of around the edge – it did turn out to be far too far for my wobbly legs, but it was worth it.

everywhere pretty wet

a roe deer slipped away, I just saw her creamy hinder end, and thick winter coat

ivy and holly keep the wood a little warmer, but the ivy is all browsed off by the deer as high as they can reach.

it was a shock to find the lower half of Cake’s lane completely flayed. it seems three times as wide as before – one side had not been done for a very long time. they cut it every three years, and it is necessary, the brambles and blackthorn would end up blocking it. and we will be able to see the primroses properly in the spring.

although a bit bald, a great subject for a painting – the white light looking through the holly tree, and the way the pale ripped stems of the hedge interact tone-wise with the dark tree and the lighter deciduous trees around it, and lots of texture. and the dark right-hand foreground trees in the hedge, all made mysterious and translucent by the hipstamatic app I use to take a lot of these photos.

the ground lattice-patterned by the tractor’s wheels too.

halfway through ….

I might just need to put a bit more lattice-y stuff into the bottom righthand corner.

yesterday I went into the woods again, not so far this time, I didn’t want the virus to come roaring back now I’m feeling so much stronger.

a grey day, but it’s a magical place

if you meet the gamekeeper it’s shooting land – but he’s been quite polite to me when I’ve run into him, even with two dogs in tow.

once the village kids played in here, and in living memory it was common land, appropriated by the local landowner to plant these oaks.

the track here is strictly “private” but I blatantly walked down here.

the old pheasant pens and feeders are this end of the wood, but I don’t see any signs of rearing birds here these days

looking out across a field to where the woods expand across to “Botany Bay”, full of roe deer and red too …

deep ditches; springs start on the gravel ridge that is the beginning of the Holt Cromer Ridge, a huge terminal moraine from the last Ice Age which gives North Norfolk its heaths and hills.

the focus of my next painting will be this entrance to the wood with its misty light and huge willow tree.

at this viewpoint it’s a black hole, but those trees are very exciting.

it will take a couple of charcoal drawings to get to grips with it I think; I’m looking forward to Monday.

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December airs

Posted jane -->on 8th Jan 2017

I have been off line rather a long time due to losing Tilda to liver cancer at the end of November. She was ill for two months, that is she lost her appetite and a lot of weight. What was wrong gradually became clear through November, and our lovely vet came and ended it for her on the 24th before she had suffered much. So now my walks are a bit solitary, though I take my notebook and scribble fragments of observation.

No more lurcher leading the way down paths and up the road. A time for more writing and thinking, constructing poems, and sending them off to magazines and pamphlet competitions. I am very pleased to report that the independent literary magazine Tears in the Fence has accepted one about Salthouse church which will be in their summer edition, and has asked for more.

You can imagine me sitting on a fallen branch under the beech tree and scribbling in my little book.

When there is light, or even on a misty day when the lights have to be on indoors, the trees, fields and hedgerows are a delight.

the pool in the wood has filled up again now that the cable trench is filled and the pumping of water from the system of springs has ended

the pattern of branches above it is reflected, the sky a cloudy mirror the trees seem to be peering into,

puddles bring the light down to my feet.

The trees are more beautiful, their branches seem to wave in fluid shapes like dancers’ arms,

the nude hedges make graphic designs with their stems through which to look out across fields of winter cereals,

grassy stems holding water drops that refract their bright green to a greyish pastel colour.

Water in the misty air makes every view soften into blue-greys.

Muddy tracks are imprinted with a variety of wheel tracks

irresistible, translatable into two-dimensions.

Greyed down colours need cool underpainting, unlike the bright autumn which I underpainted with translucent earth yellows.

acrylic on canvas 17th december The Track

I was back in the studio for a couple of days before Christmas, then felled by some strange virus. Two recent trips to Scotland and one to Whitby should appear here soon

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back to Totleigh Barton

Posted jane -->on 4th Oct 2016

two weeks ago I was at the Arvon retreat, the old farmhouse at Totleigh Barton in Devon, for the excitingly named Poetry as a Controlled Explosion creative writing course with Jane Draycott and Jack Underwood

this was different from the Ann and Peter Sansom course, in which we wrote in eight exercises each morning and generated masses of material.

instead we looked at how to make our poems more explosive and then how to control them (to some extent) and the exercises were two or three a morning with more time to work the poems out.

I have at least six good ones, I think.

we were luckier with the weather than in May. early mornings were misty, and developed into days of sun and cloud

which allowed sitting outside to write and eat lunch by the end of the week.

I think I have more idea about how to push my poems in different directions

the Devon landscape is inspiring, but so were the people on the course.

there were a couple of young mentees of the Poetry Business, both at Oxbridge, and three other youngsters, and three published poets.

some spectacular writing was done

and some bonding

a lot of walking, along the banks of the Torridge

into Sheepwash, the nearest village

I think this is an addictive experience and I am very likely to visit Totleigh Barton again next year.

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changing weather

Posted jane -->on 4th Oct 2016

a bit of a lull in posts, I have been quite busy and then there was the Arvon week in Devon, which I really should write a post about, it was amazing, and somehow seems to have triggered a sea-change in my painting

a detail from a larger painting on plywood panel which I actually worked on in my pottery workshop (originally when it was corrugated iron it was my painting studio but the clay took over)

another detail – by the way the red is just my phone camera, really it’s an orangey rust – I worked on it in a much more relaxed way, over three days, partly because putting paint on with a palette knife, as some of it was, means it does take longer to dry, even in acrylic paint

and partly because there was no need to hurry, and there were a lot of other things going on at the same time.

the light is great in there, and my old studio easel has been propped up against a shelf until and used as a convenient hanger for years, so I turned it around, but kept it leaning rather than standing on its feet. painting before various things done

like adding the rooks, more sky paint and quite a bit of other more subtle stuff – the finished painting. it is 81 x 62 cm

the change was largely brought about by making charcoal drawings and NOT looking at the original photo. so yesterday, in the village hall I repeated this procedure.

early stage here

finished – only 40 x 40 cm, so when the palette knife comes into the mix and brush handle tip drawing, things can get quite quick, but very adrenalin fueled, and lots of colour mixing going on.

so then there was time to paint another ….

I have been quite fascinated by how the electricity poles that march across our fields interact with the landscape, and have taken a lot of photos of them recently

especially against evening skies

so this painting is part of a series

just 40cm wide, and 30 or so high. after this I was bushed, I have to admit. but there will be more!

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more slow pots

Posted jane -->on 30th May 2016

there have been more pots in the running, despite lack of blogging, but an awful lot of other things happening

such as decisions on how to finish these slow coiled pots

with a plain white slip over the textured surface?

unglazed and oxide painted on was really disappointing

besides causing unforeseen accidents with kiln shelves

so what to do? inspiration from the post war generation of studio potters is all very well, but different times breed different ideas

oxide painted on and scraped off again in patterns is pleasing …

inspired by natural things found

and seen

but what to do

to fire them? in my gas kiln with reduction the oxides seem to lose the softness

I want – here I have just bisque fired a little higher to try to fix the oxides for slipping/glazing

in between I have been to Devon for a wonderful poetry writing course with Anne and Peter Sansom – which sent me spinning off in all sorts of other directions

then I have been printing plant materials onto textiles …..

David Pearce Pinching Seeds 36 x 45 cms
meeting up with this wonderful painter who is selling my pots with his paintings see his gallery here and he has the only coiled pot I have glazed with the chun and slip

I have to say his work is quite inspirational and some little threads of drawing might leak onto my pots soon

I have also been taking part in a landscape writing course which I am sure will influence the pots

and learning how to put together some different shapes

which ended up as this

and is cooling in the kiln as I write

thoughts of my painterly oxide application

and my having begun to paint again –

so looking at landscape with different eyes (more in a subsequent blog)

considering textures

even the textiles like this piece of silk velvet which reflects light

and the shimmer of light on water in the reed beds and dykes on the coast

I decided to stick to what I am doing well already with the chun glaze …..

awaiting results – also a following blog as I’ll be opening the kiln on wednesday

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home

Posted jane -->on 16th Dec 2015

and at home there has been some sunshine in spite of the generally damp mild and grey late November/early December

early walks allow for sky appreciation

as well as catching up with a backlog of work, sending knitwear orders off in time for Christmas in the shops in Japan, Germany, Italy ….

there were still leaves on the trees

to shine in the sun’s backlight

hedgerows green

winter wheat and autumn barley coming through

but bare twigs make better patterns

one pauses to admire the trees

especially where there are people in them … my young friend Ben Carter, expert tree surgeon, spectacular and graceful in his element.

at last back in the shed making pots

though getting clay to dry enough

just to roll out without sticking to everything

never mind to stand up

has made for several days without being able to get on. however the mild weather means no extra heating is needed, all to the good.

then there has been the much anticipated publication of my calligramme poem Lunan’s Guardian in the Rialto. so exciting!

you can find the background to the writing of this in a post almost a year ago Lunan.

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my flip book

Posted jane -->on 23rd Oct 2015

this is just a short post, I thought some of you might be interested in a flip book from a book I put together from the blog a couple of years ago here, you can read it online;

http://www.milkbooks.com/flip-book/default.aspx?ProjectId=d279eccd-99bd-49bb-a52c-d6590c5353d4&OId=227665&OLId=1282705

it is actually available as a beautiful physical book from Milk Books, but it is really expensive.

enjoy!

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