Jane Wheeler's Blog 2008 April

the roebuck and his wife

Posted jane -->on 30th Apr 2008

heavy rain overnight and the nut trees have little green jewel leaves all through the wood.

we met the roebuck at last, walking towards us along the edge of the wheat at the bottom of the field. he turned and trotted back, then up and over the bank and ditch through a gap in the hedge, into the beginning of the wood. water lying around everywhere and the new leaves pin-fresh, woodpecker drilling, larks singing up in the air, and the thrush in the wood. rounding the corner of the wood where I saw the doe yesterday, no sighting, but a roe barking further in, a cacophony of guttural barks. and then as we turned again towards the bottom of the green lane, there was the doe looking at us from the entrance. I continued to walk along, camera out in the vain hope of getting near enough, but she had enough of our presence, and gained the wood path in three huge leaps. through all this the dogs kept behind me, but off the lead they had a wonderful time, noses down getting all the fresh scent of the deer. I imagined that the barking roe was the buck sounding the alarm call, which brought the doe out to see what was going on, and saved her the danger of meeting us at much closer quarters. but it may well have been the buck defending his territory from another buck.

everything was beaded with raindrops this morning; my feet got very wet.

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doe encounter

Posted jane -->on 29th Apr 2008

another early morning walk, in hot sunshine. a few days warmth and the oaks are bursting their buds. the old saying “oak before the ash, expect a splash, ash before the oak, expect a soak” has never been truthful as far as I can make out. whatever kind of summer we have, the oak regularly gets its leaves out before the ash tree.

this magificent tree which bars the track to the wood was very beautiful in its autumn colours.

I had a lovely encounter this morning. a roe doe was in the wood. she obviously felt that the new foliage protected her, although we were quite close she didn’t go far in on the first sighting, when she was only a yard or two inside. then as we came round the corner to the side of the wood she moved a little further in. she was so quiet the dogs (on the lead) had no idea she was there. I peered in amongst the tree trunks, and there she was, peering back at me. we looked at each other for about a minute, I got up on the bank to get a better view. she wasn’t happy about that, barked a few times, stamped her foot, then took one bound away, looked back and barked again. this gave Tilda more of a clue of what was going on, and I thought it was time to leave the deer in peace. there was no chance of a photo, she was almost hidden, and her winter dark grey-brown is good camouflage. new roe prints in the mud over the track of my trainers.

I saw a hare this morning too, on the beet, where I saw four yesterday. I hope they aren’t eating the new seedlings.

here are red campion. despite my best efforts you will have to imagine them a really dark pink.

its interesting to see the trees pushing out their new foliage. hornbeam with its flowers too, the male catkins and then female flowers dangling off the twigs.

sycamore, the foreigner and weed tree – although I have seen some wonderful specimens in Devon – its leaf buds exploding into star shaped clusters.

the green filmy veil of new leaves is changing the landscape very quickly. this is a distant view of the anemone wood. and cowparsley! summer is almost here. I haven’t heard a cuckoo or seen a swallow yet .. they are late this year. soon there will be bluebells too.

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the last of the anemones

Posted jane -->on 28th Apr 2008

yesterday evening I made what will likely be my last visit to the anemone wood this spring, as they will be over soon. some have already lost their petals, and some have been overtaken by the nettles where the light can get through more open parts of the wood.

however there is a soft ankle deep carpet of anemone leaves with very little other vegetation under the old coppiced hazels.

a big brown owl – I presume a tawny – took off as I got into the wood at around 6.30 pm, in slanting sunshine which gave plenty of light for photographs.

everywhere in this wood there are the rotted stumps of much bigger trees, felled before this generation grew up. I wonder what date they go back to.

other flowers have become noticeable now� – a clump of forget-me-nots – whose intense blue is lost in this photograph, however much I play around with photoshop – and I have adjusted colour, saturation, contrast …… my camera does not like small flowers and wants to make them all almost white.

also an oxslip, which is a hybrid of cowslip and primrose. a much deeper yellow than the primroses, which is why I noticed it.

three pots made today, which show some progress. better than the last two days making which all ended up in the reclaim bucket. sometimes ideas only come by making and discarding.

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green and noisy

Posted jane -->on 27th Apr 2008

spring is at full blast now, soon the wood will have a canopy of leaves, the big beech has sprouted a few already, sycamores are at it, the horse chestnuts are all fully out and flowering. even a few oaks have a film of ochre-green, although most are more conservative.

what with birdsong echoing everywhere, bees busy, and the leaves growing so quickly you can almost hear them, peace and quiet is only available indoors, the ticking of the clock dimming into the accustomed background.

there is so much blackthorn flower in the hedges that I think we may get a good crop of sloes this autumn. bird cherry doesn’t seem to carry cherries, but the flowers are pretty, I have seen two or three of these little trees in the hedges.

the last two days have been very warm, good weather for making glaze tests, since my hands are in wet glaze and water. ten versions of the copper/tin/dolomite glaze, to see if I can get a navy blue edge to it, and maybe some crawling. little nudges in various directions.

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hares, pots

Posted jane -->on 24th Apr 2008

another early morning sunny walk.
Tilda gave me a terrible fright. she was up on the field bank, spotted an enormous hare and was off after it before I could think … actually it was so big I thought it was a Muntjac deer until she got closer – off she went in hot pursuit, round the back of the poplar stand. this was before we got onto the farm, and suddenly, there was the hare running up the field just next to the road, a few hundred yards away from me, Tilda about 20 yards behind, and the school bus honking its horn on the other side of the hedge. then all disappeared. other hares appeared. no Tilda ….
another 5 minutes and she reappeared in the opposite direction from which I had been expecting her, and got into a very muddy ditch full of primroses for a wallow. my heart suddenly went nineteen to the dozen … funny how that happened when I had her back safe!

I promised a blog on the new firing, so here we go. first of all, the web page for the new pots is here

the first thing I made when I started working again in March was the commissioned piece, the remake of the biggest pot in the Beaux Arts show. this came out better than the original, I think, and also, interestingly, although I made it smaller, so that it fitted in the kiln, unlike the other which had to have a high temperature biscuit firing so that it could stand upright in the kiln for the glaze firing, it ended up the same size. I must remember to be even more vigilant about the size of big pots. it has a little more glaze on it, because the lower biscuit temperature left it more absorbent. it was very difficult to glaze, being very heavy, maybe heavier than the first one.

then the disappointment, one pot I put in raw-glazed, ie, it didn’t go through the biscuit firing first.

whether it was the very high temperature (cone 11, but 1283 C by the pyrometer), or the raw glazing, I think this is almost the worst this glaze – my matt copper/tin/dolomite – has ever come out. the cones were very sheltered by the big pot, so I think the work on the shelf at the back of the kiln probably went up to cone 12, because the cone 11’s I had on the shelf there were over and melting.

the barium glaze came out really well in this firing – quite greenish. I think you could fire this to an even higher temperature and it would still be dead dry matt. So I am pleased with this tall cone-shaped pot. the clay body is the reclaim clay – so some crank and some old reduction St Thomas, a very dark stoneware clay.

this one is glazed with Ian Currie’s crawling shino, which consistently works well. it was on the top shelf, but in the corner away from the flame, and may not have reached 1050C before I started reducing, as it has a lot of carbon trapping (all the grey and black in the white glaze). I really like this. where the glaze is thicker from the double dip the glaze has actually crawled off the pot, but it leaves such a lovely rich red surface behind I think it is no problem. I like all the lacey grey pattern of the carbon very much.

this small pot was right next to the flame on the floor of the kiln, and got some excessive heat. it is quite a different clay body, but the same shino glaze, the pretty peachy tones of the clay work very well with the glaze. this clay is called ash white, it is a comparatively low temperature porcelainous stoneware, which is very odd to work with .

and lastly, this small pot has the copper/tin dolomite glaze over porcelain, which has been pasted onto the crank body with a knife. I call it overlay, as opposed to inlay. I got this effect on one pot in the last but one firing, and tried it again this time. I think it works very well, and the wood ash/clay glaze on the lower dip gives an effect rather like ancient cracked leather.

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milky morning

Posted jane -->on 23rd Apr 2008

a spring morning too beautiful to resist, mild milky sky and hazy sunshine, heavy dew.

a tractor was out, sprinkling fertiliser on the beet

two hares appeared in the wheat, saw me, and hunkered down, no longer visible.

there is an ash tree in flower in the scrubby wetland. it is a graceful medium sized tree with yellow lichen on its branches.

the flowers are beautiful, green and purple fronds.

more deer hoofprints, these are roe, they are 1 3/4″ long.

(fallow prints are bigger, 2 1/2″). they go all the way up Cake’s lane, to a point where the deer seem to have been frightened. the prints go much deeper, as if the creature was “pronging” – bounding in the air as small deer often do when disturbed – and then they turn onto the field through a gap in the hedge. but other sets continue up the track. the deer seem to use this green road as a main street.

there is a wonderful amateur video on YouTube of a roe deer here . you can hear it bark right at the beginning of the film.

no deer this morning though

at home again I opened up the kiln. the firing is a success. I will post again with pot pictures.

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moon, sun, magma

Posted jane -->on 21st Apr 2008

lovely moon last night, draped with a little tasteful cloud. up at 1.30 am and 3.30 am to light the second burner and keep the temperature going up. then at 6 am a very beautiful morning, sunshine at last, and not much wind. here are the cowslips in my garden, there are clumps of them everywhere.

the beauty of bath apple tree has blossom in bud and beginning to open.

it was such a lovely day I sat out in the garden, sheltered from the wind – it did get up – by the kiln shed door, and with the heat of the kiln behind me, and the sunshine pouring down, it was almost too hot. the dogs lay about; I got my sketchbook out and thought about new pots with pen, ink and watercolour.

I want to take things a bit further, and sometimes you can think with the clay, but its also good to push things with a sympathetic medium like pen and wash.

then the drawing becomes an end in itself, but I hope that some of this will work in the medium of clay.

and here is the flame; turned off at 1283 C (about the heat of molten rock below the earth’s crust) at 7.30 pm.

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two dapple and a dark one

Posted jane -->on 20th Apr 2008

April is very slow. it’s been cold, grey and a nasty east wind has been dominating the weather this week, blowing hard and setting my teeth on edge.

there are still blackthorn in blossom, and the primroses are hanging on; the cold weather keeps them going. the wild cherry are out too, a very elegant slender tree in natural woodland, with pale scattered flowers.

some of the shrubs and trees are showing leaves. hawthorn has been green for weeks.

the old coppiced hazel groves are hardly in leaf yet, although their catkins were out before Christmas.

walking along the woodshore today, two pale spotted rear ends became evident to me, and I grabbed Sal who generally is not on the lead. three fallow deer came out of the wood and onto the beet field, two pale dappled, and one really dark. I was a bit puzzled by the colouration, but I found fallow deer come in four colours, the normal brown and dapple, a pale creamy dapple, white, and black. they stopped and looked back at us, keeping their distance. Tilda squealed with frustration, and by the time I got to look up again they had gone. I was expecting to meet up with them again somewhere up Cake’s Lane, but there was no sign. they had melted into the land, maybe hidden in one of the old pits with a fringe of trees.

fallow were introduced by the Normans, for their deer parks, and they really are the prettiest of our native deer. the stags fight savagely in the rut; they have huge palmate antlers like little moose.

I am lighting the kiln for a glaze firing tonight, cone 11. full moon too – or just about.

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anemone wood 2

Posted jane -->on 14th Apr 2008

I went back to the secret wood yesterday. there were many more anemones this time. soon the nettles will smother some of them, but I think other parts will reward a further visit. so here is a batch of photos, I didn’t want to edit, so you get the lot.

the primroses are still going strong, and the roebuck’s fraying post is even more emphatically marked with scratches, I suppose most of the velvet must be off his antlers by now. I would love to see him.

lastly an indulgence, here is a haiku.

white starry flowers
delicate porcelain cups
drink down sun and rain.

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post-doigian pools

Posted jane -->on 13th Apr 2008

more on Doig. painting, White Canoe, 1990-1, 200.5 x 243cm

he appeals to me partly because of his paintings of all those lakes and pools, swampy wild places which in Canada one assumes are part of a much larger wilderness than you could ever find in Norfolk. but hidden away in the interstices of the landscape these boggy woods are almost the only real wild places here. realm of the deer, the fox, the buzzard, (two circling in thermals near the wood this morning) and maybe only left alone for shooting cover.

you can barely see the water here for trees and ivy. the bigger pond is more open, and has a very satisfactory Doig style reflection, the scum of leaves at the edges making a film over the brightness.

there are so many violets everywhere in this wood, amid ivy and criss-crossing deer paths.

out of the wood on Cake’s Lane I found this little green flower, which on looking up I found to be something I have never heard of – Moschatel. it has a musky scent, hence the mos part of the name.

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