{"id":14104,"date":"2025-12-24T11:08:26","date_gmt":"2025-12-24T18:08:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/janewheeler.co.uk\/blog\/?p=14104"},"modified":"2025-12-29T01:13:11","modified_gmt":"2025-12-29T08:13:11","slug":"toads-snakes-and-christmas-presents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/janewheeler.co.uk\/blog\/blog\/2025\/12\/24\/toads-snakes-and-christmas-presents\/","title":{"rendered":"toads snakes and christmas presents"},"content":{"rendered":"

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well here’s the toad, taken from my 1971 sketchbook,<\/p>\n

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hugging a pot in the foreground of a large pink expanse loomed over by suburban housing. I make no apologies for the pink, these are dreamscapes, unstable and tattered, gaping and glimmering.<\/p>\n

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the watering cans are companionable guardians.<\/p>\n

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I love painting their shapes.<\/p>\n

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Sometimes I do baking too – for Lucy’s birthday, a forest floor cake with meringue mushrooms ….<\/p>\n

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This lovely Cy Twombly book emerged from the piles when I was tidying up somewhat –<\/p>\n

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it’s having an effect on my paintings, giving me a way of curating the dribble fest …<\/p>\n

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and there’s a lot of rain, rivuletting itself over paths and filling up the river.<\/p>\n

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there’s a rainy thing going on<\/p>\n

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The echinaceas are dissolving<\/p>\n

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the winter garden is untidy, allowing insects and birds to make the most of it.<\/p>\n

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Cy Twombly has encouraged me to make the stalks and seedheads more expressive.<\/p>\n

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and the snake is back …<\/p>\n

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I Will Come Home …<\/p>\n

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Paintings are invading the living room<\/p>\n

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I need them to dry more quickly so the radiators are being colonised.<\/p>\n

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more rivulets and streams<\/p>\n

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woods with their vertical lines<\/p>\n

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playing with Hipstamatic filters for colour<\/p>\n

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if you scale it up and down, the stems in the garden …<\/p>\n

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a rainy night? Maybe.<\/p>\n

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Quite a bit of a poem on this one, it’s Tir Nan \u00d2g, for Molly, and the poem is part of a pamphlet I am working on. Tir nan \u00d3g is of course the Celtic land of youth, or the mystical island in the west where everyone stays young and never dies. As I was working on it I got the news that my friend Molly Bullick had died.<\/p>\n

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Molly was the one friend who welcomed me to Scotland, inviting me over for tea in the garden as soon as it was possible after lockdown. She was so generous and hospitable, she was my art lifeline here, introducing me to places, galleries and workshops and people.<\/p>\n

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We met on various courses at Hat in the Cat in Newburgh over ten years ago, getting our hands blue in indigo vats, making marks with cola pens, experimenting with vegetable dyes.<\/p>\n

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Molly was a printmaker turned jeweller who loved working with textiles and made beautiful scarves and shawls. She was totally open with techniques and recipes and over the years we shared many ways of doing things.<\/p>\n

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I painted “for Molly” on this painting. I will miss her a lot.<\/p>\n

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Another interest we shared was sewing. This one was quite a challenge, I made it for Lucy’s Christmas present. Sadly Molly had been unable to continue many of her creative activities in the last couple of years, due to pain in her shoulders and back and not being able to get out to her garden studio.<\/p>\n

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I also made a pair of trousers for Scott, from some tweed my mother wove back in the early 90’s, with quite a lot of details I’d never done before, like this pocket. So the painting has taken a bit of a back seat.<\/p>\n

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Bims’ foot has healed completely.<\/p>\n

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I did some potato printing ….<\/p>\n

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on craft paper, making wrapping paper!<\/p>\n

So it’s Christmas here in Scotland, family time. We indulge ourselves and each other in the name of a child born in Palestine, in Bethlehem, one of those West Bank places where illegal settlers and the IDF are persecuting Palestinians. It’s horribly ironic.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

well here’s the toad, taken from my 1971 sketchbook, hugging a pot in the foreground of a large pink expanse loomed over by suburban housing. I make no apologies for the pink, these are dreamscapes, unstable and tattered, gaping and glimmering. the watering cans are companionable guardians. I love painting their shapes. Sometimes I do […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14137,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[14,9,150,35,180,6,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art","category-garden","category-painting","category-scotland","category-trees","category-walks","category-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/janewheeler.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/OriginalPhoto-787835442.093549.jpeg?fit=400%2C400&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4GKTU-3Fu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/janewheeler.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/janewheeler.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/janewheeler.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janewheeler.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janewheeler.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/janewheeler.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14104\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janewheeler.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/janewheeler.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janewheeler.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janewheeler.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}