acrylic, oil and damar varnish on board, 2024, 30 x 20 cm
The depth of ancient Caledonian forest, somewhere in Perthshire, echoed in the layered depths of paint.
Author Archives: Jane Wheeler
WHERE DID YOU GO?
Oil over acrylic on canvas, 2024, 60 x 60 cm
Walking in tangled woodland full of deadfall, bog and fern, wilderness in Fife, this summer, trying to find a loop walk off the Pilgrim Way.
TELL ME YOU’LL COME HOME
Acrylic, cold wax and oil paint on canvas, 2024, 120 x 100 x 4 cm
I was inspired to have another go at painting my garden by Hayley Barker – and Andrew Cranston, Bonnard and Paul Klee (ref Paul Klee for watering cans and trellis) and Matisse – my garden made over four years with cardboard sheet mulching over tired lawn, and prairie flowers grown from seed
READING BY AN IMAGINARY LAKE
oil over acrylic on a beautiful cradled panel I won from the company Artists’ Surfaces, in the collaboration they do on Instagram with Artist Support Pledge. It is 40 x 30 cm and 3 cm deep. I tried to be too careful with it on the first go round, but for this final version I mostly used a palette knife and quite thick oil paint.
It’s the same distant figure reading on a deckchair in the park in Paris. The photo made the wall of the Orangerie grounds look like a lake, so I went with that.
READING BY MOONLIGHT
oil, pigment, acrylic and collage on a box canvas, 2024, 80 x 70 x 3.8 cm. How to listen to your painting and stop at the right moment. Quite a lot of words visible on this one, torn up pages from a poetry pamphlet I’ve just produced as a kind of artist’s book.
a figure I found in an old photo I took in the Jardin des Tuillerie in 2017, hidden away in the trees.
AM I SATISFACTORY?
oil on acrylic on cradled gesso panel, 2024, 7 x 5 ” with a tiny deer-suited figure sitting in the bandstand. The bandstand in the park (La Florida) in Vitoria-Gasteiz, that beautiful capital of the Basque country. Is she/are they singing tonight?
THINGS WHICH ARE NOT
Inspired by another poetry writing workshop – on a starry starry night – thinking about Midnight – little oil painting on board, 2024, 20 x 20 cm, – Things Which Are Not – “For I am every dead thing/In whom Love wrought new alchemy – the day’s deep midnight ” – a bit of John Donne.
TONIGHT I AM WAITING FOR YOU
oil on cradled panel, 2024, 7 x 5 inches (18 x 13 cm)
this is a park with a bandstand in the Basque capital, Vitoria-Gasteiz. It’s a beautiful city with much greenery, and this is the view from my hotel when I stayed there in autumn 2015. More or less. I love painting on this scale, the extra looseness it gives to the brushmarks is very satisfying.
TODAY I AM THINKING ABOUT
oil painting on gessoed cradled board, 2024, 8 x 6 x .8 inches, or 20 x 15 x 2 cm,
this guy has long sweptback ears, he is part of a series to do with a poem of mine – based on the story of Oisín, the Irish hero who is born as a deer when his mother is turned into one by a dark druid. The deer-boy and deer-people are populating some of these, and they inhabit a place inspired by photos I took nine years ago in France on a friend’s property and in northern Spain, in the city of Vitoria_Gasteiz, which is the capital of the Basque country.