September painting week

It's taken me ages to get round to blogging, but better late than never....

I went up to Ray's for a week of painting in early September, and here are the results:

My first painting was of the sweetcorn flowers against the frame for the vine behind. We'd been talking about how to depict space and depth..not my forte!...but I was pleased with the forms of the drooping leaves and the composition of the crossing stems.

Here's a photo of the painting as I worked on it, in Ray's beautiful veggie garden:

And this one is unfinished. I was looking at some of David Hockney's landscapes and decided to try and work in heightened hues of flat colours, and I was pleased with the way this was coming along, but ran out of time...now I just need to finish it! (Same old story!)

Something for a little baby

A friend has just had a baby, a few weeks early, so she's very small, but healthy and happy. I wanted to give her something..and this is what I knitted for her:

It's only about 10cms long, but looks huge next to its new owner!

Inspired by my veggie patch ....

... I thought I'd sketch some of the forms and sights that fascinate me. So here goes:

First off is the courgette plant. Giant leaves with a mosaic of green and white, bright yellow trumpets of flowers, which so quickly twist up on themselves, holding on to the fruit itself, which can grow almost while you're watching it.

Working from sketches, I'm planning to make a lino print. Here's a rough drawing to work out the colour layers for the print:

Here's the lino, first cut:

Northern Spain

Here are the three 'sketches' I made on my iPod from our trip to Northern Spain. The more I use it, the happier I am about the lack of accuracy of the lines. I think it adds life to the image. The first is a much over-rated, tourist infested village of Santillana, full of honey coloured stone buildings.This was the view from our bedroom window.

Santillana del Mar

The nearby caves at Altamira are famous for the paintings on the roof of the cave, but the visitors were damaging the atmosphere, and therefore the paintings, so the Spanish have built a full-size, faithful recreation of the caves which you can walk through and see how the paintings appeared. There is a whole 'ceiling' of paintings, all jostling for position.  



Cave paintings at Altamira



Along the roadside there was masses and masses of broom in full flower - so here are those accents of yellow colouring a lakeside view.

Our journey took us along the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela. Every day we passed pilgirms with backpacks and walking poles plodding along, sometimes on paths parallel to the road, sometimes just beside the road. It's 800kms from the French border, which is weeks of walking. As we continued towards Santiago my admiration grew for all those people who had the determination to press on, day in, day out making dogged progress under the hot sun, or in the rain. Here's a Santiago cake we bought in town - I loved the decoration; made with a stencil, I assume.



Santiago cake


As we were turning back North to cross the Pyrenees we saw clouds rolling over the tops of the mountains. A strange site above the arid, sun-baked plains.

David Hockney exhibition in Bilbao

Last month we went to the Guggenheim in Bilbao to see the David Hockney exhibition which had transferred from the Royal Academy. We were so lucky; instead of having to confront heaving crowds of people, it felt as though we had the place to ourselves! And that's just what you need to see the huge landscapes he's been painting.

I was just bowled over by the intensity of the colours he uses, but also the range of different palettes he employs for the different seasons or light conditions.

In the video documentary he talks about how everyone's perception of a place or a view is literally coloured by their memories. Interesting that many of these works are painted in the studio, from charcoal sketches and photographs. And so the colours he's choosing are quite personal. I'm sure I could sense that emotional connection he has with the places he's painting.

I'm also drawn to his use of multiple canvasses with slightly different viewpoints which together make up one image, but with a slightly broken-up, patchwork quality which reflects how we take in and perceive places.

And the exhibition went on and on...watercolours, sketchbooks, smaller scale works done on the iPad.


Then there was the iPad stage by stage construction of a couple of his works. You could see how he started, what he added when, how he changed the format half way through and then the final work.
I must practice a bit more with our iPad... I mess around on the iPod with the Doodle Buddy app, which is a much simplified version. Somehow limited choice means you can't get too fussy, which makes for clearer, simpler images. I wonder whether having so much more choice about everything on Brushes will muddy the outcome - it will certainly freak me out!

Growing veggies

As the weather warmed up, I was pulled into the garden by some invisible veggie-magnet. I'd spent dark winter evenings planning what to plant where, and from April onwards I've been creating a real 'potager' based on my plan, but somehow it never quite turns out how I expected. The plan has all the planting so far marked in coloured pencil.

And here are a few pics of the plants themselves:


A red pepper and aubergine between salad leaves




Courgette and squash



Borlotti beans, french beans, mangetout peas and broad beans

So far I've learned that there just isn't the space to grow everything, and that it's better to have a larger amount of plants all growing at the same time, to get a single meal's worth of a crop at once (other than salad leaves etc), rather than lots of smaller amounts of different things, or successional sowings, both of which I'd prepared on my plan.  I'm learning as I go....Soon I'll have to start another plan for next winter/spring.....

Ben Nicholson, Picasso and Mondrian

A recent visit to London and the chance to see a couple of exhibitions; Picasso and Modern British Art at Tate Britain and Mondrian and Nicolson at the Courtauld.

As a result, I'm championing Ben Nicholson - for the feelings of warmth and calmness his work evokes in me. The colours are frequently a subtle mud, and textural, reminding me of old sacking, and the forms often repeat the most essential of mathematical shapes; circles or rectangles, while other fine lines might scribble across the surface.

 The Tate exhibition showed Nicholson picking up on Picasso and Braque's development of cubism with his well known Au Chat Botte:

The Courtauld exhibition was concerned with the couple of years in the 1930s when Nicholson and Mondrian lived in Hampstead, and how their work evolved as a result of their friendship. It was the start of Nicholson's white paintings, where light hitting the different levels of the work created shadow lines. Very subtle, very clever, but then by all accounts he was.

I was also much taken by his paintings of abstract blocks of colour, which used his muted palette to create depth, where the Mondrian reaffirmed the flat surface with his primaries.