size 5″ x 6″
Hmm I struggled with this. I might yet alter it and take out some of the pencil work.
Found out today that I have a relative ( daughter of my father’s cousin) who also paints and sails, now that is extraordinary as I don’t think when I sailed a lot I ever met another painter. There must be some hereditary tendencies behind our characteristics!
#189
size h 7″ x 6″ 17cm x 15cm
There has been a long gap when I have written and painted nothing. In my defence it was Christmas and then I was ill.
Christmas approached and as always the creative life was swamped by the mundane. There were presents to make, cakes to make, cards to send, lovely aunts social life to mend and her medical needs to be addressed, husbands dumped friend to console, and then there were the floors, the loos and the bedrooms which all needed my attention-in addition there was still the shopping and ordering.
I have a major difficulty with being ill in this household and it’s to do with timing; ideally being ill should be a solitary activity much attended by concerned (healthy and vigorous) loved ones, that is in my dreams. Now my husband seems able to time his occasional bouts of man flu so that he is able to announce to the world, work, and his closest relatives that he is really ill as he collapses sideways onto the red settee with the remote control. He varies his illness by retiring to bed with a book on Greek Naval Warfare or the Odyssey and calls for his basic needs, conversation and fussing whenever he feels like it. This continues until he is fit enough to get up and go back to work….protesting that he is not yet fully recovered ….he then comes home and collapses sideways onto the red settee with the remote and is exhausted. He is of course excused household duties until he is at least a little better i.e. well enough not to want to come home from work and collapse sideways onto the red settee. I may be imagining this but it is possible that his episodes of ill health tend to finish when he has exhausted the recorded episodes of Startrek, Frost and Lewis. This Christmas holiday he must have been truly unwell as I found him watching a recording of a Harry Potter film followed by two of the Narnia films. I am quite worried however as we were given a swanky new set top box at Christmas which is much more effective in recording whole series of programmes and has a HUGE memory; thus we will soon have every single broadcast episode of Frost etc .
I got ill first this year for a change and by rights should have been able to collapse gracefully onto the red settee etc. etc. But I mistimed it badly, I started to get ill on Christmas Day and having found out on that morning that we were to have 13 at lunch the next day I was forced to battle on. There were arrangements in place for the day after Boxing Day as well -eight for lunch. Note to self , do not volunteer to entertain three days in a row at Christmas or at any other time. The last day was fine as there was woodpigeon pie ready to go in the fridge which we had with bubble and squeak made from left over mash and sprouts with chestnuts. Once all people had gone home and I felt able to actually be ill as opposed to falling asleep in the middle of things, I was overtaken by diy dad who, having done enough diy to empty all the cupboards in the house, caught my chest infection. Of course he was worse than me and needed attention, as he recovered No2 son came back from a days shopping with the winter vomiting. We have managed to contain his personal pandemic this time ( his best being 11 people infected)and the only person who has succumbed this time is …well of course its me.
#187
size 4″ x 6″ 12cm x 15cm approx.
These are the little slices of dried cep which make the most fantastic soups, sauces and scrambled egg possible. They are such good quality, being home made , that a slice can be crumbled into scrambled egg just before serving or even just eaten as it is. They have none of the stringy dirty look of the commercial dried cep you see in the supermarket and elsewhere. I like their shape too – an angular folded version of the slices which went into the dessicator.
We have collected about eight kilos of cep in the last ten days, most has been dried as the crop can never be guaranteed and I would hate to run out.
#186
detail of “ Lemon yellow and pink, leaves.”
These are the leaves of one of the lacecap hydrangeas , there is something quite surreal about their pink flush on lemon yellow. A painting which is larger than most of those in this blog, it measures :
22cm x 30cm 9″ x 12″ approx.
#183
size 12 in x 6in, 30cm x 15cm
Coming back to planet normal after a week on the Aegean was a bit
of a gentle letdown, the trees had coloured up, the leaves had dropped damply
onto every surface but there had been no major frosts; I could have left all
those hastily gathered tender plants to carry on blooming. Lobelia is still doing
well in a pot, it loves the damp of course, there is something very similar to
our annual blue lobelia growing in the rock crevices which sit in the permanent
spray from Victoria Falls.
The fox has started chewing up a pair of gardening gauntlets left
out by mistake. The cider is still bubbling away happily…Ah yes I have been
blogless for months but that does not mean nothing has happened, quite the
reverse. DIY dad has constructed an apple press from my collection of old oak
gateposts and a large car jack. Using this and a gang of family members we
pressed some 180 litres of juice. There were apples from a neighbour’s tree,
apples from relative’s trees and community orchard apples harvested in proper
cider fashion using a panking pole to shake apples onto a tarpaulin. Endless
fun of the“ Let soandso have a go with the pole he’s a proper panker” sort was
had, we do a lot of boy humour round here. We also had some of our own Ellisons
Orange which we had stored outdoors they had lost some of their zip but
produced a very sweet juice.
Todays painting is a worked up sketch from the holiday; it is a
view down one of the narrow passages in Mandraki , Nisyros. A very elderly
woman came and sat beside me to watch saying “Jasas corrie” (Bless you
daughter”, it felt like decades since someone said that to me. The polite reply
is “Jasas yaya” ( Bless you granny). The overhanging tree is a giant rubber
plant or Ficus. I could literally have spent the whole day finding places to sketch there and the same applies to
Simi town where we also went. The problem with that idea is that there were
three people who needed a wife, mother and skipper to make their holiday work.
It’s boring waiting for someone to finish their painting.
We went to Mandraki
for lunch after being taken up to the crater of the volcano. The caldera is
vast and contains both agricultural land and a heath complete with flowering
heather like a patch of the New Forest dropped into a volcano. Very odd indeed,
from the heathery plain you drop down a rough cliff path into a wide crater
which has a flat mud floor with pits of boiling mud in its centre. Around the
edge there are vents where steam , so thick with sulphur that it crystallises
on the sides of the vent in delicate yellow needles, streams out to pollute the
atmosphere with the worst rotten egg smell possible. Afterwards the smell of
sulphur clings to ones skin. There are also active cones within the caldera
crater which look very new and raw.
#181 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
Day One hundred and eighty one Mandraki
Click here to bid size 12 in x 6in, 30cm x 15cm
size 15cm x 30cm 6″ x 12″ approx
This picture was finished today after being started on holiday in Norfolk in August. Today I took the detail of the hedgerow from my sketchbook and put it onto the paper which held the loose washes for the field and the sky. I am ( at the moment) quite pleased with it. I may yet come to loath it or rather see its’ faults in an uncomfortable way. It is quite satisfying to meld two sketches together like this. In other words the background and the forground were done outdoors and the hedgerow and houses were added from notes in my sketchbook.
The last week has been very hectic but really exiting, I took the family sailing offshore which we have never tried before. This involved chartering ( or hiring really) a small yacht and just taking off. It was interesting to find that the things I used to do most came back most readily…I am still a competent navigator and not reliant on GPS and other assorted gizmos, I am fairly rubbish at mooring stern onto a jetty with an unfamiliar boat, I can helm in a near gale and enjoy most of it. I can cook at sea without being sick. Getting into a marina does make me feel queasy especially when I can hear the marina staff saying ” Oh my god there’s a woman at the helm!!”; next time I must tell them I understand them and polish up some fitting riposte in greek, a satisfying language in which to swear.
The high points were waking up the morning after a stressy anchoring episode in failing light, looking up and seeing an ancient Greek city complete with amphitheatre laid out on the slopes either side of the harbour. Ancient Knidos even has stone breakwaters which are 2000 years old and still functioning, the remains of the stone quays are still there from the days when it was an important trading city. There is a second harbour which was for the triremes or warships now only used by little fishing boats. Visiting the volcano crater on Nisyros was smelly but fascinating and seeing dolphins always makes my week. The best food was at Oguns Place and if he offers you an assortment of his mezethes say yes and cancel any thoughts of coping with a main course as well.
The Greek economic crisis felt like the elephant in the room..almost never mentioned.
How did the sons and DIY dad cope you may ask? DIY had to be dissuaded from opening a hole in the bottom of the boat to replace the impeler, yes I do know it is possible to fit the bung into the hole quickly but it’s not essential and frankly I have a serious aversion to holes in the bottoms of boats. The boys thought it was alright to carry on arguing about who taken whose t-shirt – as skipper I felt it was my duty to give the crew hell if they forgot that the boat comes before clothes and all other petty quarrels. I have been brought up to understand that in a boat you will get shouted at and its important to jump to and not take it personally and definitely avoid sulking, it is rather unendearingly old-fashioned but there it is, it was the first thing I was ever told about sailing. Once I reminded them that they needed to say,” yes chef “,to indicate that they had got their orders they got the idea- good old reality TV.
I think there are ten loads of washing to be done, I am only onto the fourth or fifth. Holidays are good things…but how to recover from them seems to be the problem. Lovely aunt coped well while I was away- apart from an invitation to travel 60 miles on a train ( which she is scared to do) for a pub lunch , she also hates to say no and disappoint people and ends up in a spin as a result.
Below is my first anchorage in the Aegean….found by serendipity, it wasn’t where we had first intended to go, the yacht in the middle of the frame is the one we were on.
#180
This is a tiny picture the leaf is painted at about lifesize.
Summer holidays: life one long round of slogging round Sainsburys and prising children off their electronic boxes. There are nice flowers in the garden but for some reason I am painting the leaves that fall from the little pear tree.
Only two more episodes of the Hour left to run….I could cry. If Hector is to be believed then my dad must have been in MI6 as I swear his raincoat, or gaberdine as he might have called it, looked just like the one worn by the ill-fated Mr Kish. He always seem to wear it with a trilby which is still a good look in my book, but then he was always hopelessly out of date only giving up wearing trourers with turn-ups when Oxford bags came in in the seventies…ie when they revived a look he had finally had enough of it and submitted to modernity…well almost… he wasn’t going to update the shoes or vests you understand.
#178
These are the best blueberries I have ever grown. The secret is to keep the perishing birds off without netting the birds and perishing them.
A painting!
this painting can be bought from ( apologies for photo on ETSY page there is a glitch):
http://www.etsy.com/listing/88793554/beetroot-in-a-bunch-watercolour-painting
Beetroot in a bunch
22cm x 15cm, 9″ x 6″
There is very little time in the day when there are so many plants to water and crops to pick, I do not try and grow beetroot as I am the only person besides lovely aunt who really likes it, so these are bought and no less pretty for it.
The allotment has peas and beans in astonishing variety at the moment, diy dad has dug out his early carrots and the maincrop carrots are coming up. I have a forest of flat leaved parsley in the salad bed and the first tomatoes are ripening. The first autumn cyclamen is out as well….excuse me but the proms are only just begun, cyclamen???
#177
Day 176a
The runner beans and french beans are coming in now, in the mixture are Red and White beans, Jack Edwards, Selma Zebra and some golden mangetout peas.
Lovely aunt thinks that this painting makes the beans look like evil spotted worms! ” Oh . well.” she said,” keep trying someone might like it!” The point being that if I paint on the spur of the moment I paint what is to hand , not a cute cat because it should sell, not a local view which could be of interest to the village dentists waiting room, just whatever is catching my eye in the time available . In doing this the things that end up in the painting follow short threads which break and reform as life tumbles forward. That, if you like, is the philosophy of this blog.
click on the link to get to my Etsy shop for this painting:
http://www.etsy.com/listing/85348208/honeysuckle-showing-its-colours
There really are this many different colours in a honeysuckle flower, and yet it looks modest and subtle unlike the flowers in the photo below:
There are several things I ought to be saying but there is so much
that I really should keep to myself. This is very difficult when there is a
blog to write so I have done no blogging for a long time.
Lovely aunt has a home of her own again but there is still much to be done. She had her work
friends over to visit yesterday and took them to Ockenden Manor. There is no
point booking a Harvester for three women who have been professional caterers (
of a much higher than average standard I might add) and the Manor does a
wonderful set lunch. They had a high old time and came back to mine for coffee
in the garden. They laugh and chatter as long as they can whenever they meet it’s
wonderful to facilitate. May I grow old with such good friends.
Coming soon in the garden morning glory and the yellow lily.
Unable to avoid bragging: there were so many strawberries this year we weighed a total crop of over half a hundredweight thats fifty six pounds I believe.
size 10 in x 6 in, 26cm x 15cm
Tigridia, Ranunculous showing off in front of the origano. These are a trial planting in a pot which is what I do sometimes to work out a bedding scheme. This one is really very easy, into prepared soil plant a bag of ranunculus corms and some tigridia bulbs, allow to grow, buy sunglasses and enjoy. Buy in bulk online and this is a very economical blast of colour.
#175 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
