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Three purple figs in a bowl – a painting a day
size 6 in x 6 in 15cm x 15cm watercolour on heavy weight rag paper
Yesterday was a very strange day indeed, the world wobbled a bit and everything seemed less sure and less pleasant.
No.1 son did not seem keen on going to school. This was a worrying change. In the car park I saw a letter in his bag which he tried to hide. Snatching it I found it was a handwritten note with a derogatory comment about him. It had been used as the name for a quiz team by somebody he knows from his previous school. I started to steam from the ears at this point. However the school seemed willing to deal with it. Later waiting for him to come out of the school I saw two boys knock another off his bike so that one of them could pummel him with his fists and then the kicking started…I can’t abide this sort of thing so went and broke up the fight, it’s amazing what shouting really loudly does…it worked on huge vicious baboons in the Okavango Delta, it works on teenagers. Later in the Co-op the staff were all in a twitter as there was a drunk returning for a second confrontation. At least there seemed to be some will on the part of the school to deal with issues and find out what was happening- I was spoken to by two members of staff.
I am shortly going to drown in apples , the wind is starting to bring down the cookers and the delicious but shortlived Ellison’s Orange are also blowing off. The last apples on the early tree are now bright red and shiny, I picked them all. They are very sweet. It was cold enough in the garden that a jacket was necessary; I suspect that if the dessicator wasn’t pumping out a little heat all the time the house would start to feel cold. I need things to cool a bit so that the cooking apples will get cool in their storage boxes in the shed.
The market had these plump sweet figs so with a little Serrano ham I had a simple starter which pleased me (if no-one else). As a still life I thought they would be set off by the welsh bowl with wild drippy glaze. I think that did work. It would be good to have the bowl at eye level to show off its glazing in another composition.
#127 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
Birthday flowers – a painting a day
size 9 in x 9 in 21cm x 21cm watercolour on heavy weight rag paper
I have gone back to the lovely bouquet, but cannot decide whether this is chaos or partial abstraction.
Weeds are different wherever you go, a change of soil or a new garden means that the eye has to be retrained, the unfamiliar seedlings can be confusing when they first emerge. I have been in this garden with its horrendous heavy clay for five years now; there are weeds that I did not get in other gardens. Lately I have spent quite a bit of time on the areas that were levelled with a minidigger in the spring, I have noticed some new invading weeds germinating in the areas reworked. There is plenty of Hypericum or St John’s Wort to get rid of as usual but there are also masses of nettle seedlings and horror of horrors Lesser Bindweed, which I do not get in this garden. I have reason to believe that these seeds came in on the caterpillar tracks of the mini digger. My reason being that the seedlings of pale blue lobelia have popped up in the same area and the seedlings of bedding begonia ….this time last year it had a full cover of scrappy leylandii so the opportunities for annuals weren’t great over there, and anyway I don’t generally buy pale lobelias as I love the dark blue ones. There are also plenty of thistles that are new to the garden; it just goes to show you shouldn’t let a mini digger in if you don’t know where it’s been. I have also got a stand of Verbena bonariensis mixed with bronze fennel which have come from some inadequately heated homemade mulch, that and the camomile daisies that pop up everywhere are my fault.
I have had to attack a useful hedge in the front garden as I am afraid that the honey fungus which attacked the crabapple in the road has moved on to the cotoneasters. There are signs of die back and I think it is best to remove even healthy looking bushes to reduce the food stores available to the ceps’ psychotic axe murderer cousin Armillaria. I do not want it to get to the apple trees. I was very annoyed with the council as they did not cut the infected tree down quickly. I wish now that we had done it ourselves after discussion with the neighbours…how long would it have been before the council noticed, would they ever have noticed?. Luckily yew is fairly immune to honey fungus so I can transplant some seedlings to start to get a bit of cover back. Hebe is also less likely to be attacked and I have a couple in pots which were free to a good home and one which I could transplant.
The Tigridia flowered today and I forgot to get out there and take a photo, also forgot to pick up son from school which is a bit serious. I have apologised to him here is a picture of the Hedychium instead of theTigridia promised on Twitter.
#126 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
Lily lily rose – a painting a day
size 6 in x 6 in 15cm x 15cm watercolour on heavy weight rag paper
The hunt for this year’s bumper crop of ceps has taken up rather more time than usual. On a normal year, you go out and come back with a few bits and bobs content to have had a good walk. This year a short walk can yield two hours of cleaning and slicing.
That and the start of the school term is my feeble excuse for not blogging much this week. I feel a sense of having got out of rhythm, of getting a little off centre. On the plus side the jars of beautiful dried ceps are quite cheering. Yesterday we feasted on Parasol mushrooms which have to be one of my favourites, their rich nutty taste just goes so well in a proper fry-up. I also raided the freezer for chicken carcases (the remains of several months of Sunday roasts) and made a chicken stock so that I can quickly make cream of chicken and wild mushroom soup. The chives have regrown fresh new leaves so the soup was filled with snipped chives to give the onion taste and slivers of celery to increase the colour and taste.
One evening returning to the car I spotted some pale toadstools under some trees, they were nothing to get excited about but once I was under the trees my eyes adjusted to the low light levels and I saw the biggest cep I have ever found in edible condition. It weighed 1lb 10oz and was a good eight inches across the cap. An unusually disappointing walk had turned to a legendary experience.
There are a lot of other fungi out there this year , we think we have found The Miller and have checked that the spore print is pink….but as there are near identical poisonous species around and divided opinion on how good it is to eat ,we gave it a miss. The recommendation is to spore print check every one you eat before cooking it…. good grief get a life, get a cep- it’s easier.
The flowers in todays painting are a gift handed on; one of my neighbours had a birthday shortly before going away so I was bequeathed her splendid flowers. There were carnations and lilies and roses in addition to what looked like some sort of gentian.
The sheer numbers of apples that have been uneaten and are past their best forced my hand and I decided to help the school lunch situation by making a tray of apple cake and, as I tend to avoid cake due to the egg in it, I also made a flapjack using pecan nuts and muscavado sugar. Both turned out well.
#125 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
Eat me said the giant mushroom.
Ceps for tea – a painting a day
size 8 in x 12 in 20cm x 30cm watercolour on heavy weight rag paper
There are two sorts of fungus, no three, there are those that are interesting because you can eat them, there are those that are interesting because they look extraordinary, and then there are the bbj’s (boring brown jobs ) that are just not interesting in any way, well not to me.
It’s like bird watching, the bbj’s are quite common but owing to their nondescript brownness they are at once boring to look at and difficult to identify. I did a lot of bird watching when I lived in the prospecting camp in Botswana (there was not a lot of entertainment laid on), but I knew that I was not a serious twitcher because I couldn’t be bothered to nail all the boring birds just to increase my list of sightings. I was more than happy to take a daily look at the pair of white faced owls that lived in the knob thorn tree over the tent, and to follow the squabbling buffalo weavers soap opera type existence lower down the same tree. I likewise know my limitations with mushrooms.
Returning to fungi, today I offer a painting of the beautiful sculptural ceps, they boast spectacular curves of the sort mostly found on women with large hips and bums. The photograph is of the more sinister and lumpy boletes that were in the lawn. These come up every year but there are more this year. Thinking about it they would have made a good subject to catch the eye of the judges for the Threadneedle prize had they been growing on an urban dual carriage way.
#124 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
These would grace the mantelpiece of Fungus the Bogeyman, I had to remove them as they were big enough to trip over and the lawn mower would have been ill on them.
These are DIY dads DIY new tomato varieties.
It looks as though someone has inserted a pink LED into this one.
Weirwood – a painting a day
NFS as too pale A4 watercolour on heavy weight rag paper
Today’s painting is the sketch I started on Bank Holiday Monday. It was a very fast picture of a changing sky and the landscape beneath it. Hats off to Turner and Constable, because they really made this sort of view look easy to do. It is not easy to do. It was very pale and gappy , I have worked on it to improve that but still find its got some good parts and some weak bits.
It is not for sale as it is such an imperfect piece. From a long way off the sunbeams look OK but close to they look lumpy.
I spent today driving , No1 son to school, husband to station, Mother from London,No2 son to the uniform shop (exchange for larger size required) and the post office.
DIY Dad has installed a red flashing loo seat downstairs….have warned mother in case she gets a visual shock….let’s not think about the possibility real electric shocks to the undercarriage.
Alison
#123 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
A Sussex Cep – a painting a day
size 6 in x 6 in 15cm x 15cm watercolour on heavy weight rag paper
Ceps ready for slicing and drying
The end of the summer holidays –
The what? It can’t be , that means uniform and packed lunches, No2 son is in a decline just thinking about it.
However before he went into his decline (i.e. lying in bed- hard to see the difference on normal existence over the summer really),the clever little sprat found a way to sell paintings over the internet in a site of one’s own using Paypal. It’s a BT government initiative so I got a call from a pleasant young Scotsman asking if I was planning to sell bulk quantities of paintings..”.ah, um, I could try, but honestly not very likely”. He was very nice about this in fact I think he used the word groovy which always makes me laugh (fresh young thing using jaded old hippy words).
Anyway, No2 and I have set it up as the Lemonaday Shop http://www.lemonaday-shop.co.uk/gallery-shop . On this you will find some of my older blog pieces and some other paintings that make an attractive addition to the site. The prices reflect that there is no chance of competitive bidding and include postage for simplicity at the moment. The prices also reflect my own attachment to the painting, some pictures fit into groups that could be exhibited together so may not appear.
There were a few more outings to the woods in the last week. (understatement, we went nearly every day) In the last two days we have picked over ten pounds of ceps, this is one of my favourite edible fungi, one which I didn’t find when I was a teenager and started collecting fungi to eat. Some years we find two or three in a season, even when you know where it grows, you have to get there on the day it produces its fruit or toadstool, before someone else takes it or kicks it over. This year is phenomenal and we have found a quiet wood where, it seems, no-one else collects. They will be sliced and dried and stored for winter soups and rissottos for years possibly. We are going to have a lot at the end of this year, the season could go on to November.
In the garden the red apples are finishing and the Ellison’s Orange is ripening. Ellisons orange is a fantastic apple when you get it just ripe and before it goes grainy. The official line is that it has a spicy taste: to me it tastes just like the ice lollies that ice cream vans used to sell called cyder ices. The tomatoes are showing some sign of blight but not much, they are ripening up fast now.
I am very pleased to see the creamy flowers of the Hedychium opening out in its new position and in its original site.
#122 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
Lemon a day 
