Archive
Three very red apples – a painting a day
size 6 in x 12 in 15cm x 30cm watercolour on heavy weight rag paper
These are the last of the early apples they have turned yellow and shiny red. I think they are past their best in terms of eating but the next tree is ready so that doesn’t matter. They are very pretty for a painting however. It’s a pretty rough and ready painting but I like the colours.
There was a mini apple day today at the back of the Mayflower pub, this all went very well as a mixture of people came to look and try the apples and juice. The organisers were not allowed to use fruit from the community orchard site as the council have not yet tested it ….for landfill contamination. As the apples are growing on what was a farm (according to some) and next to a nature reserve this seems quite farfetched.
I started this sketch in between helping set up a juice maker and the official opening time. Trying to juice apples with a press but no apple crusher was hard going, I did improve our yield by half freezing and then defrosting some ripe fruit and cutting it up.
There are still ceps to be found but the cold nights are going to discourage them. I am bored with the same old wood and want to go and check some different places. That’s not to say that I don’t get a thrill when I see a neat and prim baby cep sitting in the moss where there was nothing yesterday. When they are young they are very upright and straight-laced, as they age they get more wild and blowsy…no parallels there then. I have been watching a round ball slowly emerge from the woodland floor by a path, I had decided that it was not likely to be a cep, now it has sprung up and it stinks. See the photo below, the stinkhorn- it does what it says on the can.
#129 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
Turkish figs with Serrano ham – a painting a day
size 6 in x 6 in 15cm x 15cm watercolour on heavy weight rag paper
Day One hundred and twenty eight – a painting a day
The figs are very pretty cut in half and lovely with some Serrano ham.
A few leaves of curly endive or fancy lettuce in a strong but slightly sweet dressing would be perfect with this. Not that I can get the endive easily here. I should try and grow it.
The ceps are moving around the woodland or rather the pattern of fruiting is changing. The best area previously was very sparse but we found another which was in full production. The drying routine is getting to be just that, a night-time routine, an easy mindless chore.
The quality of the ceps is phenomenal some days. They dry a pale creamy white and are good enough to eat like that, also the thin dry slices will crumble into scrambled egg and soften without soaking to make the most delicious scrambled egg imaginable.
I looked at the Tigridia plant and it is doing what they almost always do- producing a second flower, I will try and get a picture of this next time.
#128 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
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
Red apples on the ground – a painting a day
size 10 in x 6 in , 25cmx15cm watercolour on heavy weight rag paper.
Today was beautiful the grass was sparkling in the sunshine this morning, the heavy dew which makes for ideal fungus hunting weather….yesterday we found about two pounds of bay boletes, today we went back and found three and a half pounds of edible fungi including three ceps, amethyst deceiver, and birch boletes. I will put some pictures in. The dessicator is now full and the Christmas soup is assured….it needs woodpigeon, ceps , cream and brandy in addition to the normal soup making things like stock and onion.
Yesterdays painting still needs to be finished, it is very wishy washy at the moment. I put off cutting the grass to get today’s painting of the early apple tree, it has got to where I can no longer rely on picking the apples that do not show from the view point so it HAD TO BE DONE. I wanted the windfalls to be in the picture too so had to pick them up in a great hurry at six this evening, in order to get the mowing done. It’s hard to believe that we have eaten pounds from the tree already, there are plenty there. The problem is now getting to be that if there is a windfallen Ellisons Orange apple I will eat that in preference.
Yesterday was our duty day at the sailing club, sadly we have been very little this year and it’s a waste of the membership really. Earlier in the summer there was a lot of work on the house to get through-there still is!
The woods where the boletes came from are a lovely mixture there are pine trees, coppiced hazels and sweetchestnuts, heathy bits and a little steep valley (a ghyll they call it in Sussex, but it’s supposed to be a Scottish word). The boys found a rope with a stick hanging from a tree , it swang over a watery hollow full of dead wood and mud. Naturally one of them fell in it.
Alison
#121 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
Todays ceps
Yesterdays Bay Boletes
Sunflower and Banana plant in the new flower bed,by tomorrow the Hedychium should be out.
The monastery from Babine Kuce, reworked#2 – a painting a day
size 6 in x 6 in 15cm x 15cm watercolour on heavy weight rag paper
There are several things report today DIY Dad has started again in earnest and has told me firmly that I must expect to listen to rambling useless diatribes about plumbing and so on. I thought I was just here to cook the food and do the washing.
Given the weather was actually rather nice I was finding it very hard spending time indoors looking at depressing breezeblock walls with remnants of 1960’s decor peeling in an unromantic fashion.
The solution I came up with was good. I suggested a walk to look at some of my favourite fungus sites. The boys were promised ice cream and a bag of crisps. They complained bitterly but under sufferance they did come, muttering and threatening retribution. In the woods we found that there were no chanterelles or ceps but that the hedgehog mushrooms were beginning to fruit and we found two nice birch boletes and two very small beefsteak fungi. I photographed them before stir frying them.
The boys got their ice creams in a village shop and I got my Saturday paper, their humour improved on the walk until they had got back to being the boys we had on holiday.
On the way home we stopped for a drink in a pub overlooking the village green and then went on to the DIY store . Husband was in seventh heaven, fungi, beer, and a DIY browse all crowned by catching the car getting to 90,000 miles on the way back……and it still keeps going.
I had another go at reworking the picture of the beautiful Benedictine monastery in Mljet this time I put in the boat which takes people out to the island.
No2 son has been very informed and pretty clever, he has found and set up a new web-site on which I can sell work without a time limit. Its being called the lemonaday shop and will feature old pictures from the blog and other work that looks like it fits in.
#120 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
Alison
Lemon a day 
