Storing apples for winter- a painting a day
Click here to bid size 7 in x 9 in 17cm x 22cm, charcoal and wash on Fabriano paper
On Friday I started to investigate the problem of what happens to the GCSE curriculum as it seems possible to me that local schools are only teaching a part of the syllabus; they may not be alone in this.
I started with OFSTED as they have given the school, where only part of the GCSE syllabus was taught to my son, a good report. They have not heard of the problem and tell me that it is not really within their remit. They suggested the Department of Education. The D. of E. said that they were not aware of a problem and it was not the sort of thing they dealt with. They suggested two more organisations, OFQUAL and QCDA, the people I spoke to here had casually heard of teaching to the exam but they saw it as something the media went on about. They finally said that it could only be dealt with in writing, so now I must wait up to two weeks for a reply.
Meanwhile I am contacting an academic who has said something about this in the press and I will try and find a journalist who can shed some light on the matter. No1 son thinks I am nuts; if a GCSE can be got by doing half the work he believes that can only be a good thing…..in the short term son, in the short term.
I was waiting for the paint to dry on my painting of the day and shaking out some clean washing when something started buzzing in it…it was the biggest hornet I have seen this year it must be a queen. I got it into a wine glass in the end and took it out to take it’s chance in the cold wintery night out there.See picture below:-
Recently painting of the ceiling has been more to the forefront of our minds than watercolour but we ran out of brilliant white and what with the twittering and the lumpen teenagers on half term I didn’t remember to get another pot. Anyway DIY Dad has retired to bed early with a cold after a miserable day negotiating time sheets with colleagues who want to bill 31+ days a month……
I have finished putting apples away now and just have the remainder left to get juiced on Thursday. The picture is charcoal and wash of fruit nearly ready to store, I just wrap each good fruit in newspaper and put it in the shed which is cool( but not very cool yet on sunny days like today). The garden is full of jobs that need doing lots of things need rescuing from the cold before it does for them.
#147 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
The body as thick, no thicker than my drawing pencil…shudder.
Sheffield park – a painting a day
size 6 in x 8 in 15cm x 21cm artists soft pastels on cartridge paper
Today I looked at the devastation the frost had produced in the garden and the devastation that the boys had produced in the kitchen and in disgust I went out with a neighbour to Sheffield Park. No way to run a household I know but sometimes you need to get out. There was morning glory in the sunshine but morning misery hung resentfully on the house wall it had been – 3 degrees centigrade.
The frost had clearly caught the gardeners out at Sheffield Park too, the Gunnera was not ready for winter, the giant stems stood still but the enormous leaves hung like umbrellas broken and half melted. At first in a frost when the temperature is still low the tender plants look fine, then the sun gets to them or it warms up and the frozen leaves turn to seaweed and darken like so much wilted spinach.
I took a small sketch pad and did a pastel of one corner of the top lake. It was a mess but it held the memory of the scene long enough for me to make this version when I got home. I also sketched my neighbour and that sketch was pitiful. The patches of colour on the water were great rafts of brightly coloured leaves which had fallen with the frost. Many trees had dropped a carpet of leaves the Ginko had not got its full autumn colour but many of the leaves were down on the path.
When I got back I rescued a few more plants and checked to see what we are due tonight, nothing quite so dreadful, the dahlias can wait a day or two. We have got used to damp mild autumns that stretch beyond Bonfire Night but this is not going to be one of them. Luckily DIY Dad has finished the heating.
#146 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
Autumn flowers- a painting a day
This painting has been framed and is for sale at Burgess Hill Open Houses see blog for June 4th
size 6 in x 10 in 15cm x 20cm watercolour on heavy weight rag paper
Life or the ongoing maths test that masquerades as life is changing. There was frost on the windscreen back and front this morning. The plants do not seem to be affected so far. Just to be on the safe side I brought in the most tender fuchsia “Thalia” and some Echeverias and the Baster Kobus which comes from Namibia and will probably cope with quite bit of cold but not damp cold. The Kalahari is surprisingly cold at night in the winter, seven or eight blankets and a husband were not enough. We used to wedge the baby between us on the coldest nights, for his sake- not ours obviously.
For todays painting I have changed the background by using a yellow pillowcase; I wanted the daffodil sky look. It’s not there yet but the colours Gauguin used are clearly findable in my world. It is very easy as a Northern European to get bogged down in drabness. I remember a painter in Cyprus, Neocles whose painting were the essence of a sun drenched day on the beach and looking at my painting realising that I was still on a non- Mediterranean dull palette. It took a conscious effort to do a painting in a better colour set for the climate. I was working in oils there as I had the space in a barn of a rented house on the Green line. Being on the line reduced the rent a bit (not enough to compensate for the Turkish Commandos crawling through the back garden one night after the Cypriots had nicked the Turkish flag on a stormy night for a laugh….well they were only kids, teenagers with large guns ….probably only a year older than No1 son, which is a very scary thought.) A full international incident was avoided because Panikos who was very short and very goofy was on guard that night, I asked him what he had done when the commandos climbed out of the dry riverbed into my garden, “ Shit I was scared” he said” I put down my gun quietly and I hid, they crawled off that way” he pointed downstream. Thinking about the spending cuts he could probably teach the British Army a thing or two about how to get by without using any of that over expensive ammo stuff.
I think the Government should simplify and declutter…stuff all the complicated spending cuts that pick on the employed middle class parents and the sick and unemployed, the coalition has already shown they can break promises with aplomb, just put up Income Tax and keep it dead simple, but put the resources into checking up on the people who hide income and dodge tax (like the occaisional MP ). No, we haven’t forgotten.
#145 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
Mrs Oakley Fisher,Study of late tea rose – a painting a day
size 6 in x 5.5 in 15cm x 13cm watercolour on heavy weight rag paper
The sky looks like a Gauguin painting this afternoon, orange and brooding purple with patches of pale yellow over suburbia , it is not quite le Poldu but then they probably don’t have a station there.
As the colours Gauguin used are ones I hesitate to put in a picture I have to ask why and why not. This is a study of a rose where I have chosen to show all the possible colours of the background and there are the puces and oranges and the glowing pale green in the bags and folders of everyday life. Its not entirely comfortable but it has a nice exotic feel, fifties Cuba or Florida.
Well that was last night, today I don’t like it at all but it is my painting a day so…blog it anyway; it’s not for sale as I think it’s a bit unhinged. Like the economy it’s gone over the edge and that is just about to speed up it seems.
Oh..did I mention I went to the Gauguin exhibition at the Tate Modern?…and I got to hold a ceramic sunflower seed for …at least 30 seconds, it was like being seven again and bead swopping. Actually I think they should do that- you go to the exhibition with some thing you feel is equivalent in value (first define your value) and see if the curator will swop it for a seed.
#144 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
Red Onion slice – a painting a day
size 6 in x 7 in 15cm x 17cm watercolour on heavy weight rag paper
Today was colder than it has been for a while , we finished clearing the room for the plasterer and tried to revise Physics with No1 son who is rapidly developing a bad case of the wobbles.
I also rang Homebase to tell them that they had sent a parcel meant for someone else to this house. It’s quite a nice bathroom light, but possibly not that energy efficient (the first thing I check with lights these days). I was kept waiting on an 0845 number for over 15 minutes, the number was on the delivery note. Once someone finally answered they said I had the wrong number and put me back on hold to listen to some woman strangling a sub Lloyd- Webber anthem yet again.
They say they will come and take the box away tomorrow….realising that they had cost me quite a bit on the phone and finding that they share profits on these lines with the telecom company, I complained ….she offered me a voucher!
I finished this painting off while waiting for them to answer the phone. Red onions have an interesting colour they are quite grey but it’s really just the purple tones shining through the white flesh.
#143 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
A Vase of late flowers – a painting a day
Click here to purchase approx. A4 watercolour on heavy weight rag paper
Inspiration for the painting goes to ejorrs twitter pic of the last garden flowers of the year in a vase. The photographs are autumn jewels in the garden.
Today’s blog will be mainly dedicated to a large moan about the education system. However I wanted to start by rubbishing an idea, an urban myth of sorts which is thought to occur in many family homes. It is said by many that mothers put on weight when they have children because they hoover up the leftovers on their children’s plates. They are really just being tidy it is implied and therefore virtuous (sort of); next they say “oh dear, I’m 14 stone (200lb, 90 +kg) “. You feel sorry…until you do a reality check, how many chips would you have to put on a child’s plate to get any leftovers to scoff? How fat can you get on the normally rejected cabbage, onions, salad, and brown bead crusts? It’s the healthy non-fattening foods that kids leave. Mothers are not getting fat on the kids leavings, no, they are getting fat on the treats hidden from the kids at the back of the cupboard, the pizza bought for the kids but eaten by all, the chocolate chip cookies left in the packet after it has been snatched from hungry offspring (what did the dentist say darling?), or the treat of a chocolate bar to enliven a regular journey. It’s a brave woman who owns up to this but as my (deceased ) diabetic friend said when her doctor told her that it was fine to have one or two biscuits, ”I’m not a one or two biscuit sort of woman, I’m a one or two packet sort of woman”. She can’t have been the only one. I know for myself that it’s the eating what I enjoy that keeps me over the weight I should be but that’s my problem and it doesn’t help me to push the blame towards my kids. This thought came to me last night as I was gloomily surveying what they had left on their plates …100% healthy….I binned it.
Mina lobata finally finds its form,the Aconitum is a deeper blue in real life.
Now education: we could all be forgiven for thinking that a child who has a good grade in a GCSE would have a reasonable balanced knowledge of the subject and be well placed to take the subject on to’ A’ level. Not necessarily I have discovered.
Every year there are reports in the press where industry laments the sorry state of school leavers and complains about their meagre knowledge, poor writing skills and general capacity for employment.
Yet every year there are articles in the press saying that it is incredible but grades have gone up once again and school websites puff with pride about the ever upward trend. However when I take a look at the work being done I worry about its quality, I get told that I don’t understand and the copy of the mark scheme is waved at me as the thing that matters today. My notion of learning a subject, I am told by my son, is outmoded. I thought that it was only my sons Geography department that was being so skimpy with the teaching that they only taught two out of four questions that could come up on the exam. Now I have discovered by talking more generally to teachers at another school that this is so widespread that it has a name. The name I would give it is cramming, the modern name for it is “teaching to the exam”.
This means that if you are doing Geography and the syllabus covers say mountains, rivers, urban planning and rural landuse , the exam offers a question on each topic from which two must be answered; an educator would teach all four subjects and advise the pupil to choose the subjects to answer in the exam according to how the question looks and their own strength in the topic. A crammer checks past papers, judges which topics are easier to teach and answer questions on (out goes anything with a tricky concept at this stage) and sticks to these two subjects. So rivers are studied but not mountains, Urban Geography but not Rural; the problem for me here is that the formation of rivers and the formation of mountainous landscapes interlink.
Now, this has been hard to understand for me because I am sure that when I was slogging through my exam years there was no real certainty about what would come up on the exam paper. Therefore you revised everything only leaving out Dr Drennan’s incomprehensible (to me) Plant Physiology. Things must have changed. If the exam papers were still unpredictable the teachers who’ teach to the exam’ (i.e. cram) would come spectacularly unstuck some years. We all know that is not happening so we have to accept that exam papers are very predictable. Possibly they vary a little in their predictability, and it is at this stage I remember that the schools are able to pick and choose their exam boards and will change them at will. I will come back to this subject after I have checked a few things with other teachers and schools etc.
#142 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
These Cobeas are unreal in theirslightly mad perfection
A tomato truss – a painting a day
size 8 in x 6 in 20cm x 15cm watercolour on heavy weight rag paper
There are more than 700 apples on the database of the apple key so it is quite surprising when, after answering seven or eight questions on the apple in hand, one variety is chosen by the keying process.
If the apple has an unusual shape in some way( inside or out) it keys out quite fast. The difficulty in using a key is in deciding whether the feature in question fits one answer or another. The apple key I am using allows you to drop questions that are hard to decide and this allows the identification to be made on points that are unambiguous.
I think one of the trees in the orchard is Calville Blanc d’Hiver, it certainly is a cooker and unlike the old English types has very narrow cavities for the pips, it also keeps its shape cooked; I tried a few slices boiled and they remained whole.
Neatly it is one of the parents of Ellison’s Orange or at least a very close relative of that parent. The parent mentioned in Joan Morgan’s book is not listed in the National Collection. I have drawn a little family tree for three eating apples I have been thinking about and however English we think they are they are very very French in their breeding.
Life at the moment is overshadowed by Maths and Physics and a battle of wills raging over the kitchen table between DIY Dad and No1son. DIY exclaims that something is so very very obvious and No1 son groans like an unhappy cow. DIY Dad has to be avoided at this point or he will catch hold of me and start telling me about quadratic equations and the curves produced and the blinding simplicity of it all as if I can do it all in my head! It’s possible to burn any amount of food while trying to give sufficient attention to avoid insulting a man on a mission. I can still do quadratics but only if I have my head down over a piece of paper with NO DISTRACTIONS, therefore I can no longer do quadratics.
I have gone back to the charcoal pencil for this sketch of some of our tomatoes. The heating process (day 135) has been successful in that they did not all succumb to blight as they ripened, however I think it has also made them a little softer than they would have been otherwise. We had some losses still but below 10% and I am certain that without treatment we were heading for 60% or more losses. There are some lovely angles and shapes in the stalks and sepals.
#141 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
Sepals on apples – a painting a day
size 5 in x 7 in 13cm x 17cm watercolour on heavy weight rag paper
Today I have painted the bottoms of two different kinds of apples. They have both been identified as Ellison’s Orange by experts at an apple day, possibly different experts as the largest apple was identified two years ago. The other, from the community orchard, was ID’d last weekend.
The smaller apple and the cut piece both show two differences. They have more distinct stripes and they have long sepals which reflex out in a little star shape. The other apple has short stumpy downy sepals. The sepals are the remains of the covering of the flower when it is in bud.
I believe that the very pronounced stripes and the sepals point to it apple being Allington Pippin. It does not taste quite the same as the Ellisons Orange ,which incidentally is a dead ringer for the illustrations of the variety. It just goes to show that there are so many factors that have to be considered when doing an ID that it is no wonder there are and always have been many cases of mistaken identity in the apple world.
But since writing this I have found some really clear pictures for Allington Pippin and they are nothing like the striped apple. There are pictures of Allington Pippin out there with lovelylong stripes but the ones in the National Fruit Collection are not striped, think again next year, the last of the apples are rotting on the ground so there’s little option.
Yesterday I drove a mammoth triangle taking in London Surrey, Hampshire and back to Sussex. I finished my bit of guerrilla gardening at my aunt’s house and got back home after dropping off my former neighbours knitting bag with her niece! She has such a sweet garden, even in the dusk I could see that the balls of box were perfect and the textures were varied but harmonious. I knew I had found the right house when I saw the pot of bamboo by the front door. Because her bamboo is so invasive she keeps it all in pots, it is still over two metres high and makes a good screen…which can be moved at will.
#140 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
Possibly James Grieve – a painting a day
size 6 in x 4.5 in 15cm x 12cm watercolour on heavy weight rag paper
A Good Crop of Cookers
This is a very rushed post. There has been too much to do today. I decided to tackle the honey fungus , buy a sack of potatoes , locate a plasterer, and find somewhere to juice apples closer to here than the place I’ve used before.
Once I had got hold of the cleaning fluid that has a second use as a fungus protector, I dug up all the three tufts of honey fungus. I then poured solution into the holes and then poured it over the bases of all the apple trees roses and shrubs in the area. It smells just like Jeyes Fluid, which always reminds me of the toilet arrangements at Guide camp. Apparently this can cause it to fruit more because its underground ‘bootlaces’ are knocked back , however the article goes on to say the spores can only infect dead wood. (Whereas the rhizomorphs or bootlaces can infect happy flowering plants and treees that I really want to keep) Then I decided to remove lots of stuff that was getting too big to let me check that there were no more signs of the lurgy hidden beneath. I ended up with a pile of cut stuff the size of a sleeping pair of hippos.
Opened my blog today and found someone from Australia selling cures for nail fungus attempting to post without saying anything about the subjects on the blog, are they a huge fan of watercolour or are they just trying to sell me a cure for my cured nails? I keep my nails sweet with neat tea tree oil and metallic green nail varnish. I must have put toenails in as a tag at some point and that had lured them or some automatic post generator to my site. Either that or they can smell my feet from Australia! Or they think honey fungus is a toe disease and not a pathogen of woody plants.
This apple is a James Grieve well it could be, we keep getting revisions on the community orchard apples.
#139 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
Red grapes on a plate -painting a day
size 6 in x 7 in 15cm x 17cm watercolour on heavy weight rag paper
Today and yesterday were wet on and off, wind and rain, horrid inside and out. It would have been fine inside as the house is warm without being heated due to the insulation being so very good. However we were engaged in a mammoth circulation of our possessions to clear space for a plasterer to mend the hole where Matt, the builder’s labourer, fell through the ceiling. Having established that he didn’t need an ambulance I considered finishing the job and kicking him through to down stairs but relented. After all there’s nothing about a load of fibreglass, muck, plaster and sawdust on your bed to make one upset, is there? The problem with bad builders is they are bad in so many different ways. By the time Matt went through the ceiling I was ready to believe he had done it deliberately. I was aware by this stage that the owner of the company was not asking us for money in a sensible systematic way and then panicking that he didn’t have money to cover wages and asking for it at short notice and then if it wasn’t obtainable in time blaming us for the short wages that I am sure the men suffered from time to time.
We also need the new cupboards plastering so nothing can be stored there, the hall and landing need painting shortly so nothing can stay there, our new bedroom needs the floor sanding so…sorry where is all this going …in the studio?…and you think I will be able to use a press in there and work round it all?…ah yes I could throw it all away but….I don’t really want to. There is a view upheld by tutors at college that an artist collects and that this somehow vindicates their body of work. They were encouraging collection in other words, I cannot imagine being in a position where I needed encouraging hoarding, sorry collecting things, it is a great failing of mine, but I am not sure that it makes one artistic.
At one point I came to the baskets where my best jumpers were stored and the woolly walking socks for Christmas stockings. These had been fine at Christmas but since then some devastating American form of clothes moth had got in and gone through a shawl that was so fine I had not known it was wool and all the jumpers were full of gaping holes. I thought the socks looked rescueable and microwaved them to kill any living creature…how was I to know they weren’t 100% ? After less than two minutes small patches were turning into melted black ooze and smelling utterly dreadful. I am not popular with anyone. After extensive airing and cleaning the smell is still lingering in draws and cupboards.
The community orchard apples have been to West Dean (with someone else) and back and some of the identifications agree with ones we got by using an online key…Carlyle Codlin and Laxtons Reward. One each to DIY Dad and I. We are in disagreement with the experts on a number of other apples but I think I have one of the pears; Packhams Triumph is an Australian pear but was planted in the UK. It makes a decent crumble and I suspect it would juice rather well and eat well later on.
The grapes came from the market and once the boys had recovered from the shock of” PIPS!?” they disappeared very fast.
I also insisted that we picked the cooking apple tree today as the wind was starting to knock the apples off in bulk. No1 and No2 son refused to put on their shoes for a long time until harsh words and threats got them outside. Before we had finished it began to rain and still we picked. In the end No2 was enjoying the rain and being up a tree until me on the ladder and him in the branches were getting along famously. We have nearly cleared the tree and have a giant stack of apples which now need sorting and wrapping for storage in the shed. I think I will get about five trays of top quality apples and plenty for now and then some for juicing.
The best part of today was visiting a lovely open studio in a village with old friends. There were paintings, sculptures/cabinets and quilts which were really restoring, the artist Heather told me she had planned for a year to make it all work well. Her studio looks over their garden to the Downs.
Alison
#138 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
Lemon a day 
