Archive
Old limonade
A ten minute sketch done to a chorus of “we are hungry can you hurry up?”.
It’s Mont St Michel last summer.
framed SOLD
#209
This is a pencil sketch
This sketch is just like the weather at the moment: a bit rough round the edges but I quite like it ( warmer would be better as colour might be better).
Great Western Railway nr Pangbourne
size 6″ x 9″ approx. 15cm x 22 cm
Apologies for the (former) silly little postage stamp image it’s a problem which seems to occur at random , of course all that means is that there is some little detail on the uploading process which I miss out without realising I have done so. Then I do it all over again and it still goes wrong until finally on a new day I do it all over again again and it goes right and I still have no idea what it was I did wrong the first four times.
One of my sons was sitting an exam as an external candidate near Reading this is what I did while he was furiously ( I hope ) writing. I used to walk in those far off woods and hunt for edible fungi. Pangbourne is to the left and Mapledurham to the right on the other side of the railway and the river Thames (which is hidden).
I am also putting time into getting ready for an open house exhibition in Burgess Hill where I will be in a house with five other women. Our host artist is Suzanne Bench and she is opening up her Art Deco house as a huge gallery- upstairs and downstairs. We will be doing tea and homemade cakes with squash for children. I have had more work framed than ever before which is slightly scary. I went to a framer in Worthing who had already cut mounts for me , she was very quick and the prices are good. She also has racks and racks of frames already made up at sale prices ( left behind by the previous framer possibly) . It would be possible to spend a whole afternoon there hunting through the precut mounts and frames and finding ones which work , as plenty of my work is square it makes it easy to find something.
#208
Rustic Pergola.
size A4
This is the sketch I completed yesterday at Oakleigh Cottage near Heathfield. Well I almost completed it in situ. I filled in some of the gaps when I got home.
The garden is one acre and in several different parts. It has a new highly impressive irrigation system run from a borehole, DIY Dad was in his element. He likes drills of the handheld and the lorry load variety and boreholes are modest sized drilling projects. The horticultural interest is varied; pretty drifts of daffodils and frittillaries , startling yellow marsh marigolds and some giant bamboo which is competing on almost equal terms with an oak tree.
I have had to go onto my third file for the blog as this picture is 201 (100 paintings per file). It is also about two years since I started blogging so I have obviously not managed a painting a day more like one every four days on average. Still, to stop would seem wrong.
#201
Mandraki
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
Away
We went to Florence for my Christmas present….to see the art not to do any, but I did sketch the Duomo and Campenile from across the river. I note with some jealousy that you wouldn’t get a view of St Pauls this uncluttered due to the tall piles of steel and cement which now surround it, thanks to the banks for a lot of that of course. On top of the financial desecration.
At the central market there were literally sacks of dried ceps or porcini, they varied in grade according to how perfect the dried slices were. The price went from 5 euro to 30 euro per 100 gramme. There were also blood oranges from Sicily and baby artichokes in heaps as well as fabulous piles of fresh damp salads in all sorts of colours. The buffalo mozzarella was really fresh and made a great lunch with olive bread.
This would have been my next sketch had there been time. Its a view back to Florence from the top of the Boboli Gardens.
You find what you are interested in anywhere-Medusa I do find interesting, this is her decapitated body conquered by Perseus. She is fairly ugly faced in this but with a decent body; I was very struck by the muscular female nudes that were carved by MichelAngelo, legs like footballers or my legs on a good day. If the models were women they were involved in some very strenuous work…washer women?
#169
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
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
Sibenik apples and pears – a painting a day
Sibenik reworked #2 (#116)
size 6 in x6 in 15cm x 15cm watercolour on heavy weight rag paper
Sibenik reworked #1 (painting a day #114) with minor alterations
size 6 in x6 in 15cm x 15cm watercolour on heavy weight rag paper
Wedding pictures have begun to trickle through on the e-mail, it looks like I habitually turn my back on the camera as there are only pictures of me from behind! The boys are in some shots which is good.
I have spent a lot of time peeling pears and freezing drying and cooking them.
I also made a tasty salad from Blackstick blue cheese and pears diced with a few stems of Chinese cabbage diced to give a little crunch. The pears are now sweet and aromatic with their special pear drop kick. I also poached some sliced pear in a vanilla syrup…..beautiful.
Loads of apples are tumbling off the trees with the wind and rain, they are also being slowly peeled and frozen or cooked.
There are more and more fungi in the grass, I might collect the red cracking boletes as I have eaten them before and they are OK- not as good as ceps, but then nothing is.
The tomatoes have started to turn so I have picked eight slightly plum shaped ones which are a bit mushy but tasty cooked. The smaller ones are refusing to ripen…next thing the blight will be in there.
I have altered the last reworking of the Sibenik sketch and here is another.
No1 son got his required grades and we are all so happy for him, after all the teachers and life threw at him he has managed to get there. He hates me talking like this so I’ll stop.
#116 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
Trogir view reworked – a painting a day
size 6 in x 6 in 15cm x 15cm watercolour on heavy weight rag paper
Eyelashes, as of today there are fewer than ever; that is because I woke up this morning with a clump of plastic lashes missing in the bedclothes, others were diving off in odd directions and some were bent out of shape. The overall effect was completely insane, I can be a heavy sleeper but I did not know I was heavy on the eyelashes as well. Sadly, I decided to have a bath and remove them, sadly because from certain angles they were really rather jaunty and sweetly curved. Removing with solvent them took a while and made me realise just how difficult it must have been to stick the blighters on. They need to be stuck to your own lashes but in my case the lashes are both short and very pale so hard to find in the first place. In the business of removing the fakes I dislodged a few real eye lashes….damn it they are an endangered species. Incidentally in case you think I am exaggerating, the falsies are the shortest in the box and they are about three to four times longer than my lashes. The next time I feel the need to remind the children that life is not fair I will be doing so with a slight self pitying catch in my voice.
I have been a very poor blogger this month, there have been days when I been busy with school holiday type things, days when there was no option but to be ill or look after the sick and I have also wanted to sort my pictures out. The second file needed organising for the second hundred pictures, it’s astonishing how long it takes to number a load of plastic sleeves and get them all in a lever arch file ready for the paintings. I could easily have done a painting with that slot.
The space where the door into the downstairs loo used to be, has now been mostly plasterboarded, a cupboard will fill the space where the short corridor once was and I am very excited, any increase in storage space is a bonus in this house which has a real lack of built in cupboards. Well for a pair of china, tool and equipment hoarders with children it is inadequate. It might have been fine for the previous occupant. Our last house had three built in wardrobes and they were well used.
#113 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
Lemon a day 
