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Autumn leaves Lilac, Cherry and Lilac – a painting a day
Click here to purchase size 6 in x 9 in, 15cm x 24cm
There are good times of year and bad times of year. This is not my favourite in many ways; the hour has changed and we all feel it. Meals feel necessary earlier as the stomach clocks are struggling to adjust. The weather is mild which is a bonus, the house is warm all day following a short blast from the radiators in the morning, which is a vindication of the warm roof insulation. I love the air and the light at this time of year. There are times when the colours are brighter than anything spring or summer can offer. Hence the leaves in todays painting. There are rows of trees on the drive to school every day that are just glowing at the moment.
I did do a painting yesterday but when I showed it to DIY Dad he asked which way up it was supposed to go…all very well if you are an abstract artist but I’m not.
The nasty neutral magnolia paintwork on the walls in this room did not scrub up well, we therefore repainted it. The walls are still neutral but the carpet will be bright or dark. I know carpet is not fashionable but we have solid floors and carpet is warmer. In fact the floors are the least ecological part of this house as they are only insulated in the kitchen diner. A good carpet will have to stand in for insulation in this room. The walls are now a very pale grey with a warm tone to it. The name is a marketers dream…for a certain section of society…’Egyptian Cotton’. It is not the colour of calico or unbleached cotton or indeed bleached cotton, mind you I have yet to see a Magnolia flower that is the colour of magnolia paint. ‘Its not magnolia’, I think they could call a paint that and do just as well.
Mainly its done(the room that is,apart from the carpet). I ,being mindful of the age of the children ,asked for everyones views on the carpet,No2 son wants a sample very like the old carpet (stupidly pale and neutral),no1 son cannot see the point and thinks the old carpet should be patched (possibly using the samples from the carpet shop?), husband thinks red would be nice but not so red it looks like we are expecting the Queen. I want aubergine but I know that it too will show the dirt. Like all consultation processes on the modern era it will be a scam, I will go back to the carpet shop and choose what I like, come home and point out a) all their ideas had flaws,yes they were rubbish, b) in two weeks they will have forgotten what colour it is and will have covered it in sweet wrappers anyway.
#150 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
Blueberry has the most extraordinary red and yellow leaves before they drop.
apple leaves in the garden
Maths and apple peel – a painting a day
Click here to bid size 6 in x 9 in, 15cm x 24cm
There was a classic shepherds warning this morning lighting up the bathroom with a coral glow. By ten it had begun to rain and has continued on and off all day.
I was very lazy today the children got just what they wanted, pizza at lunch and fish and chips in the evening. The only homemade thing they had all day was an apple crumble which was cooked with the pizza.
Maths continued on the kitchen table, in fact a sheet of it appears in todays painting.
#148 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
Sunrise over next doors building project, they are getting ready to roof this bit I think, but the scaffolders
had to be told to take the scaffolding poles off the new fence. The sky was actually several shades brighter
than this, honest.
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.
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
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
Amanita – a painting a day
size 6 in x 4.5 in 15cm x 12cm watercolour on heavy weight rag paper
The day started groggy and foggy, the fog was outside the groggy was in me.
I don’t think the smell of plumbing solder agrees with me for one thing.
The installation of a better radiator in this room has meant that some of the junk has been moved out the way which is nice and I have a better view into the side garden. This is the time of year for that patch as it had masses of Sedum ‘Autumn Glory’, which is a very simple undemanding plant but it peaks quietly now when lots of other stuff is heading for Tatty Town. There is also a large shaggy white dahlia which survived the winter in the ground; it’s remarkable what did survive, in fact I am almost sure that I have lost more things to the drought this year than to the hard frost in January.
I spent the morning collecting apples from the trees in the community orchard to identify. There are an awful lot more trees there than seemed possible when the undergrowth of nettles and brambles was untamed. An old pear is dripping with hard green fruit and there are some trees that have shed their crop. We found what we thought must be there, a Cox, almost hidden under ash trees which have grown up in the area since the orchard was abandoned, it has barely fruited. I think there is a D’Arcy Spice apple and a Reverend Wilkes (named for the horticultural stalwart who bred the Shirley poppy, see earlier blogs). There is also honey fungus fruiting on the roots of several trees which is very bad news indeed.
We went for a different walk today, if we had been there a couple of days ago there had been some very fine ceps, as it was they were huge and home to millions of tiny maggots.. In fact on the way back from the community orchard I saw a cep by the pavement only a few minutes walk from here. They really are everywhere. Instead of edible fungi we picked paintable fungi and here is my first effort. I don’t think I have drawn one of these since I was at school. Amanita’s are classics of the fungi world, tall, well formed and successful they are in the main poisonous or very dubious, some will kill you, this could make you pretty ill with the possibility of some hallucinations depending on the weather…..the suggestion is that the toxin/hallucinogen varies in strength according to the type of year it has been.
#131 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
Fly Agarics in Ashdown Forest
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
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
Lemon a day 
