Monday 28 March 2011

A VISIT TO THE CHARENTE.....

We have just got back from a short visit with friends .... we spent  some of the time out drawing and painting and this is the first little sketch - unfinished at present - of a vineyard we passed in Cognac country.  We were able to stop and I did a few quick watercolour sketches which I used for this small painting.    

     MARTEL VINEYARD  25 X 35 cm  oil/canvas


I am pleased that  today I got out into the studio and made a start ... lots of ideas from this 5 day break.   And the landscape here looks so delicious too.   I have a solo show in the summer and mixed exhibitions too so it is lovely to have so much to paint about.   

Friday 18 March 2011

MY DARLING MOL.... in 1987....


This is a person who means very much to me, .....  we were introduced to each other many years ago,  through the good offices of one of my cats, Kitty who would go missing in the summer when she found a favourite place in Mollie's greenhouse lying on her seedlings......   ah what a cat she was, and what a lot of talk of marmalade and poetry and the meaning of life  Mollie and I have shared, because of her ....   welcoming the apparently random blessings of life.....  

This is a poem we shared recently .....   chosen by Mollie from a book I was given by another dear woman friend - Jacqueline who I would love to draw.......  

SEAMUS HEANEY ....  THE BALER
All day the clunk of a baler
Ongoing, cardiac-dull,
So taken for granted

It was evening before I came to
To what I was hearing
And missing: summer's richest hours

As they had been to begin with,
Fork-lifted, sweated-through
And nearly rewarded enough

By the giddied-up race of a tractor
At the end of the day
Last-lapping a hayfield.

But what I also remembered
As woodpigeons sued at the edge
Of thirty gleaned acres

And I stood inhaling the cool
In a dusk eldorado
Of mighty cylindrical bales

Was Derek Hill's saying,
The last time he sat at our table,
He could bear no longer to watch

The sun going down
And asking please to be put
With his back to the window.


I WAS TIDYING MY plan chest and found this drawing from 1986



It is of a friend/model called Evelyne who used to live in Shaftesbury and we talked of sugaring legs ....   and disciplining cats with water pistols!   .....  She was a great model .....  and I like the drawing very much.


Still having problems with badly behaved cats ....  Evelyne - I have two new Burmese girls ....  they are bad!

Friday 11 March 2011

WINTER TREES can be lovely

Winter Trees 24 x 36"  oil/canvas

I suppose that now we are in March it isn't technically winter ....  
and the
swelling buds and catkins are adding colour ....  These are the same group of trees that I painted earlier in the snow.