Gardens Illustrated illustrations 2017 ... part 2

Here is my round-up of the linocut illustrations for Frank Ronan's monthly column in Gardens Illustrated magazine for July to December 2017 (the illustrations for January to June can be found here).

Frank's June column left him returning home after a few years living in California ... 

"The joy of being back in my own garden is overwhelming at times."

During 2016 Frank's writing had taken on a gloomy tone, so I was relieved he was happy and and back among plants he loves ... and I love too.

July 2017

Frank's garden has been left to grow wild and he's unsure what to tackle first. He decides that a large fir tree ... a Christmas tree someone planted out in the 1950s ... now dwarves the cottage and has to go; his decision made because he loves pruning things, climbing trees and using a chain saw. The fir tree's trunk already has a Clematis montana growing up it, so Frank leaves a 15 ft stump as its support. Our garden wall also has a C. montana ... and as it was May it was in flower  (I work about 2 months ahead of publication), so I could enjoy sketching from life. This isn't always possible but I prefer drawing from real live plants.

August 2017

This year I often had a very small window when I could work on the 'Frank' illustrations; the August Frank arrived in late May and I sat at my desk and carefully read and re-read Frank's words on Monday 5 June ... 2 days after the London Bridge attack, the 3rd terrorist attack in a only a few weeks last summer. Frank's essay on the subject of forgiveness, contentment and happiness was poignant and perfectly timed ... I may have cried (which doesn't happen often). If you have a copy of the the magazine or can get the online version, I recommend it as something to keep at hand if times get tough.

The editor suggested I include a Goldfinch in the composition, they are frequent visitors to our garden and one of my favourite birds, so along with grasses I sketched from life this became the image to illustrate Frank's words ...

"Happiness is no right, but an elusive privilege ... If you chase it, it will run ... The stiller you are the more it will linger. Any attempt to run after it and capture it, or even too direct a stare, and it will flit off like a goldfinch startled."

September 2017

More happy coincidences for September's Frank, the subject is meadows and I'd just spent a fascinating day visiting one and doing lots of sketches. Frank had been reading a book, 'Grass-fed Nation' by Roger Harvey, the agricultural adviser for 'The Archers' ... which is often on the radio as I work ... so I'm familiar with 'herbal leys'.

Frank discovers that his neglected garden borders ... now overgrown with a thatch of grasses, wildflowers and self-seeded perennials related to meadow plants ... are thriving! He muses about a new kind of garden border that is more like a meadow. Now, that sounds lovely, just my kind of thing too, Knapweeds, Burnets and Geraniums mingled in drifts of meadow grasses ... something butterflies would enjoy too.

October 2017

Autumn flowering bulbs is the subject of the October 'Frank', all those lovely sugar-almond pink flowers that surprise the garden with their clean sharp colour among the decaying leaves of autumn.
I chose to illustrate the Nerines and Cyclamen (Frank includes Colchicums too, but I decided they would overload the illustration). I included the toad that Frank says looks like a Cyclamen corm, and the drifts of Cyclamen are based on those at Anglesey Abbey which have a special memory for me.
I like his idea of planting Nerines in pots ... so this is a visual reminder to do that too.

November 2017

Apple trees and garden bonfires ... two more things I can draw from life and from personal experience. Frank is writing about how picking fruit and having a bonfire are great ways to get friends to 'help' in the garden. This was a lovely Autumnal subject and and excuse to carve decorative patterns to depict the flames and smoke.

December 2017

The December issue of Gardens Illustrated includes a lovely new series of articles by Lia Leendertz on identifying trees, part 1 covers Deciduous Native British Trees. To continue the 'tree theme', Frank writes about Ash trees at a time when time may be running out as they succumb to Ash Die-Back. The Ash tree I sketched for this illustration is one I can see from our vegetable plot, it stands on the bank of the brook in the neighbour's garden, and has a twin trunk which joins to make an opening big enough for a child for small person to squeeze through.
I've got used to spotting obscure literary references in Frank's writing, this month he makes a passing reference to Tennyson referring to the Ash tree's 'coal black buds in March' ... it took a request on Twitter for someone to point me to 'The Gardener's Daughter', so I thought a 2017 gardener's daughter should appear in the picture ... with her cat. The door in the garden wall is based on the one in my garden ... although I've played around with the scale and made the tree huge and the wall more extensive and further away.
A few more changes from the usual ... I worked slightly larger and inked the block in various shades of brown and dark grey. The red of the gardener's daughter's coat was added digitally after scanning the print (if I print an edition, I'll cut a special block to print the red).

So that's almost another year of prints complete ... there's one more, I'll tell you about the linocut for the Special 'Plants Edition' before the New Year.

Meanwhile, wishing you a calm run-up to the Christmas weekend. 

Cheers!

Celia

xx

Gardens Illustrated illustrations 2017 round up ... part 1

Times change and these days you'll mainly find me on Instagram or Twitter rather than keeping this blog up to date. But it would be shame not to continue to record here my linocut illustrations for Frank Ronan's monthly column in Gardens Illustrated magazine . . . so here begins a round up with the illustrations for January 2017 to June 2017 . . .

January 2017

Frank writes about the pleasure on a fine winter day, of pruning a rampant Wisteria and how a small cottage can be engulfed by a particularly vigorous Wisteria.

I aimed to give this illustration the feeling of a Grimm's fairytale.

February 2017

Frank's love for one of the native Californian shrubs, Manzanita, isn't put off by it's incendiary reputation, so he experiments with fire to promote germination of its seeds. 

"I might not be so open minded about the beauty of this native were I shivering in a silver blanket in a school gymnasium"

These were Frank's portentous words written a year ago about Californian wildfires which right now are devastating Ventura county with its worst wildfire in modern Californian history. 

March 2017

The plant hunter and nurseryman Michael Wickenden died while on an expedition, this is Frank's tribute to his friend.

I've included Michael walking out into a mountainous landscape, a humble bunch of flowers ... some of the species he collected and grew in his nursery ... and a postcard of the Mountains of the Moon, the scene of one of his adventures. 

April 2017

After reading Frank's piece about using some pink coloured rubble to create terraces and paths around his Californian garden, this design popped into my head fully formed ... it illustrates Frank's fantasy that one day his garden will be full of fruit trees and bushes that he can harvest from as he meanders up and down the sloping terraces.
This was one of my favourite designs from 2017.

May 2017

Flowers often invoke a deeply buried memories and for Frank it is his love of peonies that threads through the years ... his introduction by a cousin to the seductive flower and friends who have added to his collection. I saw this as a still from a whimsical film about a long forgotten childhood meeting.

June 2017

The 'June Frank' text arrived by email and to my surprise Frank is leaving California and on his way home ... where would that be? The magazine editorial and design team were as surprise as I was. We'd have to wait and see.

Meanwhile, as Frank packed his bags and left his Californian garden where he had tried to grow native shrubs, indulged his love of agaves and battled with gophers eating his palm trees; the rains came! His garden flowered, plants he had given up on and watched desiccate, sprang into life and bloomed! I designed the image in warm red/browns but after discussion with the art ed I printed it in a fresh green.

... part 2 of this round-up will follow soon.

Celia

xx

Chaos theory . . . and carrying on as normal

What a lot has happened since my last blog post on 17 June, not only has the UK decided on Brexit and to swerve onto a different course leaving everyone on both sides of the argument bemused and *insert words of your own choice* but also here at home we've had a chaotic few weeks - stuff happens sometimes! - but we're all OK and that's the main thing.

When life gets messy it's good to take the long view and get things back into perspective . . . to help us do this we had a lovely day out at Wrest Park, somewhere we discovered a few years ago; since then English Heritage have done loads of work and there's now a lovely café and more of the house is accessible. But it's the park and beautiful pavilions that are the main attraction.

On the day we visited the unexpected bonus was that there was a brass band concert, add to that sunshine and some delicious ice creams and it was a perfect Sunday afternoon in the park. 

So . . . what's been going on in my studio?

I've designed 2 more Christmas cards for Plantlife, they'll be for sale online later in the year; and I spent an intense 5 days working on a packaging project for a Scottish design company, drawing and then carving lino faster than I thought possible! I hope to show you the finished design sometime, maybe early next year.


Then there's Gardens Illustrated, I illustrate Frank Ronan's column 'The Writer's Plot' a few months ahead of publication, in fact today I'm carving the lino block for the October issue. 

Here are the illustrations I did for the June issue . . . Camellias - do you like them? I confess that I don't but maybe that's because I've never had a garden where they grow happily and look good, frosted buds and clumps of brownish petals aren't a good look in my opinion. In the article Frank discovers that Camellias can be pruned in the Japanese cloud-pruned style, known as Niwaki. If you follow my blog you know I love Japanese design so this immediately grabbed my attention and cheered me up; so I took my inspiration from Japanese blue and white ceramics.

As I've come to expect, Frank's next article was a complete contrast; in the dry oppressive heat of the Californian summer Frank encounters a little weed, it's Groundsel which as you probably know is a common British native weed. Frank seems homesick for a damp verdant English garden:

"you know how it is when you are abroad and lonely and you meet someone slightly disgraceful from home whom you never really liked, and suddenly you feel they are full of charm and you get drunk together and talk too loudly"

Frank Ronan

I hunted around our garden and soon found a Groundsel plant that I could draw from life; looking carefully are the complex curves and points along the leaves, how the leaf wraps around the stalk and the cluster of flower buds and the fluffy seed heads, I'd begun to find Groundsel interesting too! And this sparked an idea for a project of my own through June ... 30 Wildflowers From My Garden, each day I sketched a different wildflower and posted the picture and some facts about the plant, on Instagram.  

It became fascinating ... I learned new botanical terms like 'dioica' and 'achaeophyte' and 'neophyte'.

I found that even the most mundane and common weeds have amazing stories to tell.

And at the end I realised there were many many more still to sketch, I could probably find 100 wildflowers!

So, this is something I'll probably return to from time to time and start another sketchbook of 'More Wildflowers From My Garden'.

Last week, at the end of another hectic weekend, we we went for a walk on the high fields between our village and Cambridge ... we hoped to get a glimpse of some of the air displays at Duxford Imperial War Museum and we weren't disappointed - a flypast of 19 vintage WWII planes just for us!

And on the way home, this glorious view across the cornfields and the sky full of skylarks singing - that's the tonic we needed to start another week and just focus on getting one thing done at a time - it's as good a theory as any to sort out chaos.


Celia
xx

Coming soon: 
FolkEast 2016 and Cambridge Original Printmakers Biennale

When April with his showers sweet . . .

When April with his showers sweet with fruit
The drought of March has pierced unto the root
And bathed each vein with liquor that has power
To generate therein and sire the flower;
When Zephyr also has, with his sweet breath,
Quickened again, in every holt and heath,
The tender shoots and buds, and the young sun
Into the Ram one half his course has run,
And many little birds make melody
That sleep through all the night with open eye
(So Nature pricks them on to ramp and rage)-
Then do folk long to go on pilgrimage

those are the opening lines to Geoffrey Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' and they seem to pull together the random things in this blog post . . .

Back in early February when I received the text of Frank Ronan's column for April's 'The Writer's Plot' in Garden's Illustrated magazine, I breathed a happy sigh of relief that the subject was 'Green' and in particular, English bluebell woods. Of course bluebells were'n't in flower nor were leaves breaking from their buds, so I had to work from reference photographs and my memory, though I did find Dog's Mercury and Honeysuckle already in leaf in the tiny 'Wild Wood' at the end of our garden!

Frank makes the observation that . . .

"A bluebell needs the shimmering green

of the woodland floor for its magic" 

 

and he goes on to beautifully describe how all the varied hues of green transform the blue of a bluebell into

"an illusion of purity and blueness" 

Now is the perfect is time to find a bluebell wood and see this for yourself.

Having 'worked my socks off' during March, I was in need of a recuperative break. Cliff was going on a weekend away to Sussex with the local walking group, so I tagged along and we added an extra couple of days for good measure.

I discovered some new places . . .

The Ditchling Museum of Art & Craft is devoted to the artists that lived and worked in this village tucked in the South Downs north of Brighton, notably Eric Gill and his friends and family but there were others too, such as textile designer and natural dye specialist, Ethel Mairet.

The current special exhibition is about the calligrapher and type designer Edward Johnston (that's his desk in the display, above), coinciding with the 100th anniversary of his type designs for London Transport (with only small tweaks, they are still in use today).

The museum is a beautiful tranquil space full of inspiring things.

I bought souvenirs.

After delivering some of my prints to The Gun Room in Alfriston, which already stocks my cards I drove a little north along some tiny lanes and found Berwick Church. If you're in need of inspiration and don't have time to visit Charleston and want to avoid the crowds, I can recommend this tiny church with murals by Bloomsbury Group artists Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell.

I spent an hour there completely by myself just sitting looking at the paintings and the views across the fields through the clear glass windows and listening to the birds singing in the churchyard.

And revisited some old haunts . . .

A friend who recently moved to Brighton had been urging me to visit so that I could show her places I remembered from my student days. I wasn't sure I really wanted to re-live my past, especially if I found places changed beyond recognition, but I was looking forward to having a long chat, a good laugh and a nice lunch. In the end we had great fun wandering along the sea front (what IS that monstrous THING?!!!) and around the town.

The old fruit and veg market next to the Art College has gone and was a pile of rubble behind hoardings but opposite I was delighted to find the Market Diner was still looking just the same (except for new formica on the table tops). I like to think of all the art students who have enjoyed a calming mug of tea there after a scathing crit'.

Kemptown is a bit tidier but still familiar and there, still thriving, was The Bristol pub which was next door to the Seafront Hall of residence (now swanky apartments!). We went in for a drink and a sit down in the lounge.

Walking back to my friend's flat we past the building that was the subject of my first reduction linocut (a long long time ago! 

I now remember, we were paired to share sheets of paper, printing on the reverse of our partner's print; then we each got a set of all the printed pages and we bound them into books. On the cover of my book (I found it on a shelf in my studio) is an embossed street plan of Kemptown and foil blocking representing the 'sea'.

New discoveries and refreshed memories . . .

and having a jolly good break from the norm!

maybe that's what inspired Chaucer's Pilgrims too?

Wood engraving illustrations of
scenes from The Canterbury Tales

by June Chapman
(I bought these at an auction a few years back - and really must frame them!)

Celia

xx

On the trail of the lonesome pine . . . my illustration for March's Gardens Illustrated

Until the email arrives, I have no idea what Frank Ronan is going to write about for his Gardens Illustrated column 'The Writer's Plot'. And as he lives in California for most of the year, I can't rely on familiar seasonal plants making an appearance.

But even for Frank, the March article was something different . . . a road trip!

Over lunch one day when Cliff was at home, we sat down and followed Frank's route on Google Maps. If you have the magazine and read the article, Frank writes: 'I made a road trip the other day...' with a casualness of saying he popped down to the supermarket; BUT let me explain, Cliff and I have driven from Portland to San Francisco, we've also driven from LA to San Francisco, taking the coastal route in both cases, and each of those trips took us over a week! At our pace I think we'd need 6 weeks to do Frank's trip! So I suspect he took more than just 'a day'! 

As you can imagine, the landscape and the conifers change dramatically along the route from gnarled coastal trees, then mile on mile of uniform forest and on to the Avenue of Giants back in California. Not to mention the wide pastures of Montana and the beauty of the Lolo National Forest (somewhere I hadn't heard of and is now on my 'must see' list!)

I admit to floundering about not knowing what to draw. My sketchbook is evidence of this!

Frank's writing is always full of passing cultural and literary references, some I'm familiar with others have me turning to google (who's Smokey Bear?) ... I learn a lot. The key that unlocked my ideas for this linocut was this sentence: "spectacular mountains give way to the sort of cowboy landscape I'd dreamed of seeing since the first reading of My Friend Flicka" . . . I remember that book, it's one of my Mum's favourites and she recommended it to me when I was young. I was more taken by the black and white illustrations by Charles Tunnicliffe and noticed he'd also illustrated some of my favourite Ladybird nature and wildlife books. I think this was when the seed was sown in my mind that drawing pictures could be a real job.

So slightly inspired by Tunnicliffe and My Friend Flicka, together with my own memories of huge landscape views in Oregon and California and some unspecific conifers – here is my finished illustration in the March edition of Gardens Illustrated.

To my surprise I've managed to get my work schedules back on track, it's amazing how fast I can carve lino when I have to!!! I can take the Easter weekend off, knowing I just have to print and scan the linocut for May's Gardens Illustrated to meet the deadline next week. Phew!

Wishing all of you a very happy and peaceful Easter weekend. I hope the sun shines, but if not finding somewhere cosy is good option.

Celia

xx