June is making herself very hard to love this year. Recent mornings she has turned up with a very November look on her face. The word greige and June have no reason to appear in the same sentence.
I thought I would share a local weather explanation.
Last year our yard was vibrating with heat and colour.
It is hard to think that yesterday the weather stopped any serious yardening and the only time I crossed the yard was to take washing to the tumble dryer.
It did not look this pretty.
The day was not without some colourful excitement. One of my hybrid images from my Meddled Photographs x Watercolour project has been chosen to be printed onto glass to create a unique splash back in a recently renovated kitchen.
The full description of my project is here.
I am sure there will be a splashback reveal soon. Currently there are many blue squares of wall adhesive on the freshly delivered glass.
It is the Meddled Photograph of the same location as the glum picture at the top of this blog.
Then late in the afternoon a conversation starter was posted on one of my arty Whatsapp groups.
My comment is the green one. What I love about this brief, arty exchange of ideas is that it is timeless.
Artists of all types would have had just this type of discussion throughout history.
As someone who has always had to embrace new technology. I am used to the challenges and the.convoluted thinking that these things often require. I would be really interested in what anyone who reads this thinks.
As it turns out, a greige day was quite the fertile place for creative thinking.
Creatively I have grown like a weed. I chose to step away from exhibiting at formal art exhibitions for a year and just let art and photography grow in their own way.
The kite surfers at St Michaels Mount were the first sign that something was up . Goodness knows why I had never considered that the skills, both analogue and digital that I used in Medical Imaging could be transferred to photography and art.
The epiphany occurred on Mounts Bay beach during a cold winter weekend in January 2025. I could get mediocre photographs of a great location and some kite surfers but nothing particularly Zingy. Until I tried sticking three photos together and slightly altering their angles and magnification.
18 months in and I happily stick anything that I have photographed or painted together, to create an image which pleases me. Along the way I have used screen printing tricks like deregistering and sometimes registering, different renditions of the exact same subject. Altering perspectives, angles, magnifications and colours. Anything goes really. No guarantee of success, the failure rate is high, but when the serendipity goddess is in a good mood then anything can happen.
Like all experimental creative processes there are more duds than there are successes. But there is always some learning lurking even in the duddiest of duds.
Sometimes I flip the process and paint one of my amalgamated images as an original painting.
Yesterday’s blog featured one of my hybrid images that I was always planning to paint.
There was more flipping, flipping because the image was of a small yacht haven on the Peloponnese in Greece. Just a tiny jetty that offered overnight, safe mooring just off a shingle beach. Double flipping because my digital image was created using three different photographs, superimposed, simplified and then overlayed on a hand painted watercolour background.
Then flipped colour wise because everyone knows that all images of boats in Greece should be represented in shades of blue, green and turquoise. But I wanted to represent the warmth of the evening and the moment.
Painting this image yesterday I abstracted it a little further.
I also had a go at doing a digital deregistered double image. A pencil sketch overlayed on top of the watercolour.
Just like growing weeds, I never quite know what will pop up next .
Just like weeds quite a lot of these ideas end up in the bin.
One person’s weed however can be someone else’s flower.
What is something you wish you could tell your 20-year-old self?
My advice to my 20 year old self would be significantly different from the advice I would give to my 16 year old self. To add a caveat, any advice to my younger self that would create life changing decisions would alter my here and now. My here and now is my happy place. No changes needed. People often think change is for the better but of course change can equally bring rather negative consequences.
At 16, I would advise sticking to my artsy A level choices and fighting harder for them.
At 20 I would advise that the Science choices have worked and would continue to work. However I would suggest taking a year out, take a breath, travel a little. These delightful options were not available in the 70’s.
Lipstick
At 16 I was obsessed with No 7 Plum Beautiful.
By 20 I had moved on. It took 30 years of experimentation to lead me back.
30 years wasted.
At 16 I felt art floating imperceptibly from my fingertips
At 20 that loss felt profound. Sometimes I can be a Drama Queen.
It turns out that Art, like Love, will find a way.
Something is up in blogland. Inexplicably my reader stats for this year have jumped. Not quite half way through the year my blogs have already been read by the same number of people who read my blogs in all of 2025.
A red letter day of sorts. It seems appropriate to share the blogs of past June the 15th’s.
Some time hopping for you all. Which is a really crafty way of throwing in a book review. This morning I was awake early finishing a book that I have loved. I just couldn’t quite finish it last night.
Time hopping in books is either to your taste or not. No spoilers here but the time hopping element in this book is as near perfect as any that I have read.
And if that were not enough the book stops almost exactly where my blogs for June 15th start. In a shop just after restrictions were lifted post Covid
Picture from June 15th 2020
In another quirky little coincidence the bakery, where I bought this doughnut, has been in business for 5 centuries. The exact time span of Tracy Chevalier’s book. Life is every bit as strange as fiction.
My 5 year effort seems pretty tame compared to 5 centuries.
Black timber and a bright yellow door is a small homage to the garden/yarden style of Derek Jarman, who created an other worldly garden at his home, Prospect Cottage on Dungeness Beach, off the Kent Coast.
I am not certain how I stumbled into the world of Derek Jarman it would have been in the early 1980s in Brighton.I love the way he writes and his aesthetic style.
Prospect Cottage
Modern Nature, his book about HIV and creating a garden is one of my favourite books to dip into, until I loaned it and it has failed to be returned. Or has simply been misplaced or left somewhere.
There are so many nuggets of wisdom to take from his musings but this little quote always makes me happy.
How luxurious and fortunate is it, to wander aimlessly either mentally or physically within our own lives.
Yellow door. 2.0
Last year I painted this door yellow. Only at dawn did it look even close to the perfect egg yolk yellow. Any later sunlight and the bright white walls bleached the yellow to a horrible acidic shade that was very much not to our taste. Traffic Light by Zinzer is perfect.
How on earth did we get to this? Buying 1kg of coffee beans in an oil can.
Roll back to late Thursday afternoon when our beloved van was crumpled while parked outside our house by one of the parents whose children attend the school opposite. How the accident occurred is a mystery to us as we were parked very sensibly. But these things happen.
As a consequence we had an Industrial estate day getting repair quotes. As a reward we went to a favourite bikers cafe, which is how the coffee beans in an oil can occurred.
But while I am on the subject of our van this may be the time to address the love affair that has evolved in the past month.
This was us two weeks ago returning from our van adventure in France. Lola’s first foreign holiday. She has always loved the camper van.
But this was her first time abroad and her first time without her beloved Hugo.
Two weeks as an ‘only’ dog in a camper van has quite turned her head. Now she is obsessed with the camper van. Every time we leave the house she pulls hard in the direction of the van. It seems that life in three square metres of space is infinitely preferable to a whole house with a well kept yard.
Maybe it was the cheese or charcuterie or maybe the very reduced distance between bed and water bowl. So here we are parked up very locally taking in an early summer morning in the camper van. She is very happy.
The algorithms of my social media have had a bit of a hiccough/hiccup this week.
As a 60+ woman with a head of exuberant curls, marketing flat caps at me is going to land exactly no on-line sales. But relentlessly, this week, the cookies and the algorithms would really like me to buy a flat cap.
Writing this blog may well make the situation worse.
Flat caps do live large in my memory bank because my paternal Grandad was almost never seen outside without one. Indoors the cap, his gas filled cigarette lighter, Rizla cigarette papers and Old Holborn tobacco tin were never far from his side.
When I see a flat cap there is a vestigia of the fragrance of tobacco and lighter gas that flashes through my brain. When I went to London at 18 he had already been dead for 6 years . This building, the one on the tin, was on my bus route to Barts Hospital, when I first saw it the same little flash of fragrance zipped through my head, and I wished I could tell him that the building really existed.
Flat caps are a bit of a granddad thing. My maternal Great Grandfather makes an appearance on my family tree with a fine flat cap and moustache.
So I must admit to having a fondness for flat caps but not a need to buy one.
Once again my photo archive has come up with evidence that I have quite an archive of flat cap images. They do frame a face and set a tone which is significantly different to that of the rather over-popular baseball cap/hat.
Street Art on Union Street.Print by Annette WrathmelA singer in our London Songs ChoirAndy posingThe flat cap that got away
Clearly I do love a flat cap, but am never going to buy one.
And just like that a great flat cap wearer dies on the same day as I wrote about flat caps.
David Hockney has died, we were lucky enough to catch this exhibition twice. Once at the Royal Academy London and also at The Guggenheim Bilbao. Two reviews below.
I have been collecting friends since just before Infant school.
The friendship longevity record is held by my pre-school friend Juliet. I was named after her and always felt slightly in awe. Probably because she was older and wiser. Our friendship was forged by our mothers who had been friends from birth. In turn their mothers had forged their friendship simply by the serendipity of meeting on the post-natal ward of a small cottage hospital in Essex. The grandmother’s friendship was the most unlikely one of all. Juliet’s grandmother ran a shop and was warm, a fabulous cook and religious. My grandmother at the time, was a nurse, very irreligious and ultimately ran a pub. She was warm too, maybe too warm if you were a handsome man. I was never aware of her cooking. Three generations of friendship grown from a most unlikely pairing.
I have been collecting friends ever since. School. Work. Neighbours. Clubs. Some have been lost along the way.
I have always thought that finding a true friend is like finding love. A little bit of research this morning has proved that to be correct.
But here is the surprise !
Which is why Marc is the poster boy of this blog. Beyond his radiant smile, he always smells delicious. I can only dream of being consistently as fragrant as he is. Sometimes we worked 24 hours straight together and he always smiled and was always perfectly acceptable to be up close and personal with even in our worst of moments. Presumably I was in the thrawl of his invisible accelerator for platonic attraction. Who knew!
The reason this particular retirement gathering stands out is that it was the first of any such gathering after Covid.
By one of life’s great coincidences my very last social gathering before Covid, was with the exact same group of friends and colleagues in London. The last outing before Covid hit the world and almost certainly me and my first exposure to the Covid Virus, which has taken away forever a fully functioning sense of smell. And yet still I manage to make friends.
Thank goodness there are other pathways.
Before this mornings research I would say my particular friendship recipe would be.
A positive outlook.
A creative and enquiring mind
A little bit of non-clinical madness.
Vibing on a similar wavelenth
Good sense of humour
Loyalty and Kindness
My excuse for not giving access to the friend zone is usually.
” Not exactly my cup of tea”
Even with today’s research I am going to stick with that because it is a gentle rejection. Iron fist in a velvet glove perhaps but gentle on the outside
Saying someone just doesn’t smell right takes the rejection to all sorts of different places. But goodness me the smell theory really fascinates me because I have always thought there was something intangible involved. I thought it was my limbic system.
But then with a little more research I discovered something that I had forgotten. The Olfactory bulb lives within the limbic system.
So I was right all along.
Five years ago this bunch of friends were my cup of tea and they all smell just wonderful.
Tennis Club admin, rat eradication and emails were my target for the day.
Pest control took a little longer than planned and a Summer rain storm soaked me through. For reasons that I can’t quite put a finger on I decided that a rain storm was exactly the moment to paint a sea pool in a heatwave.
I am physically painting a lot less this year, and yesterday was an absolute joy. This painting is a mixture of traditional water colour and water colour pencils.
Water colour pencils are my quick/ holiday/travel medium of choice. A pencil case and a sketch book take virtually no space in a bag and water is always easy to find.
The other travel tool is my smart phone. Digital manipulation can sometimes rescue a failing painting. The Sea Pool at Conleau did not need rescuing but I did have a little half hour of tweaking.
To be honest I dont think these digitally tweaked images have a huge amount of value. They give me the slight AI ‘ick’. But looking at them gave me some ideas on how to improve my painting. They offer a different perspective. Just one digital manipulation pleases me.
A much simpler less vivid image. Not at all Conleau in a heatwave. But certainly a nod to the 1930’s history of the emergence of Conleau as a tourist destination.
Digital dabbling is a great learning experience and I can do it on my phone whenever there are a few spare minutes in a day
But nothing beats creating art using my hands and art materials. Who could possibly pass up sharpening pencils. Such a satisfying task.
Today I am whisking you all back to France in a heatwave.
The thing about heatwaves is that they are relentlessly hot. A campervan holiday in 35 degrees is an exercise in trying really hard to keep cool when stationary. Humans are one consideration but a curly haired dog is quite another. For her sake we booked into a cool Airbnb for three days.
A heatwave is not great for art or photography. The sun makes photographs really pretty dull as deep shadows and bright sunlight drown out detail
And the baking heat dries out paints far too quickly for anything useful to be achieved. I tried. All attempts are in the bin.
Oh my arty bones were very frustrated I really wanted to show some of the beautiful places we visited.
Our day at Conleau was just one of those days.
A really fascinating scene but the magic and vibrancy is lost in bright sunlight and deep shadow.
For some inexplicable reason, after being drenched by heavy summer rain I decided today was the day to paint Conleau.
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