This is a drawing I made at Walworth Garden Farm's botanical drawing class in South London earlier this week. When I heard about it I thought it'd be a good way of getting out of the studio and into some more experimental drawing and to see a new garden besides. Walworth Garden Farm is a few blocks down the road from Kennington Underground Station - one of those secret London gardens filled with bees (there are hives), quiet shady places amongst the spring blossoms and inspired planting.
It was so fun to go back to basics with no pressure at all to produce a masterpiece of any variety. Illustrator and workshop teacher Karen George took us through a range of drawing exercises and also generously shared her own sketch books with us. I loved that we did warm-ups, I hardly ever do those any more.
It was so great to choose from someone else's pile of materials - boxes of potentially new ways of mark making and drawing materials that I wouldn't normally go for. I decided to step away from the watercolours, as I wanted to play around with other ways of adding colour.
On the second day, we were handed secateurs and told we could pick anything we liked from the lovely flower garden and greenhouses - yay! I always love these spiky guys (forgot to ask what they are - anyone?) but a leaf study is a not a Thing of Joy in my books.
I went for a burst of yellow happiness - forsythia, instead, and began by doing a biro contour drawing before adding pastels and chalk pencil. The Euphorbia got added in afterwards.
It was so lovely to be drawing in a group, to chat and have tea and not get too serious about it all. If you fancy signing up for the next one, you can register for email updates on the website at Walworth Garden farm. Next up is a wooden spoon carving course, which should be loads of fun too.
The sun has been a stranger around these parts again. Damnation!
But the daffodils are out.
Cheap as chips in the shops, and slowly, sleepily beginning to flower in the parks and the churchyard near where I live.
Happiness on a stem, said a woman also considering the flower stand in Tesco's.
Yep. That's about right. Might as well buy a couple of bunches at a time.
Aargh...am I turning into a flower painter? Is that a Bad Thing?
Well, the fact is my friends, I enjoy painting flowers, a lot. And have been since I was about 8 years old. So somewhere, somehow, it's my thing.
Is it my only thing? This is the question.
For now, I see some flowers, I paint 'em, I enjoy the looking(and it's like shooting fish in a barrel too I might add).
Then I share them with you. That's cool with me.
This is teeny, postcard sized. The vase was a present from my lovely sis, who is always so thoughtful with gifts.
The peas, beans and lettuce in our tiny back garden all got razed by slugs this Summer, but the poppies escaped. I was especially pleased to be able to paint these poppies in situ as they don't transport well at all. As you can see, the never ending quest to find the right green mix was a struggle. Oxide of chromium, I'm still not sure about you.
The poppies and nigella in the top watercolour are perhaps not really so much wildflowers, not here in Hackney, at least not without the help of a pack of wildflower meadow mix.
I did the painting outside, on Midsummer's Day at the wonderful St Mary's Secret Garden in Haggerston.
It's a community gardening project that is my midweek break from studio life. The new ecominds garden there is full of lovely flowers at the moment, so much so that its hard to stick to just wild flowers, but a narrowed focus is probably no bad thing for productivity and concentration.
Do you have a favourite Summer flower?
I picked these in Hackney Marsh on Monday, almost in the shadow of the barrier around the Olympics/Radio 1 concert venue which is all fenced up and ready for weekend. Urban pastoral perhaps, but I love the wildness of the marshes, so close to where we live in Hackney, East London. Long may they stay that way. I had to paint quickly - these guys wilt, or the petals drop off, in no time at all. Happy midsummer!
My sis asked me to paint a card for a friend, who is a lover of, amongst many other wonderful things, flowers and fynbos, the indigenous vegetation of the Western Cape, in South Africa.
Away for a while, to do a ten day Vipassana sit, ten days enjoying the gift of silence and mindfulness in the peaceful surrounds of Dhamma Dipa in Herefordshire. The daffodils and narcissus will be well and truly over when I'm back in early May, I'm sure the world will be full of other beautiful things to paint anyway. Be happy, as they say on the meditation courses, be happy!
Painted one rainy morning in Blekinge, Southern Sweden, in a teeny wooden housie with a red wooden table and chairs, listening to a Beethoven piano concerto on an old skool crackling radio. Oak trees, wildflower meadows and murder slugs just outside the door, the placid Baltic and my sis's summer house a two minute walk away.
