Month: July 2019

Ex-Indian Army Plimsols

In the spring of 1978, I’d just finished a big black and white project and I was ready to burst into colour. I went back to the acrylics that I’d used at college and set about painting ever-more ambitious still lifes, flowers and landscapes. At one stage I remember setting myself the goal of one painting a week, but I think that it was after meeting up with my old tutor Bryan Robb at the Royal College of Art, that I speeded things up. He had chuckled and said he’d done a similar thing but he had set himself to paint one a day.

I painted these ex-Indian Army plimsols, which I remember had cost me just fifty pence at the Army surplus stores, on a primed postcard size piece of hardboard which was most likely recycled from a previously abandoned painting. An unfinished painting of South Kirkby colliery and another of my mum and dad’s back garden got recycled in this way.

Of course, I couldn’t afford to have the paintings framed professionally so I made my own, not just to save money but because I thought each frame should be a one-off for that particular painting. This one was dropped into a small tray-like frame of recycled materials, the inch or so around the glued-in board painted in a matching or harmonising coat of acrylic.

Once I’d got a dozen or more paintings together, I arranged to show them to the assistant curator at Wakefield Art Gallery. I packed them in the backpack that I’d used in Iceland and cycled to Wentworth Terrace. I got shot down in flames. One thing the curator rejected, rather scornfully, was that I’d framed the paintings, as if I was expecting her to offer me an exhibition there and then (I was!)

So that was the end of my fledgling career in fine art, at least for the present but some years later, in a new tasteful professionally-made frame (and I’m sorry that I haven’t still got the homemade version) from John at Art of Oak, Tammy Hall Street, Wakefield, this went into my first one-man show at the City Museum, then housed in the Mechanics Institute on Wood Street, Wakefield.

My dad insisted one buying it, and I’m so glad he did, because it’s now come back to me, and I couldn’t bear to part with it now, because it’s such a reminder of those early days.

The plimsols are on a workbench that I’d constructed in my small room in a shared flat. The plant box behind was made in my student days at the Royal College of Art for my room at the college hostel at Evelyn Gardens, South Kensington. And, no, I don’t still have those plimsols: I’m afraid that eventually, I wore them out.

Broad Bean and Courgette Bruschetta

broad bean bruschetta

Still enjoying our broad beans and concocting new recipes every day. With beans and mint fresh from the garden, this is a perfect summer lunch.

  • 3 cups broad beans, podded
  • 1 small courgette, grated
  • 2 spring onions, chopped
  • 4 sun-dried tomatoes, cut into small pieces
  • 4 tablespoons chopped mint
  • 4 thickish slices of sourdough
  • 1 clove garlic, peeled

Cook beans in microwave with dessert spoonful of water for three minutes. Drain and let cool, then slip off the outer skins.

Using a little olive oil (we used the oil from the jar of sun-dried tomatoes) sauté onions, grated courgette and sun-dried tomatoes for two minutes. Add broad beans and mint, stir together and warm them through.

Brush both sides of the slices of sourdough with olive oil and cook on a ridged griddle pan until toasted on both sides. Rub each piece of toast with the garlic.

Pile on the bean mixture and drizzle with a little balsamic vinegar.

Courgettes and Beetroot

vegetables
Today’s colander from the veg beds: broad beans, dwarf French beans, onions, beetroot (we sometimes use the tops like spinach) and courgettes.

Barbara is using a recipe in the latest, August, edition of Healthy Food Guide, ‘Spicy chicken kebabs with sweet potato wedges’ as a starting point but substituting whatever is available in the garden today, so Maris Bard potato wedges instead of sweet potato and beans instead of cucumber.

recipe

In Friday’s Gardeners’ World, BBC2, Frances Tophill mentioned that she’d been growing sweet potatoes in her greenhouse, so we might try that next year. Sweet potatoes might stand up to us neglecting them for a week when we head off for the Dales better than our cucumber and tomato plants did.

We didn’t plant tomatoes this year after two or three years of them being shrivelled in searing summer heat when we went away but in Healthy Food Guide, Jennifer Irvine suggests that it’s still not too late to grow a few:

“Experienced gardeners reading this are probably rolling their eyes, thinking that if you wanted to plant tomatoes you should have done it months ago. If you’re growing from seed, that’s true. But there is no shame in leap-frogging straight to a young tomato plant at this time of year.”

She suggests begging, bartering or – what we’ll do – buying a plant or two from our local garden centre. They can go on producing fruit until October, so it would be worth giving it a try.

Links

Healthy Food Guide

Jennifer Irvine

Broad Beans

wigwam
The runner beans have yet to flower but we’re picking dwarf French and broad beans.

It’s got to that time of year when the veg beds are at their most productive and we can wander down the garden and gather beans, lettuce, beetroot and herbs.

seeds

We’ve done well with a selection of seeds that came bundled with the April Gardeners’ World magazine in an offer at Sainsbury’s: coriander, mixed lettuce, zinnia, cosmos mixed and black-eyed Susan. The zinnias have done well, they’ve now been planted on and are filling up the border, but we’ve yet to sow the Sarah Raven calendula, which were also included, as we already had plenty of those: in the spring as I weeded the lower veg bed I found a cluster of calendula seedlings from a few plants that had been growing there last year. I transplanted them to grow on (in the corner of the L-shaped bed in my photograph, above) and we’ve now got at least a hundred flowering and attracting hoverflies.

beans
De Monica broad beans

The Gardeners’ World offer also included a decent pair of lightweight gardening gloves (Barbara’s size, but I can’t have everything) and a half-price garden pass, which we’ve already used at St Andrew’s Botanic Gardens, so in effect, we’ve already saved the cover price.

Published
Categorized as Drawing

Wild Yorkshire

July spread

Here’s a preview of my July Wild Yorkshire diary for the Dalesman, that’s July 2020 because after three months of work concentrating on my articles, I’ve finally got to the stage where I’m a whole twelve months ahead of schedule.

This article will describe a visit the Wakefield Naturalists’ Society made to Staveley Yorkshire Wildlife Trust nature reserve earlier this month. Migrants included black-tailed godwits heading south for the winter and painted lady butterflies still heading north for the summer. We also had our best ever views of sedge warbler and reed warbler from one of the hides on East Lagoon, which are built on raised platforms so that you can see down into the reed bed.

We saw common spotted orchid and one of the outstanding specialities of Staveley, the marsh helleborine but we didn’t spot the less conspicuous common twayblade. Something to look out for when we’re next there.

Published
Categorized as Drawing

Learning Pi

Designed in Clip Studio Paint using my desktop iMac, plus graphics pad, drawn in Procreate on my iPad Pro.

In week two, ‘Brains’ of the University of York’s The Biology of Bugs, Brains and Beasts course, for our homework we’ve been asked to get our neurones and synapses working by trying to memorise Pi. They give us the ratio to a hundred digits but in my comic strip mnemonic I’ve gone for the first fourteen:

3.14159265358979

I have a habit of looking for dates when I’m memorising numbers, so the first four digits 1415 set the historical period for me. I did actually have a Welsh granny, Anne Jones, from a Welsh-speaking family in Connah’s Quay, so for the ‘9’ I decided to go for ‘Nain’, pronounced ‘nine’, the Welsh for granny.

To really make this work as a memory-jogger, I’d have to try and bring in all my senses when remembering this story: the buzz of angry bees, the sweet scent of the meadow flowers, the texture of the old gate as it creaks open. It’s important to get a flow going for the story because I need to remember the numbers in a particular order. It’s different to one of those memory games where you’re asked to remember a collection of random objects in any order.

I crammed four digits into the final frame. At this rate, to remember one hundred digits, I’d end up with graphic novel seven or eight pages long. In case I ever need to know the ratio of Pi to fourteen decimal places, I should be able to remember by thinking back to the comic strip but, more usefully, I’ve enjoyed getting back into drawing on my iPad, which I’ve taken a bit of break from over the last three months.

Link

Bugs, Brains and Beasts

The Future Learn Biology of Bugs, Brains and Beasts course run by the biosciences department of the University of York

Ginger Beer Plant, day 5

ginger beer plant

It’s day five for my ginger beer plant and by now the naturally-occurring yeast and the bacteria that I added on the skins of the sultanas should have started bubbling away. There were just one or two bubbles yesterday morning, so I decided to leave it until today before adding the first additional feed of two teaspoons of sugar and one of ground ginger.

There’s definitely been a lot of activity as there’s what looks like a microbial mat a centimetre deep at the bottom of the jar but at the top, those little islands look as if they’re going mouldy so I wonder if the mixture has died and turned ‘sour’.

Hopefully, now that its been fed, it will start bubbling away. The mixture so far smells exactly like old-fashioned ginger beer.

Pottery, Batley 1969

pottery workshop, Batley
Pencil drawing of the pottery room, which was at the far, top end of a now-demolished range of buildings behind Batley School of Art. Here I’m looking out towards the far end. As far as I remember, a long work bench and the kilns were on the right. In the previous year the workshop had moved here from one of two huts across the road.

Looking for a suitable bowl to stand my ginger beer plant in yesterday afternoon, I remembered these bowls that I threw on the wheel at Batley School of Art in 1969 and I brought them down from the attic.

bowls

These were the rejects; somewhere I’ve got one bowl which was slightly more successful but my ultimate ambition had been to make a teapot. Mr MacAdam, our ceramics tutor, talked me through the process, which involved throwing a spout separately and attaching that with slip (watered-down clay) to the teapot. He was keen that the handle should appear to grow naturally from the pot.

bowl

Unfortunately I never got that far. Several, if not all of these bowls, were originally intended to be teapots but they wobbled on the wheel and, in order to salvage something from my efforts, I cut them down and repurposed them.

I had some limited success with mugs. You can drink from them, but my idea of randomly blotching them with manganese powder didn’t work: they just look as if someone with blue powder paint on their hands has picked them up.

But I do like the glaze on these bowls, I just wish that I’d used the same glaze on the mugs. Mr MacAdam keep a grey, A4 hardback, which he referred to as his ‘Dirty Book’, to keep a record of recipes for glazes that he tried. He claimed that he could always tell which students had done life drawing by the shapes of the pots they threw on the wheel.

I treasured a demonstration mug which Mac made to demonstrate the process. There were subtle features, like a sharper edge on the inside of the rim to prevent tea dribbling down the outside of the mug. I used the mug right through college but sadly it got broken decades ago.

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Categorized as Drawing

Ginger Beer Plant

ginger beer plant
ginger beer recipe

I’ve started a Futurelearn online course about ‘Bugs, Brains and Beasts’ and, as our practical work for week one, we’ve been asked to conduct an experiment in microbiology: to start brewing a batch of ginger beer.

We’ve put five ingredients into the ginger beer ‘plant’: lemon juice, lemon zest, sugar, ground ginger and, to provide the yeast for the fermentation process, five sultanas. The yeast and bacterium needed for the process occur naturally on the skin of grapes. If all goes well, the yeast Saccharomyces florentinus and the bacterium Lactobacillus higardii should start bubbling away during the next seven days. I’ll feed them daily on ground ginger and sugar.

Link

The Biology of Bugs, Brains and Beasts, a free Futurelearn course run by the biosciences department of the University of York

Batley School of Art, 1969

Monument
Monument to the textile industry in the town square.

It’s now fifty years this summer since I left Batley School of Art and it must now be twenty since I attended a one-off reunion there so I couldn’t resist taking a look at the old place while Barbara made a start on the shopping at Tesco’s this morning. I was hoping that I might find it open for this year’s final show but the art school moved to Dewsbury some years ago and the building now houses the Cambridge Street Muslim boys only secondary school.

The upstairs room on the left with the huge east-facing window and the skylight running along the apex of the roof was the life room. Below that, immediately to the left of the main entrance, was the office of the principal, Mr Smethurst, and, to the right of the entrance, the admin office for essentials such as buying your ticket for dinner (plus a separate ‘SWEET’ ticket for the pudding!) in the college canteen.

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