The garden is ablaze with lovely colours although I am disappointed with some of my new dahlias. I don’t like the colour and the middle bit but that sounds terribly ungrateful! Their redeeming feature is that they are ok to paint.
We are having a bit of a summer here but Norfolk will always have its winds and changeability I suppose. There have been lots of tourists going to the coast but we are able to keep away from the herds in our little inland village.
My favourite flowers at the moment are the sneezewort and echinacea.
We ate some nice runner beans from the vegetable patch and the new lettuce is coming on. Some of M’s tomatoes are huge but still green; hopefully the sun this week will help them along. We have some tiny orange ones which are real-tomato tasty. No sign of any courgette flowers yet and the aubergines are still small anonymous looking plants so I can’t believe that we’ll get any actual aubergines from them.
I have been busy all weekend with our exhibition at Cley and several paintings have gone to new homes including these:
I was waiting to get the figs back from the framers so that can get posted out today. It is impossible to predict who will buy anything or what they will buy. We’re having a break next weekend then continuing until the end of August. I also have a couple of flower paintings submitted for a Norwich ‘Norfolk Summer’ show and some postcard sized paintings for a Lockup Gallery secret postcard exhibition.
It’s nice having some motivation to paint, although I’m usually ok I do have times when I’m lacking in inspiration but at the moment the garden is providing more than enough. It’s also nice exhibiting with the other artists at Cley; both do coastal landscapes or beach scenes but have very different styles and the work is of a high standard.
Ros Copping is a trained artist and Steven Levitt is self taught like me. Kat Wheeler’s pottery adds another dimension to the exhibition and is always popular so much so that she has run out. I swapped a painting for a frog green pot which I’ve painted already and another for one of Ros’s beach scenes.
I am so pleased to now be part of a small community of artists. My friend Jane Wheeler who’s pots frequently feature in my paintings is moving to Scotland and I will miss her creativity and friendship so meeting new people is good.
After the Cley exhibition who knows; so much depends on the COVID situation so it is difficult if not impossible to make concrete plans. We would all like to do a Xmas exhibition but we won’t be standing outside in November!
And as predicted we are on the way towards more lockdown having started to move away from it. But as I said depressingly predictable. Martin and me were considering moving to France to get away from the hateful politics here; increasingly authoritarian, blatant liars but still being voted for, lining of pockets in what can only be described as corruption, honours for mates and so it goes on. And Steve Bannon praising Cummings and predicting swing to far right. Boris recruiting an American style spokesperson and there we have it.
I don’t know where I stand with my lungs or access to medical treatment there , and the idea of moving house again and leaving Norfolk is ghastly. But if we have to be political refugees then so be it.
All a bit alarmist maybe! And yesterday I felt so exhausted I thought I had heart failure or something. M keeps telling me to phone Papworth but all I have to say is that I am very tired with swollen ankles. I have a video call with the psych this Wednesday so I’ll speak to her about it maybe.
Anyway I have laundry to do and a painting to post off, plus some cards to get printed...
This week’s painter has to be Ann Redpath for her beautiful flower paintings:
