Peter Jon Fowler

Painter

Whatever next?

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There’s something odd going on here. Why should two mats be laid down apparently for the sheep? Why are the sheep treating them with some suspicion?

Well, forever battling with the dilemma of how to connect art with the time-consuming business of looking after Rare Breed sheep, I reverted to an experiment I had successfully conducted 10 or more years ago when living on Les Causses in Languedoc, France. We were surrounded there by brebis, the local version of sheep from whose milk comes smelly cheese the name of which escapes me as I write. A flock went past my humble cottage most days so one day, with the shepherd’s permission, I spread a white carpet right across the metalled track so that they could not proceed without walking across it. After initial hesitation, this they did and, because their feet were dirty, an interesting and non-random pattern of hoof-prints was left on the carpet.

This is what I was trying to replicate here, seizing a morning when there had been overnight rain so that soil had stuck, I hoped, to the sheep’s hooves. The material is upside-down laminated plastic simulated floor boards, exposing the soft fluffy underneath – not ideal, particularly as it was laid on the slightly soft ground, but to be an artist is to be forever optimistic. The sheep were of course to be the unknowing artists – and it worked, up to a point. I scattered stock nuts outside the gate of the field the sheep were in, on and beyond the mats across the gateway and, forever greedy, the sheep, hesitantly at first, shuffled out. The result looked like this:

These are simply unedited, field images. I’m sure they’ll look more like real Art once I have treated them accordingly, and we will be able to acclaim the sheep as True Artists.

Filed Under: Art

Following their Leader

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As this is, serendipidly but felicitously, one of the best photographs I have taken, an image of sheep following me up a slope requires no apology in an arty website, for this is ART. I could bluff on about how difficult it was to persuade 63 rare breed sheep all to pose at the same moment in a Z-shaped line but in fact I just stopped walking (and so did the sheep), turned round and snapped down the hill. The secret of my hold over the flock lay not in the power of my personality in the ovine dimension but in a box in my pocket containing stock nuts. The sheep knew it was there and would have followed me anywhere in the hope of getting a nut to eat.

The Lost Words

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The poster says it all really. I found it genuinely shocking that so many, to me common, words were falling out of use and could be unknown to children. Pity the child who knoweth not ‘otter’.

The message is carried by a restrained and exquisite exhibition at the HQ of The Lettering Trust at Snape Maltings. The small works of art need no commentary. I illustrate a sample of them. All I need add is that they are beautifully displayed in an exhibition which it is a privilege to visit.

Not waving, just shepherding

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Even if this post says nothing, I have to write something on this, the last day of March, otherwise almost a month has gone by since I last communicated with myself and my Reader. Blame the sheep – it’s lovely looking after such interesting and beguiling creatures but, as every shepherd has found since the beginnings of domesticated farming, they do take up a lot of time.

The two principal varieties we have in this year’s flock are neatly illustrated in this image where they are ruminating mid-morning in their ‘refuge’ or default field after a night out on the Warren: Hebrideans and White-faced Woodlands (lying down). We also have numerous cross-breeds of Rare-Breed sheep and, though they did not make it into this photograph, three Manx Loaghtans (one of them is actually unobtrusively there, lying down centre background in front of three Hebs). The splendiferous Three Horns in the left foreground had to be taken away soon after this photograph because, for no apparent reason, he became aggressive and bellicose, dangerously so with those horns not only to his shepherds but potentially to the public on the Open Access heathland where the flock grazes.

Anyway, we’ve now arrived at the end of March and I have not lifted a paintbrush this year – partly busyness, partly because the studio has been so cold, and partly painterly blockage (again!). Three ‘works’ have, however, emerged during this last week, through paintbrush-less creativity, and they might well be the subject of a spoof post tomorrow.

Capitulation

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Despite all common sense and auguries to the contrary, I have succumbed to temptation and submitted a couple of my paintings for consideration for the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. I have not done this for years, though I entered several years in a row when I was a beginner and had not realised what a futile exercise it is.

The two paintings have already appeared in this Commentary but just for the record the two submitted are:

‘Green Barn, Suffolk’

 

‘Solaroid’

Don’t hold your breath!

15 March: good advice. Neither painting was accepted. Why am I not surprised?

Winter exhibition chez nous

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This winter’s domestic exhibition should have been written up some time ago but I have waited for the return of a couple of paintings which were on exhibition elsewhere and also for the exhibition to settle down. We have kept swapping pictures around and in and out of display throughout. Indeed two have changed places since I shot the final shoot displayed here.

Several of the glazed paintings pick up reflections but that is the way it is; and several are not straight on because of the (lack of) space available for photography in front of them. The photographs are displayed clockwise from the left of the door into the kitchen right round an L-shaped room back to opposite the kitchen door. The theme throughout is ‘Vivid’; the main criterion by which these works were selected, is ‘brightness, colourfulness, especially in blocks of solid colour.’

Within that criterion, the 18 paintings are by an eclectic group of artists, namely Michael Carlo, John Crossley, Peter Fowler, Birkin Haward, Barbara Rae and Linda Thomas. Seven of the works are oil on canvas but others are acrylic or mixed media and two are collages. Some of the works are for sale.

 

  

 

                                  

 

 

 

 

Copyright on all images Peter Jon Fowler

The Lines of Friston

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One of the World Heritage Sites in Holland is called ‘The Lines of Amsterdam’. The ‘Lines’ are the extended defences of Amsterdam stretching right round the city, sometimes as just the sea but for long stretches as built walls, banks, ditches, mounds, and gun emplacements. Their origins go back to the 1880s, after experience during the Franco-German war of 1870-71, and their last active phase was when, towards the end of the Second World War, the retreating German army stripped the defences of their armament.

The ‘Lines of Friston’, so-named by me, are not quite on that scale, though the name of the Amsterdam defences is the source of my title.

Friston is a small village in coastal Suffolk where I had a cottage for a short time six years ago. It lies just 4 miles inland from Aldeburgh and the long, often lonely beaches which were regarded c1939-40 as a highly-likely landing area for the forthcoming German invasion. Hence the ‘Lines of Friston’, four carefully placed blockhouses on its eastern approaches along the main road from Aldeburgh (the A1064).

Recently the rather scruffy hedges have been removed in the area and, although new hedges have already been planted, for the moment two of the blockhouses on the west of the road, sitting in newly-ploughed arable, are fully in view from the road where attack was presumably expected to come from. Here is that view, with photographs of the individual blockhouses following:

The two blockhouses west of the A1064, with Friston village to the right and the southern blockhouse to the left

 

The northern blockhouse                                                     The southern blockhouse

Though not quite on the scale of the Amsterdam defences, four blockhouses ‘defending’ one village is surely unusual. I would guess this little group has been properly written up somewhere and it will be interesting to follow up my minor piece of opportunistic photography of structures which, though constructed within my lifetime, are now fully ‘historic monuments’ in their own right. Perhaps I am too?

 

In memoriam Ugly

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Ugly on Snape Warren, 9 January, 2018

‘Ugly’ was the undeserved name of one of the three remaining foundation members of the National Trust Orford Ness flock currently over-wintering at Snape. She died two days ago at the age of 12. A Manx Loaghtan, over the years she has been a hard-working ewe who has mothered quite a number of the sheep currently in the flock.

 

  We noted she was, apparently by choice, very much on her own when we visited the flock on Orford Ness back in September; and she has spent much of her time in recent weeks on Snape Warren on her own too, by preference near a lone pine tree. She literally stood by a sick Whitefaced Woodland ram during its last days a fortnight ago.

 

 

Blood Moonrise

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The recent ‘blood moon’ was quite an awe-inspiring sight, even without its much-trumpeted total eclipse (21 January). Partly because of the sheep flock, I was out and about a lot in the dusk and dark of January, from the 6th onwards when the new moon began. Here are a few of the photographs I took, illustrating the rise of the ‘blood moon’ which a few hours later was to be eclipsed:

Full moon rising over Snape Warren on 20 January at 16.06

 

                          as viewed from the riverside marsh, clearing different trees at 16.28

   as viewed from within the wood at 17.06 when an optical illusion makes it seem to have sunk

 

I did not take a good photograph of the total eclipse, mainly because I failed to meet the basic requirement i.e. being awake at the right time. Here’s my best one, of the partial eclipse at 04.07 on the 21st:

 

 

Filed Under: Art

Exhibitions Continued

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John Piper’s Fawley VI also caught my eye at the London Art Fair for the reason, obvious to me, that I had spent much time in the second half of 2018 painting and re-painting a not dissimilar image:

Now I put them close together I can see that, of course, Piper’s is more sophisticated and subtle but nevertheless, given that I was completely unaware that he had painted Fawley VI, the similarities in the images are striking. I take it, from is title, that Piper was abstracting an image from a real scene whereas I was trying to paint an abstract from almost nothing – my image’s origins lay in the abstraction course I went to in Aldeburgh in May last year (see posts at the time).

I don’t normally show ‘bad’ art but I can’t resist showing, without comment or identification, this example, in my humble opinion, of an outstanding example of that genre:

The London Art Fair has now disappeared for another year; and so has my next international exhibition, this time at the Barbican Art Gallery, London. I just managed to catch ‘Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy and the Avant-garde’ before it closed. As it has now closed and photography was not in any case allowed, I cannot illustrate it but, as doubtless intended, it left a strong impression of just how many couples, albeit many of them fleetingly coupled, worked in Europe in and on the fringes of the Modernist movement either side of the mid-20th century. The exhibition was primarily of historical material – photographs, books, pamphlets and manuscripts such as letters – rather than great art as such: indeed, the only striking paintings I noticed were two by Kandinsky and in the section devoted to the Delauneys. Here was primary historical material of great value on an interesting aspect of twentieth century European art and culture; though I have to confess that much of the detail did not particularly engage me.

And now to a more modest and more engaging exhibition, this time back to The Cut at Halesworth. There I visited a three-man exhibition, showing for example works such as the one above: ‘Lapwings’ by James Faure Walker.

My main reason for visiting it, however, was because one of the three artists is John Crossley, here dipping his toes in, I think for the first time, the art scene in which he has chosen to live. He has, of course, greatly helped me this last year with constructive critiques, as outlined in several posts in 2018. I post this image of one of his paintings with apologies, for clearly it is defective; but the lighting is such at The Cut that it is almost impossible to record glazed paintings without picking up reflections. Try John’s own web-page to see the full glory of his colour.


Filed Under: Art