Peter Jon Fowler

Painter

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

The Pace Picks Up

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Well, relatively anyway; whereas the first half of January was artistically dull, four exhibitions enlivened the second half.

The first was not strictly an exhibition, but we go to the London Art Fair in Islington each year as if it were an exhibition. Dozens of dealers, plus numerous projects, display their wares, mostly for sale; and quite a lot of red stickers indicate that works are indeed bought. In one way, the show was as enjoyable as ever, not least because we were given VIP status on the back of my having bought a couple of paintings here some years ago; but in another way, I found the show a little lacking in the vitality I associate with it. May be I’m merging familiarity with decline, but nevertheless some hitherto regular dealers were absent and some of my favourite artists were either unrepresented or few in number. Exceptions were Ivor Hitchens and Paul Feiler whose estates are now clearly organised and being sold off.

Paintings that caught my eye included:

‘Landscape’ by Brian Ingham is a variation very much on what I have been trying to paint, that is the detail of a landscape as viewed from above showing individual fields, continuous lines of hedgerows, and other features embedded in the landscape. In painterly terms I can learn from this work to improve my own next time.

This is ‘Swaledale Painting 2’ by Patrick Oliver, if I read it correctly a sensitive interpretation of the landscape along a valley with unenclosed land to either side. A lovely painting, I thought, whether or not I read it correctly.

I’m going to stop this particular post there, even though it is clearly unfinished. But equally clearly ‘to be continued’

2019: a beginning

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Not much of a beginning when half the first month of the new year has already gone; nor has much art happened.

A family visit unanimously condemned my appallingly bad ‘Wow with a shaman’ painting, hanging dominantly in the centre of our domestic winter exhibition (on which I will do a blog shortly). So the next day I replaced him with a church (first image below), and then further blotted him out, changed the colour balance and, later, tucked the west end of the church behind a burial mound.

The other, even more predictable, incident was to go to Halesworth to the exhibition at The Cut for the annual collection of my unsold paintings. I was not disappointed, and duly collected the three canvases that I brought up before Xmas. The biggest one, ‘Green Barn, Suffolk’, is now centre stage of our domestic exhibition, about which I shall write next.

I really doubt whether it is worth my while lugging even a few paintings to just one or two exhibitions. Especially when, as in the case of the ‘Green Barn’, I didn’t really want to sell it – I like it too much! Still, experience has taught me there is not much fear of a sale; so why bother to exhibit, except here …..

A reader comments that this is rather a sad post with which to start the year. Well, there’s a lot to be sad about in the big world out there, way beyond my little art world, so the unintentional tone of this first comment from 2019 unintentionally reflects a reality.

2018: the End

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Well, we’re running out of hours in 2018 so how shall we end the year in a blog? Why don’t I just take an image at random from my voluminous photographic archive and make up a story around it? This cannot offend anyone, and is probably of no interest to anyone either; but it might be fun to write.

Gorse and heather on Snape Warren, Suffolk, at 14.09, 23 December, 2013

There, that’s about as innocuous as they come, is it not? Indeed, it looks pretty boring.

It is not quite chosen at random. While searching, I had the idea of looking for an image of five years ago. What was I doing then? This is photographically the closest I can get to answering that question: walking on Snape Warren, apparently, what I am doing still, as Ernie Wise would write (there have been a lot of Morecombe and Wise TV programmes over Xmas and, although I only watched one, the influence is grammatically pervasive).

Actually, I well remember taking this photograph. We were still discovering our Suffolk surroundings, seasonally as well as geographically; and we were somewhat surprised to find gorse flowering in December. We now know that this is the new norm. In fact it is flowering just like this now, and this is the third flowering in 2019. It was still flowering in January-March early this year, then during its ‘old norm’ in May/June, and then again since November up until now. I don’t mean to imply that all bushes flower as profusely as that, but some gorse is in flower some of the time to justify that generalisation.

Here is a photograph dated 3 March, 2017. It is actually of the Rare Breed sheep we were looking after but it incidentally shows the flowering gorse in the background. I tried to do a painting based on the stances of these sheep but it was so bad that I first over-painted it with flood waters and then destroyed it without photographic record.

Gorse flowering on Snape Warren, 6 March, 2017; with Rare Breed sheep

The next photograph, also taken on 3 March, 2017, shows the sheep eating the new green shoots on the ends of broom stems, so there is another indicator of, at the very least, seasonal speeding-up.

Rare Breed sheep eating green shoots on ends of broom stems on Snape Warren, 6 March, 2017

I’ll take a photo of gorse tomorrow and add it at the end to mark the start of 2019 – in flower.

The Real Live Sheep in our care as National Trust volunteers, now as then, give us another line of thought sparked by the ‘boring’ photo of flowering gorse. We have not yet taken the sheep out on to this part of the Warren, a Nature Reserve, this winter but we hope to do so early next year. Interesting and enjoyable as it is to have them here for their own sake, they are actually in residence here as part of the conservation management of the heathland (owned by RSPB for its flora and to encourage certain birds). Exmoor ponies (and therefore no sheep) were on this particular part of the Reserve last winter, 2017-18, and had a dramatic effect on some of the vegetation. In Spring, 2018, a machine-led blast of vegetation clearance very visibly changed the higher part of the warren. It will be interesting to see if any changes in the sheep’s behaviour compared to two years ago reflect the changed vegetational landscape and if their own more-subtle changes through grazing make any impact too.

Part of the scrub-cleared area of Snape Warren, 1 January, 2019

Goodbye 1918 – an interesting year. I can’t say I welcome 2019 but neither I nor anybody else can stop it arriving in 2 hour’ time; so let this blog end, as it began, with gorse in flower: perchance, five years after the first, another not very interesting photograph.

Flowering gorse, with heather, Snape Warren, 14.30, 1 January, 2019

Not a Long circle

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Artistically, circles in different media and of different size in the landscape have been a hall-mark of the land-art of Richard Long for much of the last half-century. I illustrated one recently that he had created at Houghton Hall, Norfolk, in 2017.

                  Circle c8m in diameter in grassland on Snape Warren, Dec 2018

This circle could be a Long but it isn’t. Nor is it an archaeological crop-mark or one of the supposedly mysterious crop-circles which have appeared in the landscape in recent years. This appeared overnight, in the same field that is occupied by our flock of rare breed sheep.

The grass has been scuffed and worn down by repeated circular movement to create the circle, as this photograph of detail shows:

 

 

What is it and who created it? It was probably created by a Hebridean sheep – or so I infer, though I cannot prove this since neither I nor anyone else saw it being made. Not that the sheep in question is a budding ovine artist; rather was the circle created in distress and perhaps some pain. The explanation, however far-fetched, seems to be this.

Right from the first minutes of this flock being in this field, sheep were pushing into the bracken along its eastern edge to reach the fresh young leaves growing on brambles; and there are clumps of bramble dotted across the field offering similar delights. These brambles have long runners, growing out laterally and often rooting at the further end.  Soon after the sheep arrived, our breakfast-time inspection saw that one Hebridean was first of all lying down, which is unusual so early, then kneeling, as sheep sometimes do to browse grass, but not eating. It was then struggling as if pulled down by some invisible force. When we reached it, it did not run away – because it could not. The creature had managed to tie itself up in its own thick knot of wrap-around bramble so that not only were its front legs hobbled but strands from below were also tied round its neck and throat so that every time it struggled it was in danger of throttling itself.

It took us 45 minutes to cut through what was tantamount to a 2 inch-thick rope around its throat, tangled up with other bramble strands and long-haired fleece. The sheep, though trembling, lay passive throughout, as if it knew we were trying to help; but the moment we cut the last strand from legs to neck, it was up and away like a shot.

I think the circle of worn grass was caused by this sheep during the night as it struggled to free itself from the brambles it had accidentally collected, going round and round at the end of a bramble runner still fixed in the ground. In so doing it succeeded only in tying itself literally in knots of twisted bramble which had also become entrapped in its long-haired fleece.

When another Hebridean made the same mistake two days later we recognised the symptoms from a distance with binoculars. It took us only half-an hour to sort this one out, for we arrived with the tools in hand this time; but it’s an unusual way to spend the afternoon of Christmas Day.

Neither sheep shows any ill-effects. I have no photographs to illustrate these incidents for each was an emergency, with no time for sideshows. And both sheep left sharpish, rather ungraciously we felt, so there was no opportunity for selfies afterwards.

 

P.S. Saturday Dec 29. Having thought of the interpretative explanation for the circle, I went back to check again today. Because I was looking for it, I found a small hole in the ground more or less at the centre of the circle. It could have been that of a single bramble runner, one that eventually snapped or was pulled out of the ground by an agitated sheep; but I am not convinced.

The Rare Breed Sheep are here again

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We hoped that sheep from the National Trust’s Rare Breed flock on Orford Ness would be coming to over-winter on Snape Warren again (see posts about this time in 2017); but it was mid-November before we knew this for certain and December 7 before they actually arrived.

The photograph shows them at ease in their new home on the following day, enjoying the sunshine as they lie down, like cows, to chew the cud (masticate), typically either side of 11 a.m.

Not all 66 sheep who are now our responsibility are in this photo, but enough are present to show that, unlike previous years, about two thirds of the flock are Hebrideans or cross-breeds thereof: they show better in the photograph below. The flock otherwise contains only a dozen or so White-faced Woodlands and four Manx Loughtans. Among the former  we are delighted to welcome again Wendy, the matriarch of the flock, and among the latter old friends Ugly and Mike.

 

The pastoral idyll did not last long. A couple of days later a sharp early morning frost led the sheep to question why they had been brought here (above and right); and one of the White-faced Woodlands (no. 564) was clearly ill with, as it turned out, pneumonia. A visit by the shepherd, Andrew Capell, and a vet, and an anti-biotic injection, were necessary (below).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note on December 29: number 564 seems to have recovered in that, although she still coughs badly from time to time, she is up and running with the flock normally and is putting on weight.