Water Lilies in Wales!

The first time I went up to the top of the Blorenge Mountain, I was very surprised to find a large pond up there, on top of the mountain!

The little market town of Abergavenny lies down below, in between
the Blorenge and Sugarloaf Mountain that you can see in the distance.

And I was even more surprised to find water lilies on the pond.

The Water Lily, a relative of the Lotus flower, is a rather exotic flower, isn't it? Something you associate with tropical countries - or at least somewhere with plenty of sunshine? 

Certainly the last thing you'd expect to find on top of a mountain in Wet and Wild Wales. 

This photograph of Water Lilies on the Keeper's Pond
has become one of my best-selling Sympathy Cards

But there they were, blooming on the Keeper's Pond!

So I did a bit of internet 'digging' and discovered, here, that there are a great many different varieties of Water Lilies, some of them hardy enough to grow in temperate climates. 

The giant, tropical water lilies were first introduced into the UK in 1849 and grown in a specially built greenhouse at Chatsworth House. But there are others that seem to thrive in wild or semi-wild habitats - on top of the Blorenge, for instance!

In many cultures and religions, the Water Lily is regarded as sacred. Maybe it's the symbolism associated with the fact that they grow up through the mud in the dark at the bottom of the pond?

Wherever they grow, whether in the tropics or not, Water Lilies are always exquisitely beautiful. Monet certainly thought so!

One of Monet's many 'Water Lily' paintings
- probably my favourite.

And the Water Lily is the July Birth Month flower.

I was quite nervous about attempting to make a collage Water Lily for this month's repeating pattern. All those petals made from painted tissue paper could easily end up as a soggy mess. But I had already painted some for a July Birthday Card and I wanted to do something a bit different this time.

I began with a border - 

July Birthday Card to Personalize, Water Lilies by poshandpainterly
 

It didn't turn out too badly and, combined with another pond inhabitant, the dragonfly, it resulted in some interesting patterns -

Water Lilies, Dragonflies, Stripes Spiral Notebook by poshandpainterly

Water Lilies, Dragonflies Lumbar Pillow, Cushion by poshandpainterly

Pink Water Lilies on Deep Blue Square Wall Clock by poshandpainterly
 

So, here's this month's Birth Month Flower message:

Be like the Water Lily -

Please feel free to 'pin' this or
 download and print it.

Iris, the Greek Goddess of the Rainbow

Van Gogh's 'Irises'

An alternative February Birth Month Flower is the Iris.

Whoever decided on these Birth Month Flowers must live in a part of the world where spring comes much earlier than here in the UK. The irises in my garden are usually in flower in late May!

I’ve never been very much attracted to irises. I do like the plain blue-purple ones but, like violets, irises often has that smudge of yellow that, to me, makes them look ‘dirty’. As well as that, I tend to prefer flowers that grow on curved branches or at least on stems that will sway and bend. Typically, irises stand a little too straight for my liking, though a clump of the light blue ones at the back of a border can look lovely.

And strangely, I think the iris is a flower that seems to grow more appealing when portrayed in watercolour, rather than as a photo. I became much more enthusiastic about this flower in the course of collecting paintings of them for my Iris Pinterest board. 

Hereford artist, Ruth S Harris's Irises,
print available from Society6

The paintbrush seems to lend them a softness that doesn’t come across so well in a photograph. Van Gogh’s irises are certainly not standing up to attention and Monet's are decidedly floppy and curvaceous!

Monet's Yellow Irises

A few things you may like to know about Irises:

• Irises grow all over the world and they come in too many varieties and colours to list them all here.
• The Iris is the state flower of Tennessee as well as the National Flower of Croatia. 
• And in Japan, where they grow easily in the wild, people have traditionally used Iris designs on their kimonos, to protect themselves from evil energies.
• Traditionally, the iris represents faith, hope, wisdom and courage and they are represented in very early art, such as Ancient Egyptian and in Greek mythology.
• Iris is the name of the Greek Goddess of the Rainbow, who was also the messenger of the Gods. Purple irises were planted  on the graves of women to summon the goddess to guide the dead on their journey over the rainbow bridge. (I don’t know who guided the men!)

.......

When I started to think about this blog post, I began to wonder whether there was any connection between the Iris flower and the part of the eye that controls the amount of light that reaches the retina - the ‘iris’. It seemed quite unlikely.

But wikipaedia, as usual, enlightened me - 

It is in the iris that we see the different eye-colours, blue, grey, hazel, brown and green – a ‘rainbow’ of colours! (Not quite a rainbow as we generally think of it but certainly quite a wide variety of colours.)

I’ve only ever seen blue, purple, yellow and white Irises but I like the pink and tangerine ones I’ve seen in paintings. 

It seems that William Morris did too:

William Morris's Iris pattern for wallpaper and home textiles

It’s too late for this February but maybe, next year, I should put my prejudices aside, like I did with the violets, and really get to know some irises through drawing and painting them?

Can you give a man a greeting card with flowers on?

Irises at St Remy - Vincent Van Gogh

I’m finding that as I get older, I’m questioning more and more of the things I used to think were ‘set in stone’. 

For instance, now that I’ve just passed my 70th birthday, I’ve found myself doing a radical re-think about how a seventy-year old should be – from how to dress without coming across as ‘mutton dressed as lamb’, to whether I’m spending my time ‘appropriately’ when most of my contemporaries have long since ‘retired’.

Another question that has keeps cropping up in my mind since I’ve been creating greeting cards is: why does it seem to be universally accepted that you can’t give a man a card with flowers on? 

Water Lilies - Claude Monet

Is it that men don’t like flowers? I think not! 

• Many of our ‘celebrity’ gardeners enthuse about flowers as much as their female counterparts. (And my Dad used to grow Sweet Williams, his favourite flower, on his allotment.)

Percy Thrower was THE authority on gardening when I was growing up

• And just think of the number of famous painters who have painted flowers, from Redoute and his roses to Monet and Manet and Gustave Klimt!

Peonies in a Vase - Edouard Manet

Ah, but they were a special case, they were artists, so they don’t count. Ordinary men don’t like flowers.

• Not true. ‘Ordinary’ men have worn flowery clothes at various times in the past – just look at these 18th century buttons for  a man’s waistcoat! 

BUTTONS

• And there are certainly plenty of floral prints in evidence in menswear departments at the moment! I'm not saying I like this one, but it seems to be quite acceptable! (I don't suppose I'd like it on a woman either!)

The evidence does seem to suggest that men do like flowers! 

Garden Path with Chickens - Gustav Klimt

So, ladies, would you give a man a floral greeting card?

And gentlemen, how would you feel if you were on the receiving end of one?

I’ve talked this over with friends and there was general agreement that finding suitable greeting cards for men was a real challenge. It seems we aren’t yet ready to take the risk!

Luckily, I’ve managed to come up with plenty of ideas for cards for men and boys that don’t have a flower in sight. And, of course, they are some of my bestsellers! 

Click 

HERE 

for just a small selection

  I've added lots more since I wrote this blog post, in 2010!

Drawing and Painting - just do it!

Cromer Fisherment, Norfolk

I recently happened upon an article with Ten Tips for Drawing Figures and, guess what! – I disagreed with every single one of those tips.  

That doesn’t mean that there was anything wrong with these tips and some people would probably find them helpful but to me they seriously over-complicated the process of drawing. It’s my belief that if you simply draw what you see, you can’t go far wrong!

And if your fine motor skills are sufficient for writing your name, and you are able to set aside any inhibitions about what you can or cannot draw, there’s no reason why you can’t draw anything you like, including the human figure! There really is no difference between drawing a person and drawing a landscape; both are simply made up of a juxtaposition of shapes, colours and textures!

Shire Horse at Rally,

I’ve heard people say that they ‘can’t do people’ - or animals or boats or that they are no good at landscapes. But as long as you are drawing from a reference, a photo, a sketch or a model, it really shouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference what you are drawing. Everything is made up of a collections of shapes which come together to produce a landscape, a life painting, a creature, a building or whatsoever takes your fancy! 


I was fortunate to discover this even before I came across this fabulous quote from Monet:

‘Try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field or whatever. 

Merely think here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact colour and shape.’ Monet

Monet goes further and includes colour and I’ve found that the same thing applies to painting.

Forget all about those ‘arty’ terms  - perspective, tone value, colour theory, negative space, composition etc. They really do become redundant when you take the simple approach and just draw and paint what you see!

Cows coming home

Of course if you deliberately try to forget something, the chances are that you won’t be able to stop thinking about it! That’s the way our minds seem to work. But when you just focus on simply faithfully ‘recording’ what you see before you, you’ll get into ‘flow’ and all that unnecessary mind work will soon melt away.

Why is it ‘safe’ to let go of all those technicalities that people make such a fuss about? Well, in fact, you won’t actually be ignoring them. They will probably have been part of the process of choosing your subject, maybe unconsciously.

People have commented on the ‘dappled light’ in my paintings, the ‘sunlight and shadows across paths’ and the way that my paintings often seem to ‘lead the eye off into the distance’.  All I can say is that this is news to me; I was totally unaware of these things, and others that have been commented on, until they were pointed out to me. But these features must have been what attracted me in the first place, what ‘asked me’ to paint this particularly picture! So that takes good care of perspective, composition and tone value without giving those things a moment’s conscious thought!

I’m sure this is the way that many artists work, but if it’s not your way, perhaps it would be worth giving it a try! It might be the solution to drawing or painting those things that you think are ‘difficult’- and you might have a lot of fun along the way too!

Path from Abergavenny Castle down to the Meadows

 Just draw or paint exactly what you see!

Of course, drawing and painting from the imagination is another matter and would need a blog post all to itself!

Poppies

Poppies seem to have a particular appeal for artists.

Monet certainly painted them several times but he's not the only one; they seem to be an 'easy' subject for amateur artists too, maybe because those vivid red splashes of colour are so easily identifiable and make such an immediate impact?

Then again, in close up, they are, to my mind, the unbeatable champions of 'gesture' in the floral realm and it's for that reason as much as their colours that I love painting them.

But I grew up believing that all poppies were a pale orange colour. They seemed to grow everywhere - in our garden, in the paths, on bombsites and waste ground. And I always loved them, not so much for their colour as for their graceful curving stems and nodding heads, that made them seem somehow more alive than other plants. I never really associated those poppies of my childhood with the flat red artificial Flanders poppies that we wear on Remembrance Day.

But in Norfolk I was introduced to red poppies, sometimes called Shirley or Corn Poppies, in all their glory! And I painted them. But unfortunately, my pastel painting of poppies and daisies on the edge of a North Norfolk cornfield, was framed and given away long before I had a scanner so the best I can manage is a scan of an old pre-digital photo of it -

. 
As you travel towards the North Norfolk Coast, outside Cromer and Overstrand, you really can't miss the red swathes of poppies growing wild in the cornfields! In fact a 19th Century London journalist, Clement Scott, came to Overstrand in 1883, fell in love with the poppies, as well as the local miller's daughter, named the area 'Poppyland' and wrote about it in the Daily Telegraph.

A friend in Hereford is lucky to be able to grow these black-centred, scarlet poppies in her flowerbeds -

- which gave rise to these:

Garden Mug by helikettle
ceramic mugs made online with Zazzle

And a local neighbour's large, oriental-type poppies have been immortalised in this oil pastel painting, as greeting cards, mugs and even shoes!

 

'Poppies' Slip-on Sneaker by helikettle
Get custom made shoes at zazzle.co.uk

I've tried to grow poppies from seed in my garden in Abergavenny with no success at all - the same goes for cornflowers which have thrived in my previous gardens so I suspect the soil is too heavy. My only success has been with the Californian variety, which I'm very fond of,

- so last year I raised some Icelandic Poppies from seed indoors and planted them in tubs and pots outside my kitchen door, where they flowered cheerfully and resulted in my most popular watercolour greeting card -

 

Garden-lover's Mug by helikettle
View other Mug Mugs

  

Icelandic Poppies Bookmark by helikettle
Make full colour business cards at zazzle

However they didn't seed themselves as I'd hoped so I was pleased to find some for sale in pots at the Garden Centre my son and I visited on my birthday before we came across the ponies. I was also somewhat bemused to see pots of these for sale -

- surely a weed by anyone's reckoning (though one definition of a weed is 'a plant growing in the wrong place'!)

It would have been far cheaper to have grown my poppies myself but time has been short this Spring so I dutifully paid the price with my voucher and we carried them in carrier bags for the rest of our walk, trying not to damage their fragile petals.

They survived and once they'd settled in to their new homes in the pots by my door, they've begged me to photograph them daily!

It's not always been easy to capture their brilliant, almost translucent colours - I'm sure that a more professional photographer would have found a way - but these are just a few that came out reasonably well -






I think I'm going to try following this advice and, if the seeds are still available in the shops, I'll sow some in pots, ready for next year...

These are some of the greeting cards in which I've tried to portray the 'daintiness' that is part of their charm -

 

As for these, they show a different, more flamboyant aspect of the poppy's personality, I think!

 

Golden Poppies Ladies Slip-on Keds Shoes by helikettle
Create your own shoes at zazzle.co.uk

 

 

And, by the way, if anyone would ever like to use any of my photos, flowers or otherwise, as a reference for painting or drawing, just send me a message and I'll gladly email you a larger version.