Ice Melt, oil painting, 8” x 8”

‘Ice Melt’

 As I get older I find myself getting much more nostalgic and enjoying reminiscing. Whilst working on  this oil painting in the studio I found myself remembering when I was a tiny tot way back in the long,  hard winter of 1963.

I was in the infant class and each day for weeks we faced a long trek through the snow to school and back. The snow went way over the top of my wellington boots so they never seemed to dry out before the next time I had to wear them. My legs were permanently chapped, but that snow was so beautiful, and such fun to play in, we children hardly seemed to notice all the discomfort of permanently soggy wellies and gloves!

If I was lucky one of our teachers, who lived near me, would give me a ride home after school in her bubble car. I don’t think bubble cars were really designed to drive on snow and ice, but I would squeeze into that tine car with Mrs B and all her teacher’s paraphernalia and we would very slowly make our slippery way from one end of the village to the next. It very probably would have been safer to make the one mile journey on foot through the thick snow, but I can’t tell you what fun it was, sliding gracefully and slightly sideways, on the icy road, whilst somehow avoiding all the snowdrifts which were built up on both sides - it felt like a slow motion version of the Cresta Run!

Once safely back at home Mum gave my sister and I hot drinks to thaw us out and we settled down to toast cooked in front of the blazing fire in the tiny front room, which was wonderfully cosy on a cold winter’s afternoon. There is really nothing quite like the taste of a piece of bread which has been placed on a toasting fork and presented to the flames until it browns, and then buttered liberally and eaten hot. 

It was a hard winter and must have been so hard for the adults, but for us children it was quite magical.

This painting will be on display as part of an exhibition at West Ox Arts Gallery in Bampton, Oxfordshire, from 9th November to 23rd  December.

Lockdown survival strategies

I’m sure many of us have found this second lockdown more of a struggle than the one earlier in the Spring and Summer, even though that one was much longer. The combination of lack of daylight and cold, murky weather, added to missing our families and friends (and for many, very real worries about their jobs and businesses) has made this feel a very uncertain time for so many. 

I’m a naturally cup-half-full person, but even though I have been keeping myself busy I could feel myself getting more tetchy and fed up as every day started feeling like a scene from the film ‘Groundhog Day’ (which, incidentally, is one of my favourite films, and I’m not going to even try to count how many times Phil and I have watched it)!

Then along came artists Jeremy Sanders and Jenny Aitken, who decided between them to arrange a ‘virtual paint out’ on Instagram, offering other artists who were also missing painting outside,  a different daily selection of photographic views from their respective homes in Cornwall and Derbyshire to paint from. Once painted, we put our paintings on our own Instagram pages with the hashtag #l2paintin

So each day this past week I have ‘travelled’ miles across the country via my studio, keeping company with a really lovely, supportive group of artists, each of us painting in our own unique style and admiring each other’s work at the end of the day. 

I’ve taken a screenshot of my Instagram page (@jackyradbone),  which shows a little montage of the  paintings I have done this week, some of which will be in my Oxfordshire Artweeks exhibition in May. I’ve  kept to my usual limited palette, and I’ve kept to the same amount of painting time I would, of necessity, have kept to if I’d been painting at the actual location - no more than one and a half hours. 

I have my own sketchbooks and reference photos I could have painted from, or of course I could have painted some more still life subjects or painted in the garden; but this feeling of community, of ‘meeting up’ to paint with other artists each day, has felt very light-hearted and upbeat, and has helped keep my ‘cup’ half full just when I needed it. Thanks so much Jerry and Jenny x