New paintings and regular art updates.
Our Orme group continues to meet and create new art.
We are holding our annual exhibition, with paintings, sculpture, jewellery and other art and crafts available. There will be festive refreshments available.
We have new artists who have joined this year so there will be different work amongst the art on display. If you are in the area of Newcastle under Lyme, Staffordshire, on 23rd November 2025 why not come along?
Flowers in a pot decorated with music. I went to the singathon at eccleshall yesterday and all the tables in the cafe had these lovely posies on them. You can’t see the black musical notes that were placed in the pots because I cropped the photo.
I loved the combination of colours and shapes. So delicate and intricate. I hope you like them too.
One of the choirs I’m in went to a singathon today. Choirs and performances all day. This is a photo in the cafe. I don’t have permission to take photos of the participants.
It was lovely to join in with the choir, we sang songs from around the world including Tonga, Trinidad, France, Romanian, and Maori. I had to have a chair as I cannot stand for long, which is immensely frustrating. But it was great to be out and about, and driving through the autumn countryside was a bonus.
As we left we heard the theme to “Blackadder” played on recorders through an open window. A really eccentric English moment.
Up there on the hill, a sandstone church, dedicated to Saint Thomas.
I was going to enter this photo into our community calendar competition but I’m too late. I couldn’t drive up and take the photo until today so I missed the closing date. I just like the angles and planes of it’s architecture, I have forgotten the name of its designer.
The hill is called Penkhull which means hill Hill. So you could call it hill Hill hill!
I’m admiring the blue sky, I couldn’t see this colour until recently. I’m still amazed at how much my colour vision has been out of whack until I had my surgery. X
Unfortunately like many other ceramic factories it has closed. The cost of gas and electricity means that a once thriving local industry is dwindling. Stafford pottery was one of the latest victims.
There are still excellent potteries that create designs and pieces of art for the 21st Century. Portmeirion, Emma Bridgewater, Wedgwood are a few that continues to produce beautiful work. It’s hard to say whether they will still be producing ceramics in a few years time. We also have a company called Lucideon which undertakes research and development of ceramics for such things as electrical insulators, non slip tiles and other diverse uses.
Hopefully this city of potters will continue to survive well into the future.
Sultana scones with cream on a Calico Burleigh Ware plate for tea.
It was very tasty and filling. I decided not to have jam on them, it would have been to sweet. But I did butter them.
Burleigh Ware is a type of pottery made at Middleport pottery in Middleport, Stoke-on-Trent. Calico is one of many pattern types made by transferring the pattern onto the pottery with transfer prints. It’s a skilled job to line up all the prints. They are mounted on paper and stick to the pottery when they are wetted, the print sort of slides off onto the piece. If you turn over pottery it will usually have the makers name and other details printed on the base. People who do this say they are in the ‘turnover club’ .
I went to an event planning meeting today at BArts in Stoke. It’s going to be an opera based on the witch (wise woman) from Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent, who was alive in the 17th and 18th centuries. She was buried at 90 degrees to the normal North South orientation.
From Wikipedia :
Margaret ‘Molly’ Leigh (1685–March 1748) was an English property owner in the Staffordshire town of Burslem who, in her will, left substantial sums to charity. She was also accused of witchcraft, and, after her death, her grave was disturbed following claims she was haunting the town.
We had a singing session based on some of her life and the treatment she received from her neighbours. We were also invited to create some art based on her life. (hence the tub of pencil crayons. The opera is due to be put on later this summer.
My friend sent me this photo (I don’t have an attribution for it). This was a few year’s ago when it was open and the Leopard Hotel was running ghost tours and serving lovely food.
Then one of the owners died and it was taken over by a family member. I don’t know what happened but I think Covid didn’t help. In the end it closed and the owner moved elsewhere. Although the frontage looked OK it needed a tremendous amount of money spending on it as it was partly derelict in the back upper floors.
The hotel stood empty for months, it was bought by an entrepreneur who may have been going to turn it into flats. Unfortunately someone got in and apparently set up a cannabis farm in it (what I heard). Then it simply burnt down. Some of the frontage may remain but the place is boarded up.
I was involved for a while because I painted the murals in the back room, the Arnold Bennett Suite. I never got decent photos in there. I do hope it can be restored.
Very proud to say three of my photos I entered for Penkhull village calendar competition were chosen to be included in the 2025 calendar. They were on display and I looked and thought they looked a bit like mine, but someone else must have taken similar views? I actually didn’t believe it until they told me. How bizarre! These are photos of the photos so they are a bit cropped to get straight lines!
A memory of my cups and mugs a few years ago. Look at the bottom of them and you can often find out where they were manufactured. The image on the bottom is called the back stamp. There’s a lot of people in Stoke on Trent (also known as the Potteries), that check this out. They are called the turn over club? Sometimes you sneak a peak when your mug is full! A dangerous manoeuvre!
Mallaband-Brown