Janet Thumim, a regular volunteer at The Community Farm and retired Art History lecturer, has been creating a wonderful collection of drawings based on her time on the farm.
“I have been doing these drawings for four years or so. When I get back from the farm I clean up, hunker down and let an image come into my mind, or sometimes when I am on the farm I am thinking 'Oh that might be what I draw today'. Usually I do at least one, and often I do more. I also write, in handwriting, which that no one can read, about what we did on the farm that day and what the weather was like. It is like a little virtual sketchbook.“I became interested in the farm through a friend just as it was starting to get off of the ground and so I put a little money in the pot. Then in a rather wet May I got a round-robin email from Andy Dibben saying 'we’re desperate for people to come and weed the parsnips' and I just thought it was so funny to be sitting in the middle of Bristol with this vision of parsnips being overrun that I came out.
“Once I came I could see how it worked and I could see first-hand all the reasons I had put money into the farm in the first place; and I still come now because I want this project to be here for years to come. I have always paid attention to where my food comes from and tried not to buy things that come from too far away. I am aware of all the farming practices that might be lost and I don’t want that to happen. Then after doing it for a while, for all of those reasons, I suddenly realised how much good it was doing me as well.
“There is so much at the farm that can inspire my drawings, something I see that sticks in my mind. When we were clearing out the sheds a few months ago I got a drawing of a wheelbarrow full of boots because I thought it was so amusing. It might be flowers or sometimes I just do a drawing of the things I brought home like a couple of courgettes or a tomato, just a page of little things like that. Sometimes, especially in the spring and the winter, the trees by the lake are just so beautiful and I try and do a version of that.”
We’ve enjoyed Janet’s illustrations so much; we think you will too. So we’ll be using some of them to illustrate our newsletters in the months to come.
Click here to find out how you too can volunteer at the farm
