Amanda White - Contemporary Naive Art

Simply black and white

2012-03-12T13:43:00.000Z

I really DO love black ink and white paper!

And I also love the beautifully ever so subtly mottled shades of Canson paper. I get crazes on certain Canson colours. At one time it was the dusty blue one. Right now it's the greys and fawns.

These two collages were made from chopped up monoprints. The effect is a bit like a linoprint but with none of that medium's restrictions. Or (let's face it) time consumption. I like playing around with the pieces and moving them around. Which is one thing you can't do with a linocut.

I had Flora and the arrival of spring in the back of my mind as I assembled this image. Somehow it didn't seem finished until I put her in this paper mount with a primitive sort of frame. Gives it the folksy feel I was after.

Previously I made this other collaged monoprint inspired by my finishing off the Haworth paper cut - I obviously wasn't ready to leave the Brontës behind. I took a line from Emily as a point of departure:

Lone, among the mountains cold ...

which is now the title.

I will be putting them in my Etsy shop when I next feel in an uploading kinda mood!

In the meantime I am going to clean up the ink trails left by one of the cats after he nonchalantly sauntered across the inked up glass sheet. Here are Freddo's paw marks on my desk. Nice monoprint! Don't even start me on the ones on my beige leather sofa ....

Lucky I'm not a houseproud maruja!

Little Brontë foxes

2012-03-07T18:02:00.000Z

Finished at last!

It's been a long time coming, mainly because of other stuff, as I mentioned before. Can't be doing with distracting background noise, literal or metaphorical, brings out the worst kind of procrastination in me.

Anyway, here it is, Haworth Parsonage in the snow (despite the fact that we have been experiencing summertime temperatures over here for the last few days).

The snowmen, which started out more prominent, have been relegated to watchers - watching the three sisters watching them from inside. So they retain their sinister, gothicky aspect even if somewhat watered down. The foxes were introduced as a splash of colour (I just knew that National Geographic portrait of an orange-haired kabuki actor would come in useful one day!) and movement. Three sisters ... three foxes ... mmmmm. Three snowmen if it comes to that. Obviously highly significant.

Or maybe not.

As is often the case with these house portraits it was a piece of the occupants' writings that settled me on the final image.

In this case a poem by Emily which starts:

The moon is full this winter night;

The stars are clear though few;

And every window glistens bright

With leaves of frozen dew ...

Well okay, lots of snowflakes rather than a few stars and lamplight rather than leaves of frozen dew.

Big full moon though.

Anyway, it is ready in time for my Christmas 2012 greeting card collection.

Method in my madness.

Breaking the silence

2012-02-25T19:21:00.000Z

Casa Amarilla, Gallinas Blancas

Well, it's been a long time ....

Mostly because I have been a bit preoccupied by stuff involving a good deal of queuing in official places just lately, then had my daughters staying for a fortnight and have been accustoming myself to new computer and new Windows ... that's my excuse anyway.

I'm not very happy with the way the snowy Brontes are going so they have taken a temporary back seat. In the meantime here are the two paintings (yes, I did say "paintings") I am showing next month at Delamore Arts in Devon at the British Naives exhibition.

Architecture again!

I took them into the framers today in an effort to be efficient and organized!

(Some hope).

Caribbean Church with Kling-Kling Birds

Of snowmen, Brontës and tropical brass monkeys ...

2012-02-11T18:02:00.000Z

A rough beginning ...

No doodles this time ... because two sets of photographs featuring the snowmen of North and East London on the computer gave the impulse I needed to get cracking on an idea I had had for a while about "revisiting" Haworth Parsonage in winter. That and the cold weather currently assailing the allegedly semi-tropical island where I live. (I sit typing this in a thick woolly).

A set of rather-worse-for-wear parkland snowmen popped up on one of my favourite blogs, Justine Picardie's (link down on the right somewhere) yesterday and just hours later my daughter sent some photos of a massive one with a huge spherical head and pebble teeth she had met down Clapton way.

I have always loved them. Spontaneous pieces of primitive art that spring up whenever a half-decent layer of snow is laid down. Strangely misshapen, grinning or grimacing, no two snowmen are ever the same.

Now I know the Brontës aren't exactly the sort of writers we would immediately associate with skylarking in the snow, but heck, even they were children once and must have taken time out at some point from eternally writing about Gondal in their teeny weeny interminable notebooks.

And even if they didn't - well I'm making them.

My cut paper world, my say-so!

The Universal Snowman: A tropical version made by my daughter and nephew up on Tenerife's volcano a few years ago

Summer Evening in the Austen Garden

2012-02-09T17:22:00.000Z

Finished at long last!

Jane Austen having an al fresco writing session on an idyllic summer's evening (hence the golden glow in the west!) surrounded by her flowers and her cats and serenaded by the birds.

I am relieved to finish it because it seemed to become fiddlier by the minute. Miss Austen's minute eyebrows were the last straw - or should I say last pieces to be pasted down. The cats' eyeballs weren't exactly a piece of cake either!

Detail (what's she writing? A letter, a future classic or maybe just her shopping list?)

birdsong!

While I was searching for suitable pieces in magazines I came across a wonderful photo of an old fashioned coach and horses of the sort that thundered past the Austen cottage frontage and which Jane would have heard as she sat in her garden. I am very tempted to have a go at that scene but for the time being I'm tidying up the studio and my scrappings-littered table and going with the flow and seeing what surfaces in my doodle book ..

Also have to choose and photograph two paintings to send off for the great big British Naives show at Delamore House in May.

Right, time for a celebratory cup of tea and a chocolate biscuit I think

Happy Birthday Charles Dickens

2012-02-07T15:16:00.000Z

200 today ...

... and never out of print!

Al fresco with Miss Austen ...

2012-01-31T13:36:00.000Z

You find me struggling with the garden, not an hour since I was hacking back the ivy (which is going bonkers - or should that be growing bonkers?) and potting up some pansies.

But my mind and inward eye was on Jane Austen's shrubs and borders which are what's on my ancient drawing board (a venerable and battered piece of solid wood that dates from my first week at art school more years ago than I care to remember - I may upload a photo of it some time).

As you see, I am still at the piecing and plotting stage after laying in a crazy quilt-style lawn.

Here's my original doodle:

Jane Austen's great-niece said:

"I remember the garden well, a very high thick hedge divided it from the Winchester road and around it was a pleasant shrubbery walk, with a rough bench or two where, no doubt, Mrs Austen and Cassandra and Jane spent many a summer afternoon ..."

Well, I have departed a bit from the rough benches I know though who knows they may yet supercede the more elegant wrought iron furniture.

Anyway, this is the current state of play.

Anything - or then again nothing - may happen in the next 24 hours.

Dickens in Doughty Street

2012-01-20T13:05:00.003Z

Charles Dickens lived in this Georgian terrace in Holborn, at number 48, from 1837 to 1839, with his wife Catherine and (possibly more artistically significantly) his sister-in-law Mary. Two of his novels, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby were written here and his career was taking off.

But in the midst of success came tragedy when 17-year-old Mary died suddenly after a night's illness, possibly of heart failure. Just how attracted the 25-year-old Dickens had been to Mary during life is debatable. After her death, in his arms Little Nell style, it became nothing short of what might be called an unhealthy obsession:

"From her lifeless fingers Charles took a ring which he was to wear in memory of her his entire life. He dreamt of her every night for months after her death."

As Dickens himself said:"She died in my arms, and the very last words she whispered were of me ..."

Mary Hogarth is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery. On her headstone is inscribed the epitaph he composed: "God numbered her among his angels".

Mary was the prototype of the saintly and virginal (some might say insipid) young women who populate so many of the novels of Charles Dickens.

So here he is, in later life with one of his dogs, revisiting the scene of his early years, the place where the angelic Mary had lived and died and there in the window are his younger self and the object of his obsession...
I don't think it is a coincidence that it is very much a rose-coloured image - though I have refrained from giving Mr Dickens a pair of spectacles!

Mary Shelley - in the Gulf of Melancholy

2012-01-10T15:45:00.001Z

Mary in the Gulf of Melancholy

This little image had been kicking around in the back of my head for ages - it's a kind of follow-on from doing the sea storm in the picture of Shelley's Surrey birthplace last year. So I took a break between the houses of Dickens to do this imaginary portrait of Mary Shelley using magazine scraps, cuts from a photpcopy of pages from an old book about Byron and Claire Clairmont with nicely yellowed pages and an inked monoprint I pulled and then cut out

A widow aged just 26, she had experienced more life, joy and tragedy by that age than most of us in a lifetime. The rebellious daughter of a rebellious mother (feminist Mary Wolstonecraft), she had eloped with a married genius, buried three of their children and suffered several miscarriages. On the plus side, as you might say, she had written the definitive Gothic novel and an enduring masterpiece. Frankenstein has never been out of print since its publication.

Already plunged in a deep depression following a miscarriage, the death of Shelley in a sailing accident when his boat was engulfed by a storm, left her bereft and (more practically) rather less than penniless in a foreign land in what she described in her journal as "a gulph of melancholy".

So here she is in her gulph (I must say I prefer her spelling for some reason) and I can now turn my refreshed attention to Dickens's Doughty Street home.

Fiddly stuff which as you see requires lots of soothing cups of tea to aid the old concentration ...
Mary, meanwhile, is now in my online shop at www.etsy.com/shop/AmandaAWhite
(sorry the link defeats me!)

New year, new house

2012-01-02T13:30:00.002Z

First of all the very best wishes to everybody for the year ahead and I hope it is a peaceful and creatively plentiful one for all of us, wherever we are.

And to celebrate the atart of a new year, what else but the completion of my new house? 2012 is definitely going to be the year of Charles Dickens, it being the bicentenary of his birth and already, here in the UK we have had, in the past few days, a TV adaptation of Great Expectations and a radio rendering of A Tale of Two Cities.

As it happens both books were written at Gad's Hill Place.

As you see, I strayed from that original intention of including lots of garden ... the memories of the shawl and that wonderful quilt exhibition at the V&A last year kind of took over. I loved those old bedcovers appliqued with little domestic shapes which held significance for the embroiderer and the embroiderer's family. Like this one, made around 1850 and donated by the West Kent Federation of Women's Institutes to the museum.

So I have put in hearts to indicate Dickens's love for his garden (certainly not, by 1856 when he purchased the property, his love for his long-suffering and mentally abused wife which by then amounted to pathological hatred). There are quill pens and books, teapots, cats and dogs (which were a particular feature of the successive Dickens homes) and glasses of port.

And here, as promised, is a photo of my beautiful cashmere Paisley shawl which dates from around the same time, bought by me in a junk shop for about 5 shillings (yes, it was THAT long ago) in a Croydon junk shop when I was an art student and a gang of us would comb the surrounding junk and charity shops during lunch hour.

In the good old days when real bargains and very old stuff could be bought for a song.

Dove Cottage finished

2011-12-26T11:05:00.000Z

Done, dusted and stuck down:

Though this image loses about a half inch on either side.

Now on with Gad's Hill Place, which is already straying from my original intention, colour-wise, in the sky at least.

While browsing through my scrap boxes I came across bits that reminded me of something else that was current in the 1850s and 60s: Paisley shawls, an example of which I have and a photo of which I will upload in my next post.

Anyway, into the mix they go ...

A Happy Christmas to Everyone!

2011-12-25T09:29:00.000Z

God bless us one and all!

The inescapable Charles Dickens

2011-12-22T16:17:00.000Z

Well, he's everywhere isn't he? Wall-to-wall 200th anniversary celebrations all over the media, so how could I resist? Not that I am a big fan or anything, his heroines are a bit too insipid, his stories a tad too sentimental for my taste and as for his treatment of his poor wife - abominable. I think being force-fed David Copperfield at school has a lot to do with it too.

But having embarked on this Writers' Houses project I could hardly ignore him and I have to say I am rather taken by the story of his Kentish home, Gad's Hill Place, which he had first seen as a young boy, and after which he had always dreamt of owning. In 1856 his wealth enabled him to realize that dream. He enjoyed it for the fourteen years remaining to him until his untimely death from a stroke on June 9 1870.

Doodles

"It was," said one quote I came across while researching the house, "one of those comfortable old-fashioned mansions which seem to have taken root nowhere but in the most picturesque parts of rural England, and are the brick-and-mortar embodiment of the idea of Home."

There is going to be plenty of garden in this picure and plenty of colour (as a contrast to the wintery tones of Dove Cottage). My first thought was Dickens's purchase of the property coincides with that astonishing burst of colour brought about in Europe by the discovery (or do I mean the invention?) in London of aniline dyes. There are Berlin woolwork samplers of the period that still retain the depth and intense vividness of those mauves, purples, lime greens, carmines and fucshias.

My swatch of clippings for Gad's Hill Place

What a contrast to the old faded sepia photographs of Gad's Hill Place.

And an excellent lead-in to concentrate my mind's eye ....

Sheepish indecision

2011-12-19T10:26:00.000Z

Sheep in?

Sheep out?

And why am I dithering and stressing about a blimming sheep?

Get a grip Amanda.

Blimey

Dove Cottage, Grasmere and a lot of weather

2011-12-18T13:06:00.001Z

Finished at last.

After a lot of putting in taking out of sheep and a whole lot of weather. As I said in another post, heavy weather and the cozy clicking of windscreen wipers are what I remember most about my childhood day trips to the Lakes.

Consequently it is a bit of a wet and blustery vision I have snipped of the cottage with Mr W himself watching that flock go by, though they look lively rather than leisurely, I'm afraid.

So here it is again, that inspirational fragment from To Sleep:

A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by,

One after one; the sound of rain, and bees

Murmuring; the fall of rivers, winds and seas,

Smooth fields, white sheets of water, and pure sky ...

Far too cold and wet for bees , murmuring or otherwise I think.

As usual the picture above has lost some details, it not being the same proportion as my camera shots and me being a non-cropper (still).

So here is the unadulterated version, adulterated by bits of masking paper round the edges.

In the bleak midwinter

2011-12-11T11:23:00.000Z

This is taking longer than I would like because of all the other things going on right now, not least of them being Christmas, which all of a sudden is upon us. And not a single card written!

Just as well I have decided on placing Dove Cottage bang in the middle of winter with none of that foliage I was talking about. Far too fiddly for the feel of the picture, anyway.

Must be the effect of hearing carols on the radio seeping into my scissors. In the Bleak Midwinter has always been one of my favourites, mixing my poets here I know.

I have taken a bit (a bit? you must be joking) of a liberty with the positioning of the cottage too - in Wordsworth's day he did have a clear view over Lake Grasmere but I doubt whether even then it was lapping almost up to the front garden! But needs (and spatial limitations) must.

Working on Wordsworth

2011-12-06T18:08:00.001Z

It's coming together at last.

I was still faffing around in a fairly directionless manner, abandoning the board and going back to my doodle book.

Then I found these four tranquil lines from a longer poem by Wordsworth called To Sleep:

A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by

One after one; the sound of rain, and bees

Murmuring; the fall of rivers, winds and seas,

Smooth fields, white sheets of water, and pure sky ...

Then I found a couple of full page Dolce & Gabanna ads in some magazines I bought at the car boot sale on Saturday .... allowing me some big pieces for smooth fields in just the right Lake Districty shade ...

Another day or two and plenty of foliage should do it.

I want to keep it looking rough-hewn.

Christmas cards and more for Keats House

2011-12-01T11:32:00.000Z

I am thrilled to think of my artwork being available on holy ground!

Keats House, Hampstead

My cards and prints and bookplates will soon be on sale in the Keats House shop which occupies part of the room that was once the Dilke then the Brawne parlour.

Where the great Keats walked ...

I am, as you see, cockahoop at the mere idea.

So my studio has been converted into a packing station:

As well as the Christmas cards they will be stocking Sailing to Italy and Hampstead Landscape cards and prints:

Sailing to Italy

Hampstead Landscape - Letter from Naples

And bookplates - providing I can source very small cellophane bags.

Right, no time to blather on, must get back to my cardboard boxes and bubble wrap and weighing scales and packages which will this week be winging their way to the house formerly known as Wentworth Place...

My Little Shop

2011-11-28T16:13:00.001Z

and some of my current stock:

A Jane Austen Christmas

A John Keats Christmas

Seasonal cards!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
These and other goodies available in my shop here:
http://www.etsy.com/shop/AmandaAWhite

The Dove and Olive, Grasmere

2011-11-27T17:32:00.000Z

The Dove and Olive was the name of William Wordsworth's seventeenth century cottage during its time as an inn. Some also refer to it as The Dove and Olive Bough. By the time the Wordsworths (brother and sister) moved in on December 20 1799, it had been empty for several years and was known as Dove Cottage.

Here, on the edge of Grasmere lake, William and Dorothy - and eventually William's wife Mary - spent eight idyllic years of "plain living and high thinking".

It was the beginning of English Romanticism and here was written Wordsworth's greatest poetry.

Here endeth the lesson.

And here starteth the collage.

I made the mistake of laying down papers and playing around with them on the hideously bright Mediterranean blue cartridge paper currently covering my drawing board.

THAT IS NOT THE BACKGROUND!!!

I always start off with the windows.

The windows are the eyes to a building's soul.

To badly misquote somebody or other.

The left hand window was finished. Or so I thought. It is now binned. For being too neat.

The windows (and everything else) will be pretty much as you see the rest here: rough hewn and sort of geological. To echo the rugged Lake District. No good giving this home a delicate refined look. It is an honest seventeeth century cottage set in a landscape fashioned by glaciers rather than man.

I lived in a primitive, thick-walled seventeenth century cottage in the north once. Massive thick walls and little in the way of refinement - and that was the twentieth century. So I feel a kinship and am keeping the feel of the thing primitive and "plain living". Earthy. No mod cons. Part of the landscape.

Anyway, more later ...

A farmhouse finished and a cottage beginning ...

2011-11-25T15:29:00.000Z

Finished this on Wednesday, an image which I shall use for local cards.

And am now busy sorting out possibilities cutting-wise for Dove Cottage and trying to decide on a season. Summer or winter? When I visited as a child I remember it was raining cats and dogs in the height of summer. Wet slate and the smell of earth and damp and the sound of windscreen wipers.

On the whole, and going on my dim and distant memories I think I might go for watery muted colours so these are the pieces I have found so far. One more box and a pile of fresh magazines to go through.

I will try very hard to be good and not get side-tracked by the November 2007 edition of Good Housekeeping.

Here is my preliminary swatch (with cat's tail accidentally included).

As you see, continuing my sheep roll, I am thinking of including a passing herd. Not settled about that yet though.

We shall see.

Off to read a spot of Wordsworth to get me into the mood.

A taste of Tenerife - and the Lakes

2011-11-20T18:17:00.000Z

This is a small collage of a Tenerife farmhouse I am trying to finish off at the moment. It has been a bit of therapy and has served to get my hand and eye in after a couple of fairly sterile weeks.

So I did a therapeutic studio clean up and started this and now hope to return to my writers' houses, especially after discovering this ancient little yellowing booklet which had fallen down and was languishing behind the bookshelf:

It contains some very evocative small reproductions of contemporary engravings and watercolours. I was especially interested in one by the poet's daughter, Dora. It shows Dove Cottage walled by what looks for all the world like a row of headstones and not the drystone wall we see today.

But however much I peer at it, I can't for the life of me make out what they are. Perhaps just huge slates lined up... a mystery.

Photo shoot chez naive art house

2011-11-13T13:53:00.000Z

Portrait of a grumpy woman

I am grumpy, stressed out and fed up. Now there's a rivetting way to start a post. (That's not me above, I hasten to add, just a little picture that chimes with my general mood). I am in need of getting down to some serious image-making but all I seem to be doing is shuffling pieces of official paper from one end of town to another or even worse, one town to another. And I daren't even think about the hours of waiting in air-conditioned, miserably-lit depressing offices adorned with hideous paintings where windows should be.

THEN, in the same fortnight, being the glutton for punishment I already know myself to be, I embark on my Etsy adventure. (Etsy is an online shop community). Stand up anyone who believed the blurb about it being easy-peasy. On second thoughts, don't if you value your life. I was struggling at it all day again yesterday. THEN this morning I woke up to cat sick in the living room and a massive orange spider in the bath.

THEN I switched on the televison and saw the Remembrance Sunday service at the Cenotaph and all my selfish troubles and whinges were kicked into insignificant perspective...

Sooooo ..... back to this Etsy emporium of mine (opening Monday or Tuesday) - it requires photography so I have been stabbing away at every damned setting on the camera hoping that something sharp and appealing and hopefully legible would emerge. That is my usual coping method with any technology whatsoever, be it camera, computer, washing machine or telephone - stab away until it works.

Anyway, here's a sampler of some more acceptable (ie less blurry) images.

I found some nice frames for my Keatsian mini prints:

And here's my Mad Cat Lady in her frame:

And that's enough for now otherwise there'll be no surprise. It'll be a relief to think that maybe next week I will be able to emerge from this horrible chrysalis and start making things that have been buzzing around in my head again in peace and I hope this grumpy whining post will explain to those people with whom I have not been communicating over the past fortnight how things have been.

My most abject apologies.

Think of it as a lucky escape.

I'm back ... with naive Christmas cards

2011-11-07T19:13:00.001Z

I didn't realise how long it has been since I had posted anything.

Daughter has been visiting and I have had lots of bureaucratic stuff to do.

Then running around to the printer.

Anyway, that's my excuse.

My creativity was zapped - or do I mean sapped - by it all.

But as you see, I haven't been entirely idle.

More presents have arrived on the steps of Wentworth Place and some new shoots of grass are showing!

This is one of my beautiful (if I do say so myself!) Christmas cards - hooray - which will be in my shop this week.

Watch this space.

Or even THAT space.

Monoprints, yay!

2011-10-23T08:39:00.000+01:00

Two Sisters

Well, it's something I'd been promising myself to do for a while now but just hadn't got round to hunting out the ink and glass and finding a space for the ensuing mess on my cuttings strewn worktop. So along came two reminders in one week: images on tv of Tracy Emin producing a monoprint and a post on Anna Wilson-Patterson's splendid blog about it.

The fates had conspired ...

So now I'm on a roll.

I used some of the antique doll images in my sketchbook which have served as the basis for my paper cut portraits as a point of departure.

This was the first I pulled that I was vaguely satisfied with:

Portrait

I love the way two opposite poles come together in one image: the precision of line and the randomness of the fuzz and blotching and brush strokes (I have an aversion to rollers). Then there is the childish excitement (albeit often followed by disappointment) of pulling the paper away and discovering - success or failure.

Black Cat

The Two Sisters is the last thing I have done and voila, brings together monoprinting and my love of paper and scissors. I think it's an avenue I will explore at length and enjoy dawdling in!

A Romantic footnote

2011-10-16T16:59:00.000+01:00

Another miniature portrait of an all-but-forgotten female from the Romantic era. Poor Miss Cotterell has haunted my doodle book for a while, and my imagination for a bit longer. She was an ordinary middle-class girl born in the early 1800s. But for a twist of fate she would have lived and died and been laid to rest in complete anonymity.

Miss Cotterell Was a Sad Martyr to Her Illness

As it was, however, she happened to book her passage (and that of her chaperone, Mrs Pidgeon) to Naples (where her brother was a banker) on the Maria Crowther on the same date as Keats and Severn and has thus, as fellow-traveller, gained a kind of immortality by fleetingly appearing in all the poet's biographies, a shadowy figure who shared their six week voyage south, suffering from consumption and subject to frequent fainting fits.

Severn wrote that she was eighteen, pretty and "agreeable and ladylike". We are also given to understand that her case was terminal and that she was "a sad martyr to her illness", as Severn put it, but do not know her as anything but her formal title of Miss Cotterell.

What happened to her, how long did she have to live with her brother Charles in Naples? Where and when was she buried?

Poor, poor Miss Cotterell.

All we like sheep ...

2011-10-13T11:06:00.003+01:00

... is the name of a piece by Handel (I think), and I always have. Liked sheep, that is.

I'm the mad woman who quietly squeals with delight when I get back to England and pass my first green field of sheep on the train.

So I had these scraps left over from my Naples Letter collage and they were hanging around on my table top and rather than throw them away I made one of my miniatures:

Sheep 1

Which of course led to me doing a larger one, the composition of which was based on a drawing I did ages ago of sheep in Edale, where I lived at one time.

Going With the Herd

A Hampstead landscape

2011-10-09T17:15:00.003+01:00

Hampstead Landscape: Letter from Naples

I know. I was meant to be "doing" Dove Cottage ... Well, I went to the library and drew a blank as far as Wordsworth goes.

The closest was Wogan.

And that's not exactly close.

And I had a spare already made up Keats House going, plus I saw the EXACT match to the pathway in my Keats House guide in the shape of one of his last letters to Wentworth Place from Naples so I cut it out, played around, and decided to make a picture of it with a quiltish background.

It fits in more with the evolved style of my writers' houses. The brickwork is a nod to the building going on in Hampstead at the time. Indeed, Keats complains of the slowness of developers and the eternal building site opposite Wentworth Place in one of his letters. The colours are nice muted English ones - a contrast to the hectic, vivid vision Keats would have seen from the boat in Naples as he penned the letter.

I'll have to research my Wordsworth entirely online but I'm one of those stupid old-fashioned people who prefer to kick off my research by delving into an actual biography.

Ah well, c'est la vie.

Off to do a spot of googling ....

The enigmatic Miss Kent

2011-10-05T10:46:00.000+01:00

Another imaginary portrait of one of the women of the Romantic circle who oiled the wheels that allowed the men to take centre stage (now there's a mixture of metaphors)...

Bess Kent was the sister-in-law of radical journalist and poet Leigh Hunt. He was introduced to the Kent sisters by a mutual friend who knew the 11-year-old Bess was keen to meet him after reading one of his essays in a political journal. Hunt fell for and eventually married the sexy older sister but the triangular relationship lasted for many years and rumours of incest dogged poor Bess who was undoubtedly in love with Hunt.

The more intellectual and social Bess acted as amenuensis, administrator and hostess while her harrassed and indolent sister produced a brood of unruly children and eventually sank into invalidism and ultimately alcoholism. Bess herself had a legendary temper, a sometime opium dependency and made several attempts on her own life.

But once the Hunts had left for Italy she appears to have blossomed, becoming an independent woman, writing botanical books - her Flora Domestica, or, the portable flower-garden: with directions for the treatment of plants in pots and illustrations from the works of the poets was a popular hit and the first gardening book of its kind - and carrying on a long friendship by letter (they never met) with the poet John Clare.
Few of her letters survive and she never sat for her portrait.

Even more cats ...

2011-10-01T10:24:00.001+01:00

How many cats qualify you for title of Mad Cat Woman? My six sound paltry by comparison with Mrs Griggs's but when they're all clamouring for food at the same time I swear it FEELS like 6 times 13.

Anyway my interest extends to other people's cats too - my first question is always What's his/her name - didn't TS Eliot write a poem about that?. Obviously a man after my own heart. Names really are important.

Here are two of my latest miniatures, two black cats. My very first cat, Polly, was a black one. They make such very elegant shapes. Very collag-able (is that a word?):

James

James is a cat who seems to have adopted my youngest daughter in London. He lives next door, five floors up. A very urban cat.

And this is William who kind of appeared out of my imagination and a heap of scrap paper that was on my drawing board. I think the name popped up out of my subconscious because I have been toying with and doodling away at Dove Cottage, Wordsworth's house, lately.

William

Right, off to the car boot sale at the church now, in the hopes of coming across a stash of old magazines. I really need some new stuff to refresh my hoard.

Portrait of a mad cat woman

2011-09-25T14:51:00.000+01:00

You never know the minute ... a sentence, a paragraph, a photo, a poem or a curious snippet stumbled upon in a blog can spark the idea for a picture. Well, that's how it works for me anyway. Just a small piece of information can set me off.

One of my favourite blogs is Georgian London - that's www. georgianlondon.com - where a recent post, a contemporary obit, caught my eye:

"An Eccentrical Lady"

Died, 16th January 1792, at her house, Southampton Row, Bloomsbury, Mrs Griggs. Her executors found in her house eighty-six living and twenty-eight dead cats. A black servant has been left 150 pounds per annum, for the maintenance of herself and the surviving grimalkins.

The lady was single, and died worth 30,000 pounds. Mrs Griggs, on the death of her sister, a short time ago, had an addition to her fortune; she set up her coach, and went out almost every day airing, but suffered no male servants to sleep in her house. Her maids being tired frequently of their attendance on such a numerous household, she was induced at last to take a black woman to attend and feed them. The black woman had lived servant to Mrs Griggs many years, and had a handsome annuity given her to take care of the cats."

So here is my take on the eccentrical Mrs Griggs, a mad cat woman of the eighteenth century.

Hope her cats were indeed "maintained" after her demise.

In the Bay of Biscay

2011-09-24T14:06:00.000+01:00

I finished this piece yesterday, letting rip (as opposed to snipping) with my store of papers. No, I did snip the background which is a patchwork of greys, meant to vaguely represent the sails. And the boat itself, the Maria Crowther, which took Keats and Severn to Naples in September - October 1820. But the rest is torn, the best way I could approximate to what physically and possibly mentally overtook the dying and deeply depressed poet en route to Italy and his grave:

"In the Bay of Biscay," wrote Severn recalling the voyage, "we encountered a three day storm. The sea swept over the ship all day and night, and the rushing up and down of water in the cabin was a frightful sound in the darkness..."

And again: "The waves were of enormous length, and so high that the effect was like a mountainous country:"

Severn himself painted a serene picture of the Maria Crowther which I used as a source and there are strong echoes of Alfred Wallis, one of my favourite naive artists in there too.

Working it out

I used fragmented pieces from photocopies of some of Keats's last magnificent heart-breaking letters too.

I have still to get to grips with being able to crop photos, so I'm afraid there is a bit of worktable all round this picture for the time being until I master that particular IT art.

Sailing to Italy

2011-09-21T16:45:00.000+01:00

This has been kicking around at the back of my mind (and pages and pages back in my sketch book) for ages. Even before I did the Shelley storm for Field Place. A boat instead of a house this time - not sure where it's going yet.

The Maria Crowther heading for Naples.

And death.

With a 3 day storm in the Bay of Biscay between and echoes of one of my favourite painters, Alfred Wallis, thrown in for good measure.

And memories of a frightful couple of days and even worse nights in my youth which I shall never forget - on a rust bucket of a ferry grandly called the Ernesto Anastasio - in an Atlantic storm in December when only a miracle saved me from being crushed to death between shifting cargo on deck, and we all heard the terrifying boom which signified the propellor coming out of the water. That's how big the waves were.

Oh, yes. I can identify with the storm that hit the Maria Crowther ...

Christmas cards

2011-09-18T15:17:00.001+01:00

I have been tweaking my Winter Snows image.

No, what am I saying?

I have redone it completely to give it a more decoratively Christmasy feel.

Wentworth Place with silhouetted inhabitants (Keats and Fanny?), the dashing Dilke cats, some seasonal robins and a gift on the doorstep ...

White is EXTREMELY hard to photograph.

I'm still searching for the definitive shot (this needs more to the left and less to the right) but thought I'd put this one up anyway to prove I haven't been slacking after a week's absence.

Each one of those snowflakes has been lovingly (what?) and individually cut and stuck down.

I think I may be suffering from snow blindness ...

A victim of Romanticism

2011-09-11T18:32:00.000+01:00

Here is another miniature portrait, of a woman whose life was fatally shaped by the Romantic movement:

To Fanny nothing now remained except death

Fanny Wollstonecraft was a tragic figure, overlooked in life and death. The daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, half-sister to Mary Shelley, adopted daughter of William Godwin, she was herself not touched by genius, though she wished to be worthy of those geniuses who surrouded her. Conventional and unbookish, her role in the chaotic, debt-ridden Godwin household was confined to two things: running the place and peacemaking. She was most likely in love with Shelley who regarded her at best with indifference and at worst as a useful go-between and was left behind when he, Mary and their stepsister Claire ran off to France.

Unappreciated, unloved and taken for granted, poor Fanny eventually decided to end her life. Even in this she took care to cause no trouble. She took the coach to Swansea, booked herself into an inn and took an overdose of laudanum. No family member came forward to claim her body and she was buried in a communal grave. She was just 22.

No character of Jane Austen ever had to write anything as dire as a suicide note but you can't help feeling that if any had they could have done no better than Fanny's elegant and understated farewell:

I have long determined that the best thing I could do was to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate, and whose life has only been a series of pain to those persons who have hurt their health in endeavouring to promote her welfare. Perhaps to hear of my death will give you pain, but you will soon have the blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed as Francis Wollstonecraft."

Poor Fanny.

Deary me, really, the more I read about Percy Bysshe Shelley the less I find to like about him...

Newstead Abbey night scene

2011-09-06T15:14:00.000+01:00

Finished at last.
Newstead Abbey with a Gothic twist.

Strangely, as I was sticking down the last pieces, the streaks of lightning, the sound of thunder came over on the radio, accompanying a very brief excerpt from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Creepy ....

It was a storm in the Villa Diodati, Byron's rented villa overlooking Lake Geneva, when those gathered (Shelley, Mary Godwin (later Shelley), Claire Clairmont, Polidori and Byron himself) told each other ghost stories which eventually resulted in Mary Shelley's classic.

Portrait of a worried woman

2011-09-05T11:17:00.000+01:00

The Newstead Abbey collage should be finished today.
I had thought of including poor Lady Byron in it, running off with her babe in arms. When doing these houses I can't help but thinking about their occupants ...

Annabella was well aware that her husband cared more for her half sister than he did for her.

In the end I did a miniature portrait, playing card size (the correct term is ACEO but I loathe acronyms) which - as usually happens with me - kicks me into series mode. It is a small picture with a very long title - a sentence from a book. Last night I started on one of Fanny Wollstonecraft. I would like to see how a mosaic of about 20 would look together .... but I am getting ahead of myself.

Annabella Milbanke's unfortunate marriage to Lord Byron took place on New Year's Day 1815. A year and one child later she was divorced, hinting at but never specifying, his allegedly perverse practises in the bedroom and his much gossiped-about unnatural feelings for his half-sister, Augusta Leigh.

So she cut her losses and got out where other women at that time might well have put up and shut up.

The formidable Lady Byron is listed in Chambers as "English philanthropist". She went into the marriage with the celebrated poet with a view to reforming his character but spectacularly failed. She later put her reforming spirit to work more successfully elsewhere: in improving women's education, in agriculture and industry and in the anti-slavery movement.

Newstead Abbey with a ghoul and ghost garnish

2011-09-02T12:50:00.000+01:00

All of a sudden it is coming together.

I was getting a bit worried that this would be the first writer's house I would have to give up on but I really applied myself to the scissors and drawing board yesterday and got the architectural bit largely sorted.

Then went through my "maybe" pile of cuttings I had set aside, found something that jumped out at me for clouds and once I framed the bottom with some National Geo underwater vegetation from no idea what part of the planet it all clicked into place.

Nothing is certain yet, of course. Not till it gets aerolsoled or Pritted down.

I like the flying skulls, an idea lifted from a doodle in my book which originally came (I think) from a Fuseli engraving.

Amusingly Gothick.

I want to camp it up a la Byron.

He was such a poser.

Cards and stuff ...

2011-08-31T13:53:00.000+01:00

One way and another, there's been far too much going on in the shape of comings and goings mainly, family stuff (and nonsense) which all combine to push my creativity levels down quite a few notches. So I have been involving myself (on and off) with more practical matters - like getting together things to go in my coming-soon online shop.

Cards, for instance.

Introducing (above and on the left) Field Place and on the right, Haworth Parsonage. Framed collage in the middle. All posing on my mantelpiece.

And below:

bookplates, bookmark and a mini-print greeting card.

More to come.

In between grappling with Lord Byron's Gothic pile, that is.

Right, back to work ...

Struggling with Newstead Abbey ..

2011-08-23T16:37:00.000+01:00

Well it might be enough to drive me to drink, but honest, guv, it was just a lunchtime vino blanco caught by the side of the drawing board ...

Might help to orchestrate the perpendiculars and ogee curves better - now there are a couple of words kicking in that I hadn't grappled with since my art history A Level. It's a question at the moment of chopping up the building into manageable proportions.

The trouble is Byron's relatively short life (relative, that is to his fellow Romantics Keats and Shelley) was so packed with places, incidents, characters and animals it is hard to know what to put in and what to leave out. Add to that the impossibly complex character of Gothic architecture and it's an explosive cocktail (to continue the alcoholic metaphor).

I came across a marvellous quotation of Pablo Picasso's in an old sketchbook the other day which sums up this dilemma so wonderfully:
"When one begins a painting one always meets with temptations. One must distrust these, destroy one's own painting, and do it over many times. Even when the artist destroys a beautiful creation, he doesn't really do away with it, but rather changes it, condenses it, makes it more essential. The completed work is the result of a series of discoveries which have been eliminated one by one ...."

Anyway, as you see, (to come down to earth after Picasso's marvellous thoughts) I am going with the Gothic romance theme, with not one but (possibly) two black friars with a touch of classic Greece in the shape of the Byronic bust for good measure. They may all, of course, be eliminated in due course.

Once I have the house itself sorted out I think working out the foreground and background will be fun. Ghosts, ghouls and an owl or two. Lovely.

Mad, bad and difficult to decide ...

2011-08-20T16:55:00.000+01:00

... on how to go about portraying Newstead Abbey, Lord Byron's gothic pile in Nottinghamshire. Which I have decided to do.
Having collaged the homes of his fellow Romantic Poets, Keats and Shelley, I feel I can't leave out Byron though his place is nothing if not a real rambler of a building and hard to get a handle on.

Byron wasn't born at Newstead Abbey but grew up there with his querulous mother and the dilapidated building and its history obviously had an enormous and lasting influence on his life and work.

"Eternally romantic and beautiful, like a smaller version of the great cathedrals of Wells or Salisbury, the great west front of Newstead Abbey stands as one of the most perfect examples of thirteenth century monastic architecture. The Abbey has a long history, but it is the spirit of the sixth Lord Byron which pervades the place today ..."

During the course of one of his not infrequent cash flow problems Byron ordered his servants to dig up floors looking for treasure reputedly buried by monks centuries before, but all they found were a number of stone coffins full of bones. He had a drinking cup made from one of the skulls.

The building is said to be home to any number of ghosts, including a nebulous black shape with staring eyes, a white lady and The Black Friar - this last immortalised by Byron in his poem Don Juan - the appearance of which was believed to portend bad luck for the family that had usurped the monastic order's home ...

All in all I think a large helping of Gothic Romance with a bit of spectral horror a la Fuseli is called for for this one ... but I am determined to introduce Boatswain into the picture somehow, Byron's beloved huge Newfoundland dog who has a magnificent tomb at the Abbey.
Animals were one of his lifelong passions.

And apropos of dogs, here is a tiny collage I did the other day:

It really is tiny, playing card size, based on a previous collage of Fanny Keats's dog Carlo. Another poetic pet. Just playing around, in between pictures, with leftover scraps I am too miserly to throw away.
Right, off to do some more research and review my stash of suitable papers ...

Storm at Sea: Field Place, Sussex

2011-08-14T18:38:00.000+01:00

Here it is: the Sussex country seat of the Shelleys, threatened by the Mediterranean storm that took the life of Timothy Shelley's eldest son, Percy Bysshe, who had been born there 29 years and eleven months previously.

Field Place

All his life Shelley appears to have what would at the last prove to be a fatal attraction to boats and being on the water, whether it was the paper boats he and his successive wives, Harriet (who by-the-by drowned herself) then Mary would sail on London ponds or later rowing boats in Marlow and last but not least, his specially-built sailing boat, the Ariel, in Italy.

So paper boats feature in this house portrait, made from photocopies of pages from his biographies, with significant names on them:

detail

As to July 8, 1822, this is how one biographer described the fateful day:

"In the heat of the Italian summer Shelley went with Edward Williams to Leghorn in the Ariel, and spent a week there and at Pisa with Leigh Hunt. In the afternoon of an intensely warm July day, under a sky that presaged bad weather, they said goodbye to Hunt and set sail for Lerici. A tremendous storm arose, such as is not infrequent on this coast. The frail little Ariel, twenty-four feet by eight, disappeared from the view of those watching it from the shore, and was swallowed up in the tumult of the tempest.

"A week later the body of Williams, cast up by the waves, was found on the beach, and the next day that of Shelley was discovered upon the shore near Viareggio, three miles away. It was not until three weeks after the storm that the corpse of 18-year-old Charñes Vivian, the young sailor-lad who was their sole companiion in the boat and the only one of the three who could swim, was also found on the sands.

"In one of Shelley's pockets was Keats' last book, Lamia, which he had told Hunt, who had lent it to him on his departure for home, he would not part with until he should see him again..."

Shelley's ashes were eventually interred in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome near the graves of his little son William and that of Keats.

Shelley's birthplace taking shape

2011-08-10T15:03:00.002+01:00

So far, so slow. Too many distractions at present, mainly that my studio is being inhabited by my youngest, on a visit. The studio houses the computer, hence the lack of solitude...
Small price to pay for her presence, however.

This is my last photo of the work in hand:

As you see, I have lost a window ... possibly hoovered up in my zeal to tidy up and clear the floor yesterday. And since this photo the grass has grown paler, as has the too-black forecourt.

I borrowed a biography, Shelley by Edmund Blunden from our local library this morning. It is a bit of a whitewash but has a few interesting nuggets. Here, for instance, is his take on Field Place:

"Two miles out of Horsham to the north-west, not far from the county boundary, the river Arun and the Roman road called Stane Street, stood and still stands Field Place. In the summer season at least it is a house of enchantment ... like others round about it has a mighty roof of Horsham stone, and a line of chimneys like towers. It is very rambling, with long passages and odd corners, turnings and recesses, floors on different levels - a long low house in which the work of several periods is combined.

"It stands in park which like most in the district has long been shaded with great trees, and it has its own little brook and lake. Before Shelley knew this home, its masters had laid out fine gardens and orchards, as well as "the American garden," described as "a long strip of green, softly turfy and sweetly shaded, with circles and crescents of rhododendrons; here and there ornamental pines of many kinds, cedars, beeches, birches ... making tents of greenery where one might sit hid, unseen yet seeing.

"From the garden he could see the line of the South Downs and in another direction the seemingly mountainous region round Hindhead. The whole estate was such as might fill his days with pleasant adventures. Charming or wild, secret or sunlit, these glades and groves had much to give to a sensitive child, and yield him imagery for his later concepts ..."

Thinking about Shelley ...

2011-08-05T01:28:00.001+01:00

Scrummy new books ...

... while I was clearing leaves in the garden yesterday. He is not one of my favourite characters from literary history what with his monstrous ego, his cavalier attitude to his wives and children and his rackety lifestyle, to say nothing of his Christian name, but I suppose he must have been undeniably charismatic. And then there's the poetry, of course. She said, ironically.

I remember being set tracts of Ode to the West Wind to learn by heart as English Lit homework. It was hardly a punishment after reams of Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard I can tell you, in fact I still love that poem, but even then as a callow schoolgirl I preferred committing Keats to memory. And as I read about their lives I have to say the more I read about the privileged ethereal Shelley the more I preferred the under privileged and down-to-earth Keats.

That said I am rather enjoying The Young Romantics by Daisy Hay, one of a batch of books I got from Amazon recently, which features the story of Shelley and his entourage (it's the one on the far left in the above photo) writ very large by comparison with Leigh Hunt and Byron, the other main protagonists.

All this as a bit of a long-winded way to introduce the fact that Shelley was born in a splendid, highly collagable house, Field Place, in the Horsham area of West Sussex in 1792.
He died almost thirty years later, drowned in a storm at sea.
Before he could get his hands on the house or his inheritance, albeit he'd managed to live off the prospects of it for all his adult years.

I like the idea of trying to contrast the contained domestic classical symmetry of Field Place with a suggestion of his turbulent life and death as a meteorological backdrop. Enlightened balance v. romantic drama.
If you get my meaning.

This is what my doodlebook looks like at present.
Another morning raking up leaves and assorted creepy crawlies should do it ...

A Sussex Albion

2011-07-29T17:06:00.000+01:00

Finished this today.

William Blake and his wife metaphorically cast out from the Garden of Eden - or rather in this case Felpham - Adam and Eve style, after the incident with the soldier, and overlooked by one of his angels that lived in the trees.

Most of the cuttings for this collage came from a stash of old National Geographics - I believe the thatch in reality is a desert and the angel's robe, for instance, part of the Lascaux caves.

I love these transformations.

Anyway, it's a relief to have finished it at last.

Its completion coincides with my beginning a new book tomorrow which may or may not provide me with food for thought for my next House......

Wrestling with Blake

2011-07-26T17:38:00.000+01:00

This is possibly my most difficult one so far, in that it has so far caused not one but two headaches. There is a lot of standing up involved in making a collage, what am I saying, more standing up than sitting down. And the combination with a bowed head is not good. Last night I feared a migraine so took myself off to bed with the cats locked out. Ooof, very serious that. They are still sulking..

The hippy lookalike is gone and replaced with a tree which I hope looks a bit Blakean with some sheep and vapours. Blake was big on sheep. (While I am in danger of contracting the vapours). In fact I may put this vignette on the back burner for a painting at some point.

Hopefully it's all looking very Albion-y and green and pleasant landish. I think I'd like to go for a walk through this garden.

Oh, and the significance of the scythe - I nearly forgot:
"In the summer of 1803 Blake found in the garden of his cottage a soldier, called in by the gardener, it seems, to cut the grass. Blake did not like soldiers; he was against war as such, and against the war of English intervention in France in particular. He ordered the intruder out by main force. Ill-advised words followed, reported as "Damn the King, and damn all his soldiers, they are all slaves"; and some remarks about Napoleon more fitted to the mouth of a French than of an English poet ..."

The upshot was poor old Blake was tried at Chichester for treason but eventually acquitted.

Bring me my scissors of delight ...

2011-07-23T09:36:00.001+01:00

Well, it's got a catchy tune ... and I am enjoying getting stuck into this (puns'r'us). It's getting to the complicated, decisions-to-be-decided-upon stage. I always seem to start with the windows, I find they concentrate my mind wonderfully.

Blake and Catherine, his long-suffering wife, were known for stripping off in their garden in Lambeth so I have no doubt they did so in the far less urban surroundings of Felpham, so there they are. At the moment.

"I have very little of Mr Blake's company," Catherine was quoted as saying, "he is always in Paradise."
So I must place much more paradaisical green and pleasant vegetation in here to compliment the Adam and Eve of Felpham.

The archway I think may have been a later addition to the cottage but I have purloined it for 1800 as it has a Blakean, grotto-like feel. The scythe represents an infamous episode which led to Blake's trial for treason in Chichester, which I will relate in my next post being as I am pressed for time right now.

The angels .... Blake used to converse with them and see them in trees. I am not sure the more finished one on the left isn't influenced by my last post and Alan's comments - a bit flower-powery and harking back to those art school days of mine.

Entirely unlooked for effect.
Such is the power of the subconscious...

Beginning with Blake

2011-07-20T20:04:00.001+01:00

My love of William Blake dates back to my art school days when he fitted in with all that rebellion, mysticism and downright morbid angst to which spotty youth is so prone. Bedsits with Athena posters of Blake's engraving of Newton, funny cigarettes and vile smelling joss sticks ... those were the days... Blake spans such a wonderful period of English history, being born just before Romanticism really got underway , in 1757 and dying in 1827.

A dyed in the wool Londoner, he nevertheless has a connection to my favourite county, Sussex, having lived in the idyllic village of Felpham for three years (1800-1803) during which time he produced the strangely wondrous words for Jerusalem. The cottage, then called Rose Cottage, still stands but is privately owned.
So I have decided it is to be my next collage capture.

Here is the roughest of rough beginnings:

And here is an engraving of the building by the great man himself:

I think the blue is too strong. I want to keep to the true Blakean palette. That means a lot of whittling down of cuttings scraps ... watch this space!

Sold

2011-07-18T10:28:00.000+01:00

Thank you to the person who bought these two paintings at the ABNA show in St Ives at the weekend.

I am very fond of them so am pleased they have found a good home.

Cut Off

The Blue Boat

Out of season's greetings from Miss Austen ...

2011-07-10T00:53:00.002+01:00

I glued in the last snowflake (which all look suspiciously like the cotton wool balls my dad and I used to make for the Christmas tree when I was really small) this afternoon.

The light wasn't very good so it's a bit dark and there is about 3 and a half centimetres chopped off on either side because my camera doesn't do nice slimline rectangles, only dumpy ones. When I have better images on the Canon I will replace all the duff photos I have taken of late. As it is there are just one-and-a-half robins on either side of the house instead of two.
But I wanted to upload it because I then feel it is done and out there and I am freed to start on something else.

Mrs Austen in her pyjamas has gone. And that may or may not be Martha Lloyd in the doorway putting out the cat. The swirly lines have writing on. Which may or may not (ambiguous moi?) be words written by Jane Austen, a Christmas carol or just a simple swirl of seasonal fog. Or all three. I gave the neighbour bearing holly a black dog. The Dilke's refugee cat is back in the scraps box.

Christmas always reminds me of childhood. And one of the things I loved most in the run up was opening envelopes from aged relatives containing those dated (even then) cheapo cards with cheesy scenes of coaches and four, snow, glowing mullioned windows and rosy cheeked people in strange old-fashioned clothes. Often liberally sprinkled in glitter. I thought they were wonderful and would wish myself into the jolly scenes. As I got older and more sophisticated (who am I kidding?) I would outwardly make fun of them while still sneakily getting a thrill if one came through the post.

So now I produce this design. I think there are some echoes in there. My past is catching up on me ...

Beavering away on Chawton Cottage

2011-07-06T11:36:00.000+01:00

Okay, so some of this is stuck down and some is in a state of flux. Is this a metaphor for my life I ask myself in ironic tone.

I am afraid it is becoming a bit unwieldy. For a "cottage" Jane Austen's was a bit of a humdinger as far as size goes. I have had to add on more at the sides as I go along to try to approximate to the rather grand proportions.

Looks like the turkey might be squeezed out. But there goes Jane Austen crossing the street. And her mum is at the door. Though she looks a wee bit too much like she is in her pyjamas at the moment so that will have to be changed.

I have been mugging up on Chawton Cottage for some background info: It was already 120 years old when the Austens moved in, part of Jane's brother Edward's estate. He improved it quite a lot for them, adding on more rooms at the back, apparently. Jane, her mother, her sister and their friend Martha Lloyd were not the only inhabitants, there were several servants. No wonder the place is a bit of a sprawler rather than a poky two up two downer with roses round the door traditional building associated with the word "cottage".

And it must have had an interesting view, looking out as it did over the main road to Winchester with all the comings and goings of the coaches that that implies. And the clatter. In fact in one of her letters Jane describes looking out of the front window and seeing the face of one of her nephews inside a passing coach.

Anyway, enough of this and back to the drawing board. I am setting myself a this week deadline for this larger-than-usual piece.

A Happy Christmas in July ...

2011-07-05T12:22:00.000+01:00

I always did prefer cold to heat so what better time to put together my Jane Austen Christmas card design?

As the petunias wilt, brittle rubber tree leaves clatter to the ground and the cats sprawl in the shade, here am I in the cool and clutter of the studio moving bits of paper around the drawing board and trying to imagine myself into a Regency December in Hampshire kinda mood.

The idea came to me when I stumbled upon a contemporary engraving of holly sellers. I don't know if that's a holly seller approaching Chawton Cottage or one of the neighbours, but either way he gave me the way in to the picture: Probably not raggety enough for a seller now I come to think of it. A neighbour then. With a gift of holly and fir from his fields to deck the Chawton Cottage halls.

On the left is a refugee - surplus cat from the Dilke tribe in Keats House I found in my box of unused bits and pieces.

He may yet be transformed into a turkey. I am not sure that turkeys had got their feet on the Christmas traditions ladder or do I mean under the traditional Christmas meal table at that time, probably not, but I will conveniently ignore the fact. I fancy doing a turkey.

In the meantime I am pleased to announce the unveiling yesterday of my (still under construction) new website:

http://www.amandawhite-contemporarynaiveart.com/

Please drop by and have a look if you have the time, as I say I am still faffing around with it so there are lots of blanks and things that probably need blanking come to that. Golly I am getting so au fait with technology I can't believe it.

Jane Austen collage, finished at last

2011-07-02T12:32:00.000+01:00

Jane and Cassandra Austen Tending Their Garden at Steventon

Phew! Finished at last. Has this been my most fiddly to date? Probably. It has also been a bit of a mission tracking down suitable prints that I thought fitted the period.

My admittedly shallow researches so far didn't actually turn up any references to either Jane or her sister Cassandra tending their garden at Steventon Rectory, their practical enthusiasms seemed channelled into putting their ensembles together and attending dances but I daresay they may have done some genteel pruning or cutting of flowers for the house.

But they most certainly did patchwork.
In a letter written to Cassandra in 1811 Jane wrote:
"Have you remembered to collect pieces for the patchwork - we are now at a standstill?" And I believe one is on display at the Jane Austen Museum in Chawton. So I've got that right, anyway

I don't seem to be able to capture the brightness of this picture. I've taken about a dozen shots but none of them come up to the mark. I'm looking forward to getting some professional style photos taken by my daughter when she arrives at the back end of July.
Bear with me!

The Austen Rectory taking shape

2011-06-28T11:05:00.001+01:00

But more slowly than I would wish given distractions, various. Which is to say watching too much Wimbledon and hacking back ivy and an African creeper (I really don't know its proper name, African creeper is what a friend from South Africa used to call it so I bow to her superior knowledge) in the arbour I'm trying to get tidied up for use as an outdoors painting den. Yes, painting. Certainly not collaging - the bits would scatter to the four breezes.

And I will have to share with the cats as they think it's theirs. Although they seem to have gone off it at the moment. But cats are like that. As soon as they see someone else muscling in on their former territory I daresay the arbour will become all the rage with them.

I will post a picture at some point once it is respectable.

In the meantime I post the above work-in-slow-progress shot. To make me feel I am getting somewhere. The colours are much brighter but I can't move the piece to better light without much of it going awol.

It has acquired Pollock's Toy Museum-style drapes. And Jane and sister Cassandra with lady-like trugs doing some lady-like gardening. (I don't think hacking back alien creepers would have registered on their horizon). So you see life does sometimes reflect art. Or should that be the other way around?

Steventon Rectory

Steaming ahead with Jane Austen

2011-06-26T12:56:00.000+01:00

Sort of.......

It went from this earlier start

But still a long way to go.

Steventon Rectory was the home of Jane Austen for the first 25 years of her life. The place was torn down many years ago and there is now nothing left of it except a water pump in the middle of a field, so I am treating it as a bit of a fairy tale with more than a sideways (or backwards) glance at the simply stunning quilt exhibition at the V&A last year and to childrens' samplers of the time.

Jane's letters are full of references to fabrics and sewing projects so the idea of a patchwork effect feels right.

Let us see how it goes.

Defeated by technology

2011-06-19T16:45:00.001+01:00

The computer man came to give my computer some much-needed oomph the other day and install a new second-hand printer. And enable some things and disable others. Among which last appears to be my facility to upload photos from my camera and bung them into a file. Or even to upload anything from existing files onto here. I am sure it is still there somewhere. Unfortunately I haven't a clue where. Or how. Or what.
So the photo I took of my latest work-in-progress (the now demolished Steventon Rectory) languishes in my camera.
Just thought I'd pop in to say that and explain my continuing silence.
An artist's blog without a picture isn't worth the cyber paper it's printed on.

Okay..... I have managed to get to upload stuff, namely this Brontë drawing, from my existing files.
New photos are still a mystery though.
I'm working on it...

I hope to resume normal communication soon.

Who's afraid of the Long Man of Wilmington?

2011-06-09T10:32:00.000+01:00

Night and Day, Monk's House, Rodmell.

Nobody, now he's been restored to his original form after that massive aberration (is this the word I am searching for I wonder?) given him by some pranksters a couple of years back. So here he is, not in need of any modesty foliage, guardian of the South Downs and Virginia Woolf's countryside retreat.

It is many years since I visited it but I remember it as a place of wonderful tranquility and dense greenery. Some of that greenery I had to sacrifice in this picture in order to allow for the sight of the house itself. Inside it was almost like being underwater, what with the shrubs and trees pressing up against the small windows and the walls being painted in a lovely antiquey pale green shade.

Given Woolf's untimely end that is perhaps unfortunate.

Or maybe fitting.

Anyway, I'm fairly happy with this one.

Now onto someone else's house......

Who will it be I wonder?

Tweaking away at Monk's House ...

2011-06-05T20:03:00.000+01:00

.....Described as "a modest brick and flint dwelling, weather-boarded on the street side", it was bought by the Woolfs in 1919, the year of the publication of Night and Day (hence the moon and the sun) for all of 700 quid. It had no bath, hot water or even a toilet.

As Quentin Bell puts it:
"On September 1st they loaded two waggons with their possessions, crossed the Ouse and moved into Monk's House ... Virginia was obliged to admit to herself she was depressed. Whether the melancholy arose from the comparative imperfections of her new house or from the fact that Duckworth was about to publish Night and Day is not easily determined."

I am no Virginia Woolf but I have to say, in a flippant aside, that the possession of hot and cold running water and a toilet does contribute greatly to my happy-ometer. The personal hygiene arrangements - or rather the lack of them - of past generations has always been a deeply interesting subject for me.

Anyway, to get back to the picture in hand, I am now seeing my way with it and plan to include the Long Man of Wilmington which I am quite sure cannot be seen from Monk's House but is in the vicinity, well about 10 miles off. He is a figure, originally carved from the chalk uplands, regarded as a guardian of the South Downs. So in he goes. Tomorrow
For now, it's back to the drawing board ...

The Woolfs' Retreat

2011-06-03T17:26:00.000+01:00

Virginia and Leonard, that is, in the East Sussex countryside.

Near Lewes.

This is still at the planning and moving around and humming and ha-ing stage, as you see. But I needed to take a photo just in case the lot went flying and I was left with bits on the studio floor and a paper puzzle to solve.

Next to Keats and his circle come the Bloomsberries in my affections. I caught both early - in my teens - and they persist all these years later. In fact now I come to think of it the first two things I bought myself with the first wages I earned in my first job was a smelly Afghan jacket and the two volume biography of Virginia Woolf by her nephew Quentin Bell.

Many years and thousands of kilometres later I still have the books.

God knows what happened to that absolutely frightful jacket.

Haworth Parsonage Revisited

2011-05-29T14:10:00.000+01:00

I have done another Haworth for the ABNA show. Slightly smaller with transportation in mind. It's a tighter composition and has the addition of Victoria and Adelaide, the Brontë geese exiting stage left. The moors are darker and the moon has a yellowish tinge though it probably doesn't show up much on the photo.

Comparing the two reminds me a bit of those spot the difference pictures you used to get in comics years ago.
I did consider putting Black Tom, the Brontë cat into the mix but haven't so far. However, there is still another 24 hours before I take this to the framers - anything might happen!

British Naives

2011-05-26T00:13:00.000+01:00

It's that time of year again - parcelling up some pictures for the annual Association of British Naive Artists show in St Ives. Actually it isn't because the date has been brought forward so it's not nearly a year since the last exhibition ... Pictures to arrive by June 14 deadline.

Anyway, I am away tomorrow to my friendly local framer with these:

Three of them are on paper so would be a liability to send to the UK behind glass so I am going to see how they look with the unbreakable synthetic alternative (whispers: "plastic") but the sheet I was shown last week looked good.

I may send in the Haworth collage too but haven't decided yet.

The show runs from July 9 to 22 at the Crypt Gallery.

Bookmarks and a stroll around town

2011-05-21T13:30:00.000+01:00

This is what is on my table this morning:

One bookmark design finished and the next at the assemblage-and-chopping-and-changing stage. And the book I borrowed last week, Haworth Harvest by N Brysson Morrison which is an enjoyable and untaxing read, devoid of the dreaded footnote disease and full of interesting little nuggets. I just wish it didn't smell of old (this is one of my daughters' most withering descriptions). Or should that be wuthering?

I called in at our local modern art museum the day before yesterday and was pleasantly surprised to find the collection had been changed since last time when I must say the preponderence of crusty, dusty fifties and sixties abstracts in various shades of mud and deterioration had detained me less than 10 minutes.

This time around I was bowled over by two tiny Eileen Agar pastels, one of which is below:

Not a very good reproduction I'm afraid as I was taking the photo undercover. In real life the colours sang out and here they look more like they are doing more of a bit of a muffled hum. Agar spent the winter in Puerto de la Cruz for several years in the 1950s. As did another British painter I admire, Dot Procter.

And here is another picture I was taken with, by Canary Island artist Lola Massieu:

The collection is housed in a beautiful 17th century mansion overlooking the fishing port, and was once the local customs house. It deserves to be better known and better visited. Unfortunately it suffers from another disease I am averse to (see above), namely acronym disease. The letters MACEW will mean absolutely nothing to 99% of people but that is the big sign under which the building labours (standing for Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Eduardo Westendahl). So potential visitors who don't go a bundle on figuring out word games simply pass it by. There was just one other person strolling around when I went in.

The woman on the desk, who was very knowledgeable about the paintings and artists, seemed touchingly pleased to see us.

Haworth Parsonage pet picture

2011-05-15T18:52:00.000+01:00

I finished this today.

At least I think it's finished.

Not terribly happy with this photo as I am missing about an inch of empty space to the right. One day I will get around to finding out how to crop images instead of just bunging them in as they come on the camera.

Anyway, it depicts part of the Brontë menagerie: Flossy the dog, Victoria and Adelaide the geese and Little Dicky the canary. There were cats too and a falcon and other dogs but I think it had to be a case is less is more for this image. Paring back is generally the best bet.

The animals seemed to have mostly belonged to Emily and Anne. Charlotte could, apparently, take them or leave them. Patrick Brontë their father had a couple of dogs called Cato and Plato in his last years.

I quite fancy doing a picture of those three. Possibly outside the church. In the snow.

Mmmmm ... time to do some thinking with my biro and book.

Back to the drawing board

2011-05-11T18:45:00.000+01:00

Spending time gathering my thoughts and ideas in my doodle book, as you see, and happy to have abandoned yesterday's aberration.

I picked up a book about the Brontës in the library this morning. It smelt rather old and musty and hadn't been taken out in seven years, but the first sentence I read was this:
"Emily's interior life was as spacious as the landscape that met the gaze from the field path behind the parsonage and against so ultimate a background everything was simplified."

I really liked that.

So I have brought it home to give it an airing and see what emerges.

More scribbling, most probably ....

When you're in a hole ...

2011-05-10T18:38:00.000+01:00

stop digging.

So I am.

I followed up this (which, you may recall, I was happy with):

With this (which I am decidedly not):

Hence the miniscule photo, ha ha.

I soldiered on, hoping it would come together ar some point (which often happens) but I have now admitted defeat.

Life is too short.

(On the other hand it has helped by pointing me in what I hope will be the right direction for another Brontë image).

... I hope.

2011-05-04T16:41:00.002+01:00

Haworth Parsonage, Autumn Evening

I finished this piece, pasting the final leaf on, at about 2 o'clock this morning. Obsessive or what? Anyway, I am fairly happy with it and it captures the atmosphere I was after. Gone are the dog and the plethora of graves. It would be too easy to always plump for a strictly bleak and tragic view ... coloured by our knowledge of how their brief lives played out. It's autumnal, yes, but happy autumnal I hope. Before the advent of the grim reaper down Haworth way.

"My home is humble and unattractive to strangers, but to me it contains what I shall find nowhere else in the world - the profound, the intense affection which brothers and sisters feel for each other when their minds are cast in the same mould, their ideas from the same source - when they have clung to each other from childhood ...", said Charlotte Brontë in 1841

Detail showing the sisters

So there she is clinging to Anne by the side of the parsonage, Emily striding out across the moor in the background. The three large birds? The sisters' soaring imagination, with the distant Branwell perversely flying in the opposite direction, poor thing.

And there they are again, inside the plain, solid, somewhat comfortless house (their father brooked no curtains or carpets for fear of fire, apparently) looking out of the windows.

I once read a Freudian interpretation of Wuthering Heights, the author of which had counted the number of times that windows and doors featured in the work. Having lived with the facade of Haworth Parsonage for a couple of weeks I have to say that windows were an architectural feature the Brontës must have had an awful lot of trouble ignoring in their day-to-day lives.
They certainly had me cursing with the fiddly panes.

Eight years after Charlotte Brontë wrote the lines quoted above, she was to write to her friend, wryly laughing off the suggestion she take a companion (her siblings having died in the intervening years):
"... the young person whom I might request to come and bury herself in the hills of Haworth - to take a church and stony churchyard for her prospect - the dead silence of a village parsonage - in which the tick of the clock is heard all day long - and a grave, silent spinster for her companion ..."
Needless to say she didn't wish the fate on anyone.

Now that does sound a grim and tragic scenario, but even that isn't as grim and tragic as the one which would be the lot of their father who outlived them all by six years,

I feel a bleaker parsonage picture coming on ....

A Keatsian card and other stuff

2011-04-27T11:11:00.000+01:00

Here is my prototype card. I now have to source the blank cards and envelopes. When you live on an island on the edge of Europe this is not as easy-peasy as it sounds. The envelopes I have found so far are either a few millimetres too big or a few millimetres too small. I may have to resort to importing them to find some that are just right. The Goldilocks effect even influences envelopes.

And while I'm about it, here is a wider view to take in what I think of as my trophy shelf in my studio on which the card is perched, just for any nosey parkers out there (I know I always am when it comes to Other People's houses):

Roughly left to right holding some junky pencils and brushes is a plastic beaker from Jamaica, leaning against which is a postcard of East Head and West Wittering beach, then comes a battered sheep from Edale, the last of a herd I cast in plaster of Paris then painted and sold to Peak District tourists more years ago than I care to remember, up above that is a postcard of an Alfred Wallis sent me last year from Cornwall, crowned by a leaf retrieved from the garden of Wentworth Place. There's a Gauguin girl in the background, a portrait of Sir Astley Cooper by Lawrence, a postcard of Sir John Soane's house (and believe me, until you go there you don't know what clutter is) and a boat sharpener that used to belong to one of my daughters' school kit.

Golly, as you see I go nowhere without buying a postcard or three. An lifelong habit. For which there is no known cure.

The Living Year

The cards will be on sale in my online shop which I hope will be up and running by September (my generous deadline). I may have figured out the procedure by then. To say nothing of having enough to put in it.....

Haworth evolution

2011-04-24T12:27:00.000+01:00

Dog's out ... leaves in.

Frustrated by having every colour backing paper except the one I want.

This piece is too small.

Life's too short.

Happy Easter!

Haworth in peril

2011-04-22T11:00:00.001+01:00

This is the latest stage of the game. Taking snaps as I go along as nothing is fixed and everything is likely to be in a flux, not to mention imminent danger of being scattered to the four corners of the studio and beyond by a draught if I inadvertently open the kitchen door or more likely a cat decides to muscle in on the act. I eventually happened upon Charlotte Bronte in the bathroom by the way, she must have stuck to the sole of my shoe and been transported there at some point in the day. She is now restored to her rightful place as you can see, winging along in the wake of her sisters.

So, if disaster does strike I have this memory jogger to restore order to chaos, so to speak.

I am still trying to ignore the fact that Keeper was brown, as you see ...

Messing around with Haworth Parsonage

2011-04-21T14:29:00.000+01:00

This is how I've begun. Nothing stuck down yet. Just playing around with the basic shapes and ideas. There are supposed to be three black Bronte birds (and I use the term strictly in the ornithological sense), but one dropped on the floor and I can't find it.
Was Keeper black? Probably not but he will be for me..
Anyway, it's a start.

Which is hopeful after being stymied in my quest for envelopes for my Keats cards by Semana Santa. The big stationers recommended by the printer was closed, as were 95% of all other shops in La Orotava. Strangely the funny little shop on the bridge that sells outrageously lacy, scanty and expensive knickers was open for business. I was forced to conclude they are either atheists or desperate.
Maybe both.

Bronte country

2011-04-19T11:59:00.001+01:00

My thoughts have turned from that house in the north of London for the time being to one in the north of England, now that I have decided on expanding on the Keats theme and starting a series of writers' houses as an ongoing project.

The Brontes are a recurring interest of mine though my collection of books on them (a grand total of 3) can hardly be compared to my Keatsian shelf.

I came upon a nice little cache of magazines at the fleamarket the other day to begin a collage. But first I have to find a way in, as it were. So I have been reading around the subject and turning it over and scribbling words and rough sketches and website links on scraps of paper.
I love the research and doodle bit.

My raggetty ideas book

One of the things which struck me was the contrast, in contemporary accounts, between the clean, neat and well-kept house and the indifference with which the garden was treated, to the point, according to some, of neglect. "Stunted thorns, shrubs and only the most hardy plants ..."
I brought home a bunch of roadside English-looking weeds from my walk this morning to get me into the mood and doodle in my ideas book.

Some inspirational weeds, and a ginger cat exiting stage left.

Have to see where this goes. A single sentence in one of the books might trigger me into action ...
In the meantime I am finishing that linocut today.
I hope.
Anybody spot the undeliberate mistake in my last post? Yep. I did it again. Forgot to reverse the image I mean. I was so embarrassed I went back and removed the photo!
I definitely need a break from carving bits of lino ...

A linocut card

2011-04-16T20:04:00.001+01:00

This is what I am aiming at: a composite of the collages and the bookplate, another element in what I am now thinking of as my Keats suite of bits and pieces. It will be a hand-printed card.

Still a way to go.

I am getting a bit weary of black and white and need a change. Mmmmmm .... I feel a painting or a collage coming on.

Ex Libris - finis

2011-04-12T17:32:00.000+01:00

Finished tweaking:

And I had some surplus ink on my roller so I reprinted an old carving from a few years back to have a nice fresh print instead of the unloved dog-eared item in my drawer:

Done and dusted!

Naive bookplates

2011-04-11T18:56:00.000+01:00

Testing, testing....

Just tweaking and trying different papers and messing about with ink.

This last being something one of my cats was apparently doing overnight, as I woke up to find black paw marks all through the house.

Linocut rage

2011-04-10T00:00:00.000+01:00

I have a lot on my mind just lately. And a lot on my desk, as you can see.

Which is just a bad excuse for my complete and utter idiocy in cutting a bookplate and forgetting to REVERSE THE TEXT.

That'll teach me to carry on beyond midnight when the spirit is willing but the brain is in freefall. At least mine must be.

My only consolation was that it was a small piece.

And this evidence in a book on my shelves that even the great Carrington was capable of the same mistake. At least twice. And once on a bookplate as it happens.

So ... time to clear the decks and get back to the drawing board tomorrow, stop mixing metaphors and letting cats invade my workspace.

Deep, deep sigh.

Mellow fruitfulness

2011-03-27T18:16:00.000+01:00

The first print of three I'm satisfied with.

I had forgotten what physical work it is and Ingres paper was the best I could find for the time being.

Measures 24 x 31 cms.

A Dominican Republic naive giant

2011-03-27T11:43:00.000+01:00

Stopped in my tracks I was on Friday when I popped to the framers to get a couple of pictures mounted (yeah, I know, Miss Lazy me). Dominating the whole shop was this wondrous thing, a truly tropical Noah's Ark which was fair sizzling off the canvas.

It had apparently been purchased in the Dominican Republic by some lucky person in Puerto. It stands about five feet high and nine wide and I fell in love with it so I quickly took some pictures as best I could to share it with you.
Enjoy (as they say).

To Autumn, printed

2011-03-24T15:13:00.000Z

Okay, okay: impatience got the better of me.

I knew some more cutting was necessary.

I knew the paper was rubbish.

And I hadn't inked it enough.

So it was always going to be a rough.

But I just had to have a looky-looky.

So here it is in that rough state.

I had forgotten how much I love the magic of pulling a print and seeing the result. Really exciting. Takes me back to my childhood when a John Bull printing set was always on my Christmas list.

I had also forgotten how messy it is. Or rather how messy I am.

Anyway, now to finish the cutting - only a few tweaks - and track down some decent paper. And that will be the hard part, I fear.

The Pot of Basil

2011-03-19T13:20:00.001Z

I finished it this morning:

A bit of a sad one that started as a thumbnail sketch related to a poem, Her Posthumous Life, about Fanny, and looking at illustrations and paintings of Isabella and the Pot of Basil, and family talk about a relative who I remembered dimly as being dressed in beatnik (now there's a word) black, and family farewells .... and all the while in the background there was the dreadful rolling news of tragedy in Japan (hence the oriental-looking pot) ....

It's all in there.

For me it is, anyway.

Work in progress ...

2011-03-17T17:40:00.000Z

This is the state of play (and never a truer word!) at present on my desk, though minus the cat who had made a rapid (and assisted) exit just before I shot this.

I thought I'd take a photo to remind me of where everything (roughly) goes before transferring and glueing the bits to another piece of paper. And possibly before the cat scatters everything to the four winds in her unstoppable quest to be the absolute centre of attention. Under my nose.

And at the risk of being a bore (for anyone out there who has read of this elsewhere, like on my FaceyB pages) may I say Suzie Grogan has kindly posted some images of my Keats House collages today on her brilliant blog, No More Wriggling Out of Writing Woman, a link for which I would post right here but I have tried and the feat appears to be way beyond my technical expertise at present. But the whole blog link is on my list down on the left, if you see what I mean.
Goodness, this post is straying into gobbledegook...

Anyway, please take a peek - then carry on grazing among all the other interesting nuggets Suzie has posted.

Birdsong

2011-03-13T18:38:00.000Z

Birdsong

Still kicking Carlo around in my mind. Here he is in the garden, being deafened by the birds. Once I am back on track with a visitorless spell, sometime next week, I think I will tackle the Staffordshire Pair.
In paint.
On canvas.
Time to ease myself back into some painting, after all this paper-work, though I still have a lot of collage ideas so will have to try to concentrate and multi-task.
The linocut is nearly finished. But I still don't have the right paper to print on. I may even have to send off overseas for some.
Deep, deep sigh (tempered by the knowledge that this is such a little, miniscule inconvenience on the grand scale of current events and tragedies ...).

A Staffordshire Pair

2011-03-10T00:27:00.000Z

A Staffordshire Pair

I did this today and thought I'd just put it up now before I toddle off to bed and while I'm still on a computer roll.
It's a collage (yep, those old Vogues definitely came in useful) which was sparked from doing Carlo. I really love the idea of mirror images.
Well, almost mirror images.
And I adore this sort of English pottery.
You can keep your Meissens!

The Four Seasons

2011-03-04T16:32:00.000Z

Right, here is the full 4 season set as photographed with my daughter's Canon. A nice hefty proper camera that you can actually look through a viewfinder (is that the word I am casting around for?) with, instead of squinting at a stupid tiny reflecting screen and pressing the button on a wing and a prayer.

Thus spake a confirmed Luddite...


Spring


Summer


Autumn

Winter

I am rather pleased with them and the fact that I think I pulled off the idea of capturing a separate and distinct atmosphere in each one.

Reading the Gittings biography of Keats and the letters between his friends and relatives helped with details to create a little world in each: Carlo the dog; the writing of the Ode to a Nightingale under the plum tree; the "fine fellow" that was the song thrush watched by Keats and Fanny Brawne, and lastly the Wentworth Place cats and the denuded plum tree recalling "In a drear-nighted December/ Too happy, happy tree/ Thy branches ne'er remember/ Their green felicity ...."

It's not often things turn out the way I mean them to, but on this occasion they did and I am satisfied. Good feeling. What was it that Vaughan-Williams said about "I don't know whether it's any good, but it's what I meant". Probably entirely misquoted, but a good maxim to (creatively) live by.

Keats House in Spring

2011-03-04T10:09:00.000Z

Well, it was certainly the most fiddly of the four but I stuck down the very last leaves this morning:

For some technical reason I have not yet (if I ever will) fathomed there is a distinct distortion on vertical images. To be rectified when I finally persuade my daughter to get out her Canon this week and take a swatch of proper photographs.

Spring, snipping and Staffordshire spaniels

2011-03-02T13:07:00.000Z

Introducing Carlo Keats...
The dog the poet's young sister wasn't allowed to keep by her guardian and which found a home at Wentworth Place with the Brawnes. I like a backstory, it helps to trigger an image. I have taken a bit of a liberty though by turning him into a native of Staffordshire.
Carlo is the way in to my spring collage which as you can see from the state of my big fat messy desk is at a preliminary stage still, but I think he also works as this minimalist image. Or perhaps, in future, as a still life ...

Ghost ship on the Horizon

2011-02-28T10:17:00.000Z

Well that's what it looked like anyway. It is always such a time-jolting surprise to see a vessel like this out at sea and it was so far out and I had to zoom so far in that I knew it would come out blurry, misty and Ancient Mariner-like. So no apologies this time for the poor quality of image.

Purely deliberate.

I love the timeless stamp of these traditional sailing ships.

It could have been sailing out of another age.

There are some rocks up at the Santa Cruz end of the island with crude carvings of galleons - just a few lines but recognisable, nevertheless - made by someone among the race of people who inhabited these islands before the Spanish conquered them. Their amazement at just such a scene and the need to record it lived on in me in a diluted form. Only I opted to snatch up my Ricoh and press a button in preference to a primitive implement and get stuck into a piece of rock.

I was at a bit of a loose end over the last image in my four seasons series but have now found a hook as I describe it to myself, a way in (a canine one), and I am looking forward to starting that today.

While still carving away bit by bit at the lino, worrying at the island-wide dearth of Japanese paper, making soup and potting up the last of the plants I bought on an unintended spree at the garden centre a couple of days ago...

Mmm .............. where to start?

Keats House in Winter

2011-02-25T09:46:00.000Z

So ... that wasn't my last word on Keats House at all apparently.

Well, I decided as I had already done summer and autumn I may as well go for the complete set and snip away at winter and spring and do a four seasons thing.

I also thought as cats hadn't featured in either of my two efforts so far and as they seemed to be cherished residents of Wentworth Place, with the Dilkes and Brawnes being cat lovers all (George Keats, in a rather wistful letter home from the comfortless wilds of the New World, recalled the Brawne residence thus: "I remember the curtains, the chairs and the cats ..."), I had to include some somewhere.

Cats are, after all, Very Important Animals.

So here they are, running harum scarum through the winter snow, the very last vestiges of which were melting away when I visited in December, so I have had to imagine the carpet effect of a thick fall.

If nothing else I now have the satisfaction of knowing I won't have to cope with the traditional, God-awful last minute panic of having to dream up and print out my cards for Christmas this year!

Hey, Amanda is ahead of the game, for once.

(Yeah, but they will still arrive late as usual, I hear my friends say).

Back to boats

2011-02-18T12:10:00.000Z

Okay, so I was struggling with this house portrait and couldn't find any paper in my not exactly wide-ranging hoard of magazine pages and clippings and these colours kind of came together into these shapes to make this design.

The local harbour is after all second uppermost in my mind these days.

Something tells me it's going to be hard to find stand-ins for Lake District slate roofs within the pages of Vogue, Glamour and Cosmo. Even though I have some fine potential sheep-y clippings.

What I really need is a windfall of architectural magazines ...

Purely decorative

2011-02-16T11:33:00.000Z

There is so much birdsong at the moment, blackbirds and blue tits mainly, so they must have been on my mind when I started messing about with paper yesterday. And this design for a card surfaced.

The colours and lighting is bad - the background is more of a lovely warm Naples yellow and the rest of the colours are much brighter - but I was battling against the combined effects of an overcast day and my not terribly good camera. Oh, and fears that the cats might stroll across it with their muddy paws, poised as I was with the picture on the floor in the doorway and me hovering over it trying to snap it.

Once I get a better photo, which I'll have to do for printing out, I'll probably replace the above.

More poetic birds ...

2011-02-14T13:49:00.000Z

Autumn Days

... which is my last word on this particular subject.
For now anyway.

Now off to review what I might describe as the housing situation re Wordsworth, Shelley and Beatrix Potter ...

And a nightingale in a plum tree ...

2011-02-12T10:53:00.000Z

In a Poet's Garden

Still snipping away ...

2011-02-10T14:09:00.000Z

at Keats House.

And now trying to decide between different backgrounds:

and leaving this design as it stands.

Or adding the garden.

Or a song thrush.

Or doing those separately.

Decisions, decisions.

Portraits of houses is something I've had in mind for some time but couldn't find the way in ... now I've found it.

Ha ha, Eureka!

Two awkward nuns and two bouncing dogs

2011-02-05T10:06:00.000Z

= two recent bits and bobs.

The nun painting, the sketchbook idea of which I posted earlier, is finished.

They are two of a group who all looked really seriously out of place among the desporting semi-naked bodies on the beach at the Witterings on a bank holiday a few summers ago.

The bouncing dogs emerged from something rather more problematic.

It's a fragment of a painting I sat up late into the night doing. My only excuse for this aberration is that I must have been hallucinating. The next day, thinking better of the rubbishy result I chopped it up in disgust and cut out the only bit I was even vaguely happy with. That'll teach me. Too much detail. So I've stripped what was a complicated image of the local port back to a couple of bouncing dogs on the sea wall. And will put it behind my ear for reference for a future minimalist painting.

Why oh why

2011-02-03T14:44:00.000Z

Do I paint deep into the night and not-so-early early morning when I know I will feel knocked for six the next morning?

Anyway, I'm not sure how that particular painting is panning out yet.

In the meantime I have done a collage, after thinking twice about throwing out a pile of my daughters' fashionista magazines, which is a variation on the linocut design (still haven't got to Santa Cruz for lino) of Wentworth Place which is such a perfect Regency doll's house of a building.

collage detail (1)

It was ages since I had done a collage and it was great fun. I even managed to downsize the nightingale and put some more authentic plums (rather than pears) on the tree under which the ode was written. Had it not taken the best part of an hour to pay the wretched water bill this morning I would have been in time to buy a selection of coloured papers to use as backing for more.

Collage detail (2)

I find it very therapeutic cutting, sticking and listening to Radio 3 ...

The best laid plans ...

2011-01-31T14:40:00.000Z

Afraid the small piece of lino I found whilst clearing my studio cupboard isn't up to the task of the design that started out as a tree then grew and grew to include Wentworth Place and a couple of fields. And a couple of birds that from the cut of their jib, to say nothing of their size, couldn't possibly be described as nightingales:

This means a trip to the big city some time in order to track down lino in the only place that I know sells it on this island. And lovely Japanese paper, of course.

Must say it was an unexpected pleasure to return to the limitations (or do I mean tyranny?) and formality of nice thick uncompromising black lines which I seem to have shockingly neglected of late since swishing around with loose images of the sea and shore.

The general design owes a lot to stuff in my London sketchbook such as the garden, reminder scribbles of eighteenth century samplers I spent an hour or so drooling over in the textile department of the V&A and the barley-stick like poles on the merry-go-round in Hyde Park. Funny how things come together when you're not expecting them to.

Here is another photo of Wentworth Place (aka Keats House) as it was just before December. Season of fog and freezing ice more like. I am still in the thrall of the Keats biography which I finished last week and vastly enjoying stumbling upon obscure Keats-and-his-circle-related things on the internet in that one-thing-leads-to-another way which is such a guilty, time-consuming pleasure.

And apropos of nothing, here is another de-cluttering find: a photo of a photo (hence the poor quality and distortion) of a painting, now long lost, I did more years ago than I care to remember and evidence of another long-enduring obsession of mine which is rearing its head again after visiting the Museum of Childhood in December: old dolls. I mean portraits of old dolls ...

Golly, I really should get out more!

Wild Weather Blowing In

2011-01-24T10:19:00.000Z

is the name of the picture I finished over the weekend.

I had had an idea for doing some local fishing port scenes for a while and have many sketchbook squiggles and snapshots to prove it but meeting up with a fellow naive (wave wave to Judy Joel) down there last week was the push I needed to put brush to canvas.

It's a start. The next one will include the harbourside dogs and pebbly beach. And there is also the old customs house, but that may be for another angle.
First I need a now for something completely different moment to release an idea that's been nagging at the back of my mind for a while: linocuts.

Haven't done any for a while and my fingers are itching after finding an odd piece of lino and inks and being still well an truly immersed in the 18th century thanks to Andrew Motion and my visit to Keats House just before Christmas.

I came across this old print while decluttering the studio (the task that never finishes).

As you see I err on the side of the simple rather than complicated multi-pieced prints. My "naivity" has always been more naturally attracted to ye olde Englishe broadsheet style rather than the slick art deco one. Which is a very happy coincidence given that the technicalities of the latter would be well outside my comfort, skills and, um, patience zone.

Bits, pieces and sticky tape

2011-01-18T14:20:00.000Z

This is a bit of a mess, I know.

I painted this picture, see, and after spending about a couple of hours tore it up in disgust and binned it.

The next day I could be seen picking through the rubbish to retrieve it, cut out the re-usable bits, stick them together mosaic fashion and add bits, subtract bits, until I got an idea of what I wanted.

It is now pinned up for use as a working sketch.

The sea, the sea

2011-01-16T17:13:00.000Z

Sanctuary

Last week I went for a trip down to one of this island's most picturesque towns, Garachico. It used to be a big bustling port until lava blocked the harbour and destroyed part of the place back in the seventeenth century. Lots of lovely big traditional mansions, churches and old convents criss-crossed by cobbled streets and alleys.

But for me it is the craggy dark Garachico rock, battered by the elements (and there are an awful lot of elements in this part of the north coast) for thousands of years, home to seabirds and the offshore guardian of the town, that is the star of the show.

Unfortunately on the way I had realised I was sketchbookless. As it was a Sunday and I had to resort to searching a little souvenir shop-cum-mini-market for a notebook and eat my words (further down the blogroll) regarding paper with gridlines on it. Vile stuff.

I think my general distaste for the material I had to work with comes across in this hasty sketch I did as the rain started to sweep in and which formed the basis for the painting I did the next day.

That'll learn me, as they say.

Horses ...

2011-01-11T18:18:00.000Z

... painted ones.

I just love them.

Here are a few I have snapped recently which I thought you might like to see.

The magnificent traditional steam-driven ones were in Hyde Park over Christmas. Just contemplating them and their shiny barleystick brass poles gave me a warm glow - despite the minus temperatures and snow.

The one I spotted yesterday outside a Spanish supermarket isn't a patch on them. A pitiful plastic 21st century mass-produced descendant of its Edwardian ancestors.

But interesting, for all that. And extremely fierce-looking, with a possible oriental air. Look at those clumpy hooves compared with the elegant lovingly-carved carved ones above! Can't help thinking how very much children are being sold short on their aesthetic experiences these days.

Work in future progress

2011-01-02T11:36:00.000Z

More figures are starting to quietly creep into my sketchbooks and the scruffy doodle book (which is just a cheapo spiral bound school exercise book with blank pages, remarkably hard to find in these days when children seem to need to do everything on lines or a grid) that travels around with me in the house.

It is a fairly indecipherable object and full of jotted thumbnail pictures, quick cat poses, food smudges, crossings-out, photos cut from newspapers, book titles, phone numbers and striking sentences from whatever book I'm reading.

A faithful stream-of-consciousness reflection of my bemuddled mind, in fact.

For some reason (which may or may not go back to my convent-school nun-dominated days) the figures that are pushing themselves centre stage, as it were, are all somewhat shrouded.

Or it might be the juxtaposition of the bizarre with the well-known and understood.
Like the two burkha clad women in Hyde Park which I posted earlier, and these two spotted outside a typical Victorian house in Cavendish Road in the depth of winter

Or these Mother Theresa nuns who were incongruously gathered outside a beach hut and picknicking on Wittering beach a couple of years back and who seem to be surfacing to the page at last.

Anyway, they're all very rough at the moment and I'll have to see where they go.

If anywhere.