Onward and upward ...

First of all, a belated Happy New Year to everyone!

 

I see by my last post that it is exactly a month since I last blogged. Suffice it to say a lot has been happening behind the scenes here, not least my daughter falling seriously ill in Mexico just before Christmas. She is now back home recovering and I am hopefully back on track with studio work. It was a rocky end to 2013.

 

I'm still waiting for the scan to come back from my Dr Johnson's House collage, so that I will next week.

Currently on the table is a design for a bookmark for Keats House which, if I do say so myself, is looking very good. Based on the Ode to a Nightingale and very summery. I am just putting a few finishing touches to it though I did declare it finished on my facebook page (Amanda White Art)

https://www.facebook.com/AmandaWhiteNaiveArt?skip_nax_wizard=true last night. Above is a photo I took when it was still in the process of coming together.

And here's a detail I snapped yesterday:

The Ode to a Nightingale is my favourite Keats poem and one I am happy I was forced to have to commit to memory while at school. As you see I managed to get the "draught of vintage" into the picture.

 

Once the weather is more favourable I will be able to take a better photo. In the meantime I have a couple of doll-portraits coming up and a private commission involving a castle tower...

Like I said, onwards and upwards!

Sold yesterday ...

... my Pot of Basil picture:

I will miss her, but she is off to a good home in the US.

This way for Writers' Houses Christmas cards ...

 

My Christmas cards are going great guns with Virginia Woolf (above) and the Brontes (the 2012 newcomers) (below) slogging it out for top position this year.

 

 

I started the series last year with John Keats (below)

 

 

and Jane Austen:

 

 

They are printed on white stock card and come with a white envelope in a cellophane bag.

Ideal for bookworms!

On sale in packets of three in my online Etsy shop:

www.etsy.com/shop/AmandaAWhite

until December 3.

Moodier blues and the sky at night ....

The grey was a bit dead so after much faffing around I am adding some moody background. Underwater deep sea clippings (chiming with the writ in water epitaph) which double as mottled sky.

It's looking a bit Patrick Moore-ish now......

A Romantic footnote

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.

Sailing to Italy

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 ...

A Keatsian card and other stuff

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.....

A linocut card

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.

To Autumn, printed

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.

I'm back ...

And it was great. Really great.

Hanging the show

The show was good. Five paintings went to good homes, released into the big wide world. I am so happy that someone likes my work enough to reach into their pockets and pay for it with their hard-earned cash, but I have to say a part of me is always sad to see them go ...

Workaday East Croydon Station in the mother of all blizzards.

 The snow was amazing. The stunning new take on familiar, even mundane places in London is almost worth the cold, the slips and general inconvenience. And the sight of the English rural landscape blanketed in white and swathed in sunlight was simply breathtaking.

The Sussex Downs transformed

 Staying with my crazy daughters was fun, fun, fun and catching up with old friends, new friends and an old new friend was really special.

Then there were the cultural highlights: Gauguin at the TM (absolutely stunning); accidentally stumbling upon a whole roomful of Constable's oil sketches at the V&A (golly, what a find); the 400 Women exhibition at Shoreditch Town Hall (one of the most moving shows I have ever seen); Dame Elizabeth Blackadder in Cork Street and, a few doors down, Miranda Moncrieff's incredible sizzling landscapes, all the more sizzling for coming in from the cold and drizzle. Then there was the cosy afternoon spent roaming around Keat's House in Hampstead Heath as dusk fell  ...

Keat's House in the gloaming.

All in all a memorable and energising fortnight.
Now for something completely different: back down to earth and a bit of work, I think.