Portrait of a worried woman

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.

Time's wingéd chariot ...

... a poetic way of saying that life's too short to struggle with a painting that refuses to come together at the outset, especially with exhibition dates looming closer. So the budgies have been temporarily (or perhaps terminally) parked and I have turned with a big sigh of relief to doing some miniatures.

They are something I often mess around with previous to a larger painting, chopping, tearing, changing and cutting them up like a patchwork or jigsaw. Sometimes I take an old sketch and hack it to pieces and will one day I am sure get around to basing some paintings on the surprising abstracts that can emerge from something quite figurative.

But these ones are destined for the browsers as alternative affordables (which is not to say everything else isn't - far from it!) seeing as it will be at a time when people are buying Christmas presents.
And because I LOVE doing tiny stuff!

Owing to still being cameraless I cannot put up any of these minis so I will drag out something to illustrate my point, one of a few collages which resulted from a prolonged chopping session - I must have been in a "neat" state of mind - they aren't always quite as regular!