And now for something ...

 

... completely different to what I had envisioned.

So much for the Virgin Queen idea. Somehow or other Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicholson inveigled their way into the composition. Well, it WAS her tower and writing room. She and Harold saved Sissinghurst from rack and ruin in the 1930s. Here they are, a couple of decades on with no room for any regal visitors. Only dogs.

 

This is still up for changes but most of it is stuck down or decided upon.

Hopefully finished in a couple of days.

 

Hey! My 200th post! Golly!

Virginia Woolf in the snow

I think this is finished. In fact I will put it away before it gets over fussy.

Virginia Woolf being greeted by the couple's dog, Pinka, the spaniel given to the Woolfs by Vita Sackville-West, the aristocratic writer/poet/gardener who was also at one time the lover of  Virginia and muse for her novel Orlando.

Note her Omega-inspired handbag and Omega-style curtains!

(The Omega Workshops were the artistic wing of the Bloomsbury Group).

I have taken a massive artistic liberty in leaving so many leaves on the plants and trees at Christmas time. My excuse is that they are the ghosts of leaves past.

And I'm sticking to it. Or rather they are if you'll excuse the pun.

This is the fourth in my series of Christmas card designs.

On sale later this year ... watch this (and other) space(s).

Mad, bad and difficult to decide ...

... 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 ...

Haworth Parsonage pet picture

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.

A Staffordshire Pair

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!

Two awkward nuns and two bouncing dogs

= 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.

Reality re-ordered

Sometimes, just stumbling around from site to site on the Wonderful World of Internet apart from wasting precious time, you come across somewhere really exciting and thought provoking that sets you off on another series of stepping stones. In the end you forget where you were, which in the case of the interesting blog I came across this morning I have. I shall try hard to retrace my footsteps later on.

But I did note down a quotation that popped up on the first page:
"Art, no matter how minimalist, is never simply design. It is always a ritualistic re-ordering of reality."
I love that. I have inscribed it into my sketchbook
Camille Paglia came up with that gem. I had never heard of her before but will now make it a mission to find out more about her.

In the meantime here is one of my re-orderings of reality, a largish (for me!) (21x26 cms) mixed media on paper which was a take on a tiny (7x10) fragment of another.

The whippets got their spots ...

They look less ghostly now.

Red Ball

This sort of showdown is not uncommon on the beach.
Okay, so I arranged it in a decorative way ...
That is my prerogative!

I have been doing a bit of decluttering today ... Possessions are terrible things.
Would that all mine could be condensed into one red ball.

So, this painting is obviously an allegory.
I get it now

Disaster

Dropped my (admittedly pretty rubbish) camera yesterday and it is now officially dead. Just when I was going to put up my revised sheep and golden (formerly cadmium red) angels picture. Or try to. And just when I was quite happy with the result after a lot of repainting and palette angst.

The Sea, the Sea

So instead here's another of my dogs-on-the-Sussex-beach pictures that I love to paint almost as much as the dogs love to run. There really was a family of six brown dogs that day I watched from one of my favourite spots at East Head.
This is acrylic and pencil on paper and will be on show in Chichester in December.