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!

Keats House in Autumn

Autumn Days ..... finished.

 

Here is the uncropped photo, taken by me, with my cheapo camera, on the terrace, in the shade .... yeah, I know, I need to get it properly scanned.

To Autumn is one of my favourite Keats poems. We had to learn it by heart at school and it was no chore, I date my Keats obsession from then.

 

I got in the maturing sun, the bees that think warm days will never cease, the soft-dying day and the gathering swallows twittering in the skies...

No full-grown lambs, stubble plains, river sallows or cider-presses - well this IS Hampstead and not Winchester where it was written.

 

I have substituted a thrush for the redbreast of the poem too.

Keats, who lived in the left part of what was then known as Wentworth Place, referred to the thrush in the garden in some of his letters to his great love, Fanny Brawne, who lived on the right hand side of the house. In one letter to her he mentioned "your new black dress which I like so much", so I have given her exactly that.

 

This afternoon I am collecting a large batch of cards and prints of Virginia Woolf's house (Monk's House) to send off to the shop at ..... Monk's House. I will be delivering this picture for scanning at the same time and cards and prints of it will be in my online shop next month.

Back to the past

Here I am returning to my roots!

John Keats started it all, my writers' houses that is, when Keats House contacted me after seeing some of my early efforts on line, with a view to cards and prints.

One of those was a design with the thrush that Keats wrote about in a note to his beloved Fanny chirping away in the foreground:

 

Although it has a certain naive simplicity, the colours didn't work, the atmosphere was wrong and the whole thing seems quite crude now. It was abandoned and committed to my drawer of what I think of as my lost souls, there to languish.  I think my collage style has refined and become more detailed in the intervening couple of years but I still liked the original idea, so I am having another crack at Autumn Days with a view to refreshing the range at the Keats House shop.

 

 

 

I am after a softer, mellower look. This is a badly lit photo taken in the studio on what is a cloudy day. So far the only thing which is certain and stuck down is the lawn. Everything else is just blocked in, in flux and in mortal danger of being messed up by a breeze or rogue cat. Note to self:  It is a windy day and all the cats are in, be afraid ...

 

 

I'm back ... with naive Christmas cards

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.

Naive bookplates

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.

Work in progress ...

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.

The Four Seasons

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

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

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 ...

Keats House in Winter

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).

More poetic birds ...

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 ...

In a Poet's Garden

still snipping away ...

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!

The best laid plans ...

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!