Sold yesterday ...

... my Pot of Basil picture:

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

Cards, cards, cards ...

My writers' houses cards have been receiving a bit of publicity lately, starting with the very lovely Shop Floor Project, a wonderful shop in Ulverston, Cumbria, which also has one of the best designed and most original online shop websites around:

http://www.theshopfloorproject.com/home.html

They are now stocking a selection of my cards which you can see here:

http://www.theshopfloorproject.com/makers_AMANDA_WHITE.html

The Guardian online's Katy Carter had them as a Buy of the Day on Monday May the 6th (you have to scroll down for this one) http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/may/06/buy-of-the-day

Meanwhile, over at Life. Style. etc ...

http://lifestyleetc.co.uk/2013/05/07/life-style-etc-loves-writers-houses/

from where they were picked up by Sian at her blog:

http://www.domesticsluttery.com/2013/05/design-porn-amanda-whites-writers-house.html

And as from next week the Benjamin Franklin House museum near Trafalgar Square in London will have my take on that house for sale in its shop.

All in all a satisfactory snowballing card fortnight!

I'm so pleased people like them.

A Painting! Yes, really!

A little breather between collages took the shape of this small painting:



Calm Before the Storm



 I have tried photographing it in every room, on every terrace, using every setting on the camera .... and still the true dark colour of the sky refuses to be pinned down!

 

In reality I used a mix of Windsor Blue and Violet with a dash of black

to make a rich night sky and here it is, looking like daytime!

The sheep have a muddy Naples Yellow wash too, but you wouldn't know it.

But I have lost patience now.

If I get a truer photo I will replace it.

 

Anyway, it's a small piece intended for a group show in St Ives in August, quarried

from one of my old sketchbooks with doodles done on my last visit to the Peak District.

 

 

Many, many years ago, when I lived there, I used to make and sell sheep along the lines of "fairings"

out of plaster. Very primitive. And I still have these three hanging around in the studio here, very much the worse for wear.

But still inspiring me, it seems, years later.

I'll never kick the Staffordshire pottery habit!

 



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.

Portrait of a lady

Or should that be Regency wild child instead of lady?

It's a long time since I did any portraits. I was reading about the Shelley entourage again recently and this was the result - inspired by some cuttings I happened upon in my bits and pieces box and by Claire Clairmont, teen runaway who threw in her lot with Shelley and her half sister Mary when they decamped for France.

Then threw herself at Byron and ended up pregnant and deserted.

 

Here she is, older, wiser and still poor, as a governess in Russia where she did her best to distance herself, geographically and metaphorically, from her scandalous past, though judging by her letters and recently discovered memoir (in which she rages against Byron and Shelley's conduct)she retained her splendidly fierce independence of spirit, in contrast to Mary Shelley whose somewhat prim and proper life-after-Shelley always seems a bit of a disappointing anti-climax.

Had she been born a hundred years later I think she would have made a wonderful suffragette.

Dangerously listing actually ....

... that's me at this pre-exhibition moment.

It's all very well putting pictures up cyberwise on the worldwide web but my anxiety levels know no bounds when it comes to the prospect of actually hanging the actual pieces in an actual gallery in an actual location.

Complications arise when that gallery is abroad and I have to add the worry of normal travel details like how many clothes and bits and pieces I can stuff into hand luggage.

The large case will be stuffed solely with writers' houses.

So at least that's simple.

 

My answer to all this is to go into list-making overdrive.

I write everything down on bits of paper.

And given that the studio is naturally awash with bits of paper anyway these lists tend to go under never to resurface ...

 

So the first and last item on these lists now generally begin with "Do list".

 

In between I am darting up and down to the framer.

And revising each image.

And adding bits and changing bits.

Like the latest house above which got two more birds and a bit more foliage before glazing.

 

Anyway, just look at this posting....

 

.... I have made another list.

 

(And you now know why I haven't been around much just lately).

Prospect Cottage and my love of (shingly) detail

Crikey - a whole 10 days have come and gone since I signed off with Charleston Farmhouse. Tempus fugit and all that.

 

I actually (sad soul that I am) looked up that saying to check on the spelling. And ended by knowing that it loosely comes from Virgil's Georgics: Sed fugit interea fugit irreparabile tempus, singula dum capti circumvectamur amore = But meanwhile it flees: time flees irretrievably, while we wander around, prisoners of our love of detail.

 

And God knows my love of detail led me into an almost trance-like state sticking down these pebbles one by one, to say nothing of giving me a touch of the screaming ab-dabs from time to time. Virgil obviously knew a thing or two. Though possibly nothing involving glue sticks and cut up bits of National Geographic ...

So here is .... ta-ra .... Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, East Sussex, former home of Derek Jarman:

 

Derek Jarman (1942-1994) was an English film director, artist, author and Aids and gay rights campaigner and creator of an open, fenceless, tranquil garden in an area by the sea famed as being Britain's only desert.

 

"You can't take life for granted in Dungeness," said a friend of Jarman shortly after his death and talking about his now famous garden. "Every bloom that flowers through the shingle is a miracle, a triumph of nature ..."

 

Prospect Cottage itself is a traditional tarred black fisherman's cottage which Jarman purchased in the last decade of his life with money left to him by his father.

The building and highly original garden certainly chime with the description of Jarman (in his role as film maker) as a "radical traditionalist".

 

The same article also described how his reading of Jung affected his films and "gave him a theoretical framework for his attempt to find the past in the present and the present in the past", a sentence that sings for me.

 

Anyway, he certainly strikes me as a person who lived and loved life to the full, so I have included a kind of tree of life in the foreground.

The cottage famously has lines from a John Donne poem, The Sun Rising, carved on an outside side wall. Some of my pebbles are cut up words of John Donne.

 

Here's a detail:

 

 

Each stone cut and glued by hand.

Thank goodness for Radio 4!

Christmas thoughts in July

It's that time again ....a deadly suffocating heatwave.

Lovely for sunworshippers but not my sort of weather at all.

And, as usual, every July our lovely neighbour Juan decides he really has to plough up the field outside the back door and envelop us with dust.

To say nothing of stirring up the flies.

And giving me the grumps.

So, also as usual, at this sweltering juncture my thoughts turn to winter - and Christmas cards.

I wasn't terribly sure that my Bronte themed Winter Foxes which I did earlier this year was finished. It seemed a bit empty. But a couple more foxes, more snowflakes and frozen vegetation has done the trick, I think.

More lively and appropriate for a Christmas card as well.

The colours aren't quite right on this photograph but it was the best I could do.  

Now it's off to the printer this week for scanning and samples.

I'll put up the professionally done image at some point.

One good thing about this time of year though ... my beautiful jacaranda tree is in full bloom.

Such glorious colour.

Such a lovely name.

Such a sense of insufferable pride on my part too - this tree (which would be way taller than the house had it not been drastically pruned back) started out as a seed in a packet I bought at a local newstand as an afterthought. One of those garish packets aimed at tourists I half thought of as scams.

So here is the living proof they aren't.

That'll teach my cynical self to think better of things labelled "A Souvenir From Tenerife" .

Portrait of a mad cat woman

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.

Who's afraid of the Long Man of Wilmington?

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 ...

.....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 ...