Mellow fruitfulness

The first print of three I'm satisfied with. 

I had forgotten what physical work it is and Ingres paper was the best I could find for the time being. 

Measures 24 x 31 cms.

A Dominican Republic naive giant

Stopped in my tracks I was on Friday when I popped to the framers to get a couple of pictures mounted (yeah, I know, Miss Lazy me). Dominating the whole shop was this wondrous thing, a truly tropical Noah's Ark which was fair sizzling off the canvas.

It had apparently been purchased in the Dominican Republic by some lucky person in Puerto. It stands about five feet high and nine wide and I fell in love with it so I quickly took some pictures as best I could to share it with you.
Enjoy (as they say).

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.

The Pot of Basil

I finished it this morning:

A bit of a sad one that started as a thumbnail sketch related to a poem, Her Posthumous Life, about Fanny, and looking at illustrations and paintings of Isabella and the Pot of Basil, and family talk about a relative who I remembered dimly as being dressed in beatnik (now there's a word) black, and family farewells .... and all the while in the background there was the dreadful rolling news of tragedy in Japan (hence the oriental-looking pot) ....

It's all in there.

For me it is, anyway.

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.

Birdsong

Birdsong

Still kicking Carlo around in my mind. Here he is in the garden, being deafened by the birds. Once I am back on track with a visitorless spell, sometime next week, I think I will tackle the Staffordshire Pair.
In paint.
On canvas.
Time to ease myself back into some painting, after all this paper-work, though I still have a lot of collage ideas so will have to try to concentrate and multi-task.
The linocut is nearly finished. But I still don't have the right paper to print on. I may even have to send off overseas for some.
Deep, deep sigh (tempered by the knowledge that this is such a little, miniscule inconvenience on the grand scale of current events and tragedies ...).

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!

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 ...

Ghost ship on the Horizon

Well that's what it looked like anyway. It is always such a time-jolting surprise to see a vessel like this out at sea and it was so far out and I had to zoom so far in that I knew it would come out blurry, misty and Ancient Mariner-like. So no apologies this time for the poor quality of image. 

Purely deliberate. 

I love the timeless stamp of these traditional sailing ships. 

It could have been sailing out of another age.

There are some rocks up at the Santa Cruz end of the island with crude carvings of galleons - just a few lines but recognisable, nevertheless - made by someone among the race of people who inhabited these islands before the Spanish conquered them. Their amazement at just such a scene and the need to record it lived on in me in a diluted form. Only I opted to snatch up my Ricoh and press a button in preference to a primitive implement and get stuck into a piece of rock. 

I was at a bit of a loose end over the last image in my four seasons series but have now found a hook as I describe it to myself, a way in (a canine one), and I am looking forward to starting that today. 

While still carving away bit by bit at the lino, worrying at the island-wide dearth of Japanese paper, making soup and potting up the last of the plants I bought on an unintended spree at the garden centre a couple of days ago...

Mmm .............. where to start?

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).

Back to boats

Okay, so I was struggling with this house portrait and couldn't find any paper in my not exactly wide-ranging hoard of magazine pages and clippings and these colours kind of came together into these shapes to make this design.

The local harbour is after all second uppermost in my mind these days.

Something tells me it's going to be hard to find stand-ins for Lake District slate roofs within the pages of Vogue, Glamour and Cosmo. Even though I have some fine potential sheep-y clippings. 

What I really need is a windfall of architectural magazines ...

Purely decorative

There is so much birdsong at the moment, blackbirds and blue tits mainly, so they must have been on my mind when I started messing about with paper yesterday. And this design for a card surfaced.

The colours and lighting is bad - the background is more of a lovely warm Naples yellow and the rest of the colours are much brighter - but I was battling against the combined effects of an overcast day and my not terribly good camera. Oh, and fears that the cats might stroll across it with their muddy paws, poised as I was with the picture on the floor in the doorway and me hovering over it trying to snap it.

Once I get a better photo, which I'll have to do for printing out, I'll probably replace the above.

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!

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.

Why oh why

Do I paint deep into the night and not-so-early early morning when I know I will feel knocked for six the next morning?

Anyway, I'm not sure how that particular painting is panning out yet.

In the meantime I have done a collage, after thinking twice about throwing out a pile of my daughters' fashionista magazines, which is a variation on the linocut design (still haven't got to Santa Cruz for lino) of Wentworth Place which is such a perfect Regency doll's house of a building.

collage detail (1)

It was ages since I had done a collage and it was great fun. I even managed to downsize the nightingale and put some more authentic plums (rather than pears) on the tree under which the ode was written. Had it not taken the best part of an hour to pay the wretched water bill this morning I would have been in time to buy a selection of coloured papers to use as backing for more.

Collage detail (2)

I find it very therapeutic cutting, sticking and listening to Radio 3 ...

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!