Flash, bang, wallop

I haven't posted for soooo long that I need to get back into the swing with a quickie.

This was a scribble that might someday end up as a quick print for a card or something.

A deafening clap of thunder woke me. It was two in the morning. It was hot. It was raining buckets and the lightning was flashing every couple of seconds, sheet lightning, forked lightning. I got up and looked out of the window. Outside, the walnut tree kept appearing in staccato light and then disappearing.

The next day, sat having my roots done, I remembered....

I think this could be a nice easy image for when I find myself on that linocut course and they say, 'Right, now just think of something and have a go!', at which point I would normally expect a total vacuum in my head, as everyone else happily sets to.

Decorated eggs - going a bit loopy!

Before Easter I decided that it was a perfect time to get in some crafting with my 8 year old very crafty goddaughter!

And lo and behold! in a charity shop a lovely book leapt into my hands - Decorating Eggs by the fabulously named Deborah Schneebeli-Morrell. That got us keen to put on our much-loved aprons and begin.

First up, painting polystyrene eggs. When you get these, the surface is a bit honeycombed, but a couple of coats of gesso or a glued on layer of napkin soon sorts that out. And then...off you jolly well trot, sticking, painting, pinning.

My biggest find for getting these to look good was sequins and bead pins, which meant that I could position stuff accurately, which I don't think I could have done with glue.

Next up was a direct project from the book, these sweet little egg birds. Some cool and crafty friends came over and look what we did! We used hens eggs and very lightweight origami paper and I hung mine from some twisted willow twigs, along with some beautifully handpainted eggs that I bought at the Easter market in Vienna a couple of weeks ago.

Aaah...

Ashmolean Cezannes and the rest

So the Ashmolean yet again comes up with an exhibition that proves you don't have to pine for London galleries if you live in the Southern English sticks!

They have a paying exhibition on until 22nd June of works from the collection of mostly post-Impressionist work from the Henry and Rose Pearlman collection, which is normally exhibited at Princeton University Art Museum.

And there were a number of true beauties. The collection is centred around Cezanne. My favourite showed Cezanne's technique off a treat. Three Pears is an early work, once owned by Degas. I kept having to trot back to have another look.

Three Pears - Paul Cezanne (1888-90)

There were a few very fresh green dabs which lifted the whole thing and lots of bare cream laid paper coming through. It was scrumptious.

There was a great later still life too, you could see his numerous itchy marks making the objects shimmer.

Still Life with Carafe, Bottle & Fruit - Paul Cezanne (1906)

Also a lovely, loose Degas and I think six decent Soutines. All in all, you may know the artists' biggest of big-name pieces, but these paintings broadened my view of them and I don't expect to see many of them again.

An additional wonder: Kevin Coates's A Bestiary of Jewels finishes on 30th March. I include a piece below and if this doesn't whet your appetite to look up other images of his work, I don't know what will. The phenomenal creativity and the quality of the finish were amazing and I loved the layering. I've picked this piece because Ted Hughes's diabolical Crow always makes me grin wildly. The poem around the centre is Crow's Song of Himself. The middle is a circular brooch of Crow clinging to a black stone.

A Crow for Ted Hughes - Kevin Coates from A Bestiary of Jewels

There are more wonderful images on this link.
http://www.thejewelleryeditor.com/2014/01/celebrated-british-artist-jeweller-kevin-coates-exhibits-his-bestiary-of-jewels-at-the-ashmolean-museum-in-oxford/

Indigo and a quilt

Indigo is my favourite colour. I love its inky velvet shadows. And I've been promising myself that I'll have a go at a quilt ever since Meg at New Threads at The Fairground in Weyhill near Andover (http://www.new-threads.com/) came and did a really inspiring practical session at our 'young WI' (or as my husband calls it, the Decaf WI. I'm not sure what he thinks those who attend the more mature village WI are on!).

So I am going for a lap quilt based on a very simple design from a book recommended by Meg: Quick & Easy Quilts for Kids by Connie Ewbank. The idea is that I will get to try every bit of quiltmaking, I should finish it and I will be able to do it all by hand.

This will be the centre of the quilt top as laid out on the floor, so that I can remember where the pieces go. It includes a batik and some Japanese indigo shibori fabric. It also includes a bit of an old shirt of my husband's.

For the backing, I'm wondering about using a piece of indigo dyed fabric that I bought in Botswana, cos otherwise those treasures just get put away and never see the light of day. Anyway, a long way to go yet!

I made a note in my sketchbook, too.

My plan is to quilt it using kantha stitching - just a simple running stitch all over, running vertically, following the layout.

Bacon & Moore - more, more!!

On Thursday we went to the Ashmolean in Oxford, before the Bacon & Moore exhibition finishes on 19th Jan. I had high hopes, mainly for the Bacon, but it was the Moore that blew me away. In the first room, his drawings and then in the second room, his sculpture. I guess I used to walk past it in Battersea Park and not even look.

First, his drawings in shelters during the Blitz, like this one below.

The Three Fates - Henry Moore (1948)

He seems to have incorporated a wax crayon resist and a lot of black scribble, and the figures really look as though they are emerging from darkness. Although it's hard to see from this, the one on the left holds a baby and the figure in the middle is knitting.

Then the sculpture. Again, I don't think that this picture really shows what I saw - such a friendly sculpture, a classical head, quite cycladic, I thought. And a lovely rounded handful of a belly. I just wanted to crawl onto her lap!

Woman - Henry Moore (1957-8)

I came home and ordered the book London's War - The Shelter Drawings of Henry Moore.

I got different things out of the Bacon. Funnily enough, the piece that made the most impression was pretty ugly and scrubby even for Bacon, I thought. But a FIERCE composition, so a huge tick!

A massive foreground and a two fingers of a calligraphic green line right across the middle. Take that!

Papercuts - a very Happy New Year's Eve!

What a lovely low key way to spend New Year's Eve! A few friends and an hour's playing with the girls before midnight.

A friend brought round a book of Japanese papercut projects and with a sheet of tracing paper, some origami paper and a scalpel each, we were set.

We were so busy, we nearly forgot to rejoin the guys as the clock struck.

Happy New Year!

Sketchbooks & Christmas

I suppose I'm still working out what I want my sketchbooks to be. They seem to be places where things that inspire or excite me get noted, where ephemera from my life get somehow incorporated and where the odd idea gets noted, or if I'm really lucky, worked through, and quite importantly I am finding, all with a dash of guilt if there isn't some original drawing of some sort included.

This was the result of Christmas: amongst other things

collaged bits from: the local butcher's receipt for our chicken, a woeful joke from a cracker, sections from the most splenetic round robin that dropped onto the map, stamps from a card from Japan

and my scribbly drawings of chickens. I wanted to have a go at a turkey, but we didn't eat one so...

And another couple of recent sketchbook pages while I'm at it:

I think there may be a theme here: the more outrageously patterned the more I ooh and aah.

I laughed out loud when I saw the A/W 13 Celine pictures in a magazine at the hairdressers (I always seem to make lots of notes when my roots are cooking). The photographer is Jurgen Teller and the model is Daria Werbowy. 

And my mind was obviously still in that mode when I saw the Breviari d'amor pic in the Guardian or Observer review section a few weekends ago. I loved the background patterning again and as for the subject: the weighing of souls... There are lots of other images from this amazing book, begun in 1288 and purporting to deal with the 'reconciliation of love for God with the erotic amours of the troubadour lyric' (Wikipedia). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matfre_Ermengau

The Wellcome Library has just bought another interesting little item, once owned by Edith Sitwell. A medical almanac which they are going to digitise and make available. I can't wait!

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/dec/29/wellcome-library-medieval-medical-almanac

For me and my world I think this all means: love pattern and go for it!