Raindrops on Leaves

Musicians in the Forest

Looking through my files, wondering when I will have time to cull all the imagery on my computer (which will have to be done) I come across this painting, now sold, and from quite a time ago, and I notice two things: firstly, my attraction to wandering musicians, which is the subject of my new story, goes way back; and secondly, I have made a very serious mistake in the shape of the guitar case, which I will now have to carefully rectify in about fifteen illustrations at least. I got so involved with the story I didn’t check the details. I had forgotten about this painting – it is strange how ideas and imagery recur. It’s much more orange than my usual work, which tends towards blue and mauve and deep red, with a fair smattering of brown (sepia being one of my favourite colours) and naples yellow (ditto); but it certainly has the feel of what I am working on now. Glad I came across it, almost by accident, it has proved useful.

Garden Birds

Runner Bean Flower and Shadow

Old Photographs

I seem to have been presented with some new elements by WordPress which I certainly didn’t mean to ask for. I like everything staying the same! How do I get back to my old trusty way of doing things? (Oh go on, read the book, not just the first two chapters). I spent yesterday looking through a chest of papers that I haven’t seen for about ten years, and I find photographs from long ago. Two things I thought I had lost in transit: a photograph of Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, taken by a photographer who worked for Faber and who gave me this copy as a present, which photograph somehow seems to have detached itself from its frame; and a photograph of myself, my grandfather, my grandmother, mother, father and little brother in romper suit in the porch of a faraway house near Chailey Common, a photograph I included in a painting but then could not find as I gave it to someone to look at and now don’t know where it is; this is a near equivalent, taken at more or less the same moment, it has always meant a lot to me, I am the little girl half-leaning against my Granny’s skirts. I also found a box of slides from 1984 which I have never seen before. And there is a letter to my mother which I cannot remember writing, saying how my young son used to call Sigmund Freud Sycamore Fraud. I never throw anything away. I don’t know why the old photograph means so much to me, it is imprinted in my heart. I look a tad dour, all the same, and was even more morose in the photograph I used for the painting. The painting is about the people in the photograph. A bientot.

Clock on the Wall

The clock is on the garden wall, next to the star mirror.  As was pointed out this clock is now absolutely right twice every 24 hours. Over the summer, a plant gradually obscures its face, another month or two, the leaves will vanish. When I first knew my husband, this more or less kept up with the time. I don’t like wearing a watch, which is maybe why I am attracted to this clock. The little pink flowers and the pale leaves among the deep green and their shadows go well with the numerals and the sunburst round the dial.

Star Mirror

Our home is so full of things, picked up here and there, and the garden walls are also hung with objects. It is a method of  decoration that is accumulation, with a space found for a new object add to the accumulation: this is not interior nor exterior design. More a “Burglar Bill” approach. Most things have a history before we acquire them. However, the garden itself has a pattern, and the garden shed is a miracle of organisation. Still, many things are piling up, they kind of shuggle into place, and if some bookcases are hang from walls, or set up on tables, then so what.