Season's Greetings

A late Merry Christmas, I hope you've had a relaxing few days. It was remarkably peaceful at my house; usually someone is complaining about what they didn't get, or needs help putting together something with hundreds of little plastic pieces!!! This year everyone was happy!!

I hope you got a present to inspire you - I remember one christmas I was about 16 and got my first set of acrylics - after a lifetime of kids tempera blocks and powder paint they were a revelation! This year I treated myself to some books, including the sketchbook challenge, and got a moleskin journal. The moleskin is still in its shiny wrapper - I hope it isn't too nice to use!! (Do you have this problem too?) But I have been doing some drawing, here are a couple...

Also this in progress work for the Cloth Paper Scissors 'Quotable Art Journal Challenge', you can find out more about it here. There's still time to send something in if you feel inspired.

Best wishes and happy holidays!!

Don't give up!!

A month ago I was ready to throw this plant away. We got it last christmas (a curry plant, you have to keep it in a pot or it will run rampant across the neighbourhood! mine was not rampant!). I don't think it grew a new leaf all year, the leaves it had looked sickly. I did everything I should - plenty of sun and regular water. A couple of weeks ago the last leaves fell off leaving a bare stick in the pot. Well, that's that - I thought. A few days later I was amazed to see a ring of bright green feathery leaves emerging - a tiny miracle.

I don't have green thumbs, half the things I plant don't survive, but there are enough surprises - like the rebirth of the curry plant and like this red flowering plant that's come up in my veggie patch - to keep me interested.

Oh, and the pineapples are pretty good too. This was the first one of the season, not much bigger than an orange but very sweet!!

Hope your xmas preparations are going well, school is over for the year so the kids are getting excited, I still have a week of work to go..

december already!!

Just a quick post with a couple of photos of my stall at the craft fair 2 weeks ago (time flies!!). I was lucky to be inside one of the studios, under the fans and out of the chance of rain - tho fortunately for everyone it was a fine day. Thanks to everyone who visited, stopped for a chat or bought something, it was a lovely day!!

Also I'd like to send you off to visit a lovely blog I found called Jumie Handwerk, it's all in German so I don't understand what she's saying but the photos of her work are gorgeous!!

flags revisited

At the begining of the year I made some happiness flags. Over the last couple of weeks I've made a new batch, this is how my verandah was looking last Friday!

Today I've just been finishing things off - varnishing fridge magnets and putting cards in bags - ready for the craft fair on Sunday. 10-3 at Tactile arts right next door to the museum, if you're in Darwin do come and say hello. I'll try to remember my camera and take a few shots on the day!

After that I have no more art commitments lined up, and I'm looking forward mucking about in my sketchbook!!

getting ready

A quick hello to show you some new cards I've been making ready for the craft fair in 2 weeks time.

Some of them are monoprints hand coloured with my luscious prismacolour pencil set!! Some are photocopies of the monoprints with an acrylic wash over them and then worked into with the coloured pencils.

I wonder what you're reading? I heard a great interview with Paul Kelly on Radio National's the music show a couple of weeks ago which made me go and look for his musical memoir 'How to make gravy'. It includes the words of 100 of his songs from A-Z along with thoughts and memories associated with each. Very interesting and entertaining.

A last fish post

Just one more piece I’d like to tell you about for the fish exhibition – a concertina book. I showed the beginnings of it here a couple of months ago, at that point I didn’t really know what I was going to do with it. Then I remembered I had written a fish related poem years ago about fishing for the right word.

Word Angling

I’ve had my line out

over the water for days

shadows pass below

I should pack it in

this endless casting about

for something perfect

the supple rod bends

the line whirrs running away

‘careful as you go

reeling her in!’ See

such iridescent beauty!

Some words I will keep

pomegranate, brass,

some I’ll toss back with a kiss

until the next time.

This gave me the idea of looking for the striking words in some of my favourite poems. The concertina book is folded over at the bottom to create a row of pockets, there’s a luggage tag in each pocket. On the back of each luggage tag there’s a tiny envelope with a copy of one of my favourite poems, the fish on the front of the tag carry a word from the poem.

I spent a lovely week rummaging through all the poetry books on my shelf, trying to choose which poems to include. It was quite difficult – many favourites had to be left out because they were too long (big) to fit in the envelopes. These are the poems I used in the end.

Tony Harrison – Fire eater

Gwyneth Lewis – The Flaggy Shore

Andrew Motion – On the table

Nikki Giovanni – Seduction

Anne Stevenson – Poem to by daughter

Ted Hughes – Thistles

A concertina book is a simple structure – a good place to start for an inexperienced book binder! It’s good for an exhibition because you can display it open with the content visible, with a normal book you can show the cover or open at a particular page.

You can see some gorgeous tiny concertina books over onNat’s blog 'Smallest Forest', which she included in the miniatures show. She has a really great blog, always worth a look!

I've started getting ready for the xmas craft fair, which will be mid-November, so I'm as busy as ever! I can't believe we're thinking about xmas already, where does the year go? Hope you're having a great weekend!

Wild patience - some thoughts about fishwives

Now that crazy month is over I can get back to you with the 2nd fishwife painting as promised! It's called 'To Market'.

(not a great photo it's a bit glary.)

Here are some of the things I've been thinking about while I've been working on these paintings.

These days I suppose fishwife is used to describe a woman who is common, unsophisticated, with a loud raucous voice. If I've had a bad day of yelling at the kids I might note in my journal that I've been a bit of a fishwife!!

I grew up in the north of England, at school we learnt songs about fishermen battling the stormy seas - one that goes 'it was windy old weather...', and a hymn I think that goes 'the fishers watch when night comes down...' The women in these kind of songs - if mentionned at all - are passive, waiting. (I'm amazed I could track these songs down on the basis of one half remembered line!)

In reality they didn't sit around twiddling their thumbs, they would have helped mend the nets, take the fish to market, manage the money, make sure there was food on the table.

There's a great line in an Adrienne Rich poem - 'A wild patience has brought me this far' (Integrity)
I had always thought of this as a contradiction, wild and patience being opposites. Now I've started to think about how patience could be something fierce, full of determination. I think it says a lot about how women's lives have been.

While I was wandering around the web looking for images of fishwives and wondering what their market cries might be, I came across this blog by Kate Davies a crafter in Scotland who's doing lovely work inspired by fishwives!!

Here's the 3rd painting I managed to do for the Fish exhibition called the fishwife's cat.

If you're in Darwin, the fish exhibition is open at Tactile gallery (Territory Craft) until 20th October.
The minatures exhibition 'The goddesses of small things' is still on at DVAA until 13th October.

Best wishes to all, I hope to be around and about on the web a bit more this month!!