Un-natural histories

This morning* I saw a Goth Caterpillar! Not your slightly-penniless, torn-stockings-and-safteypins sort of goth, no, this was Haute Couture Goth. Posh Goth. Frankly, it’s probably far too upmarket and real goth catterpillars will not speak to it. To start with it was covered in fine black velvet, with black leather belts around its many, many midriffs. The black velvet appeared to be studded with the tiniest white fairy-pearls all over, but the spikes were the most spectacular thing: It had spikes, yes, but the spikes had spikes on! This is not my caterpillar as I didn’t have a camera, but…

It’s true: sometimes a glass of wine really does solve your problems!

The July painting for my calendar is finished and I have done something I don’t usually do: I have added an element into a painting a long way down the line to almost finished. This usually never happens. Here it is: (click on the picture and then click on it again, to see it bigger) The difference is another glass of wine. Yay! 🙂 To be fair a wine glass is a fairly transparent object and so one of the few alterations I could have made. Extra fairies would be right out of the question. I just was not happy…

Don’t Try this at Home: work-in-progress

And on to the second painting for the calendar… Having started in the middle of the year I think I may work outwards to both ends at once. That seems nice and sensible. So this is June, and coincidentally perhaps the most appropriate, given that there seems to be some sort of sporting event on just now ;-). It could be called Extreme Wine Drinking. I am not sure that this is exactly an Olympic event, nor even a sport, but one could say much the same about beach volleyball… This is one of those that I shall definitely have…

Seven Birds on a Wire… finished

So, one down, eleven to go! And for anyone new to this blog, here is ‘July’ in my series of paintings for a 2013 calendar. Yes, I started in the middle… This is a photo of the painting, which is never as good as a scan for really showing detail, but click on the image and you can see it a quite a bit bigger. I have decided to paint each one with ‘surplus’ background, which will make it a lot easier to format for a calendar so that the whole thing has the same overall ‘feel’, as I can…

Finally got round to putting paint to paper!

Hooray! here is the start of the first of my calendar paintings. Bearing in mind that they were going to be drawings not full paintings, that there have been several distracting events, and that I am pretty slow anyway, I will not take up much time today to write a lot…. I think I better get on with it! This is ‘Seven Birds on a Wire’ – the sketch is in this post, if you’d like to see it again. In calendar-order, I have started in the middle with these paintings: If I start right at the beginning, with the…

Snakes and Ladders (the spelling kind)

Well, life once more gets in the way of the short time I had to get on with any ‘proper’ artwork today, but this time for a good reason. It is one of my nephews’ birthdays, and so a card was called for. I have gone all through the six nephews and nieces with spelling lizards and spelling cats, so it was time to pick another spelling creature (this way I do not struggle at least to come up with a new idea on the spot six times a year). And I like spelling animals 🙂 Spelling snakes? Are snakes…

In Memoriam

If truth be told, I haven’t really been able to gather together too many coherent thoughts lately. A good friend has been terminally ill and died yesterday. So when I mentioned that ‘life’ had been getting in the way of artwork, it was a little more than that. I feel this blog, though it is an artwork blog, not a wholesale  ‘welcome to my life’ blog, should nonetheless mark the passing of a dear friend in an appropriate way. I first met Jen in a bar in Abu Dhabi, which, considering I live in a small rural village in Somerset,…

And finally: November’s Intrepid explorer!

Eleven Fairies (and one firework) for November: the Intrepid Explorer and his 10 assistants, well-wishers and hangers-on. Most of whom, for the sake on Elf and Safety, are somewhat cosily stuffed into a jam-jar for spark-free viewing. I owe thanks to John Pindar of notestothemilkman.wordpress.com for this suggestion, though it almost didn’t come to be: I imagined all 11 fairies riding on a rocket, and that simply wasn’t working! And of course, as those who’ve been following the progress of this 2013 calendar will already know, there had to be 11 fairies and not any other number. And so, with…

Musings on the rehabilitation of the word ‘Craft’…

I live in hope! The hope in which I am living, today in particular, is that the word ‘craft’ will one day not be considered a ‘dirty word’. That is often is, does not keep me awake at nights, but all the same it irritates me. I had a conversation today with someone who practically bridled at the suggestion that ‘craft’ could be considered in any way connected with what he does. This person runs a small company making hand-blown glassware. It is beautiful and meticulous and absolutely stunning, and each piece is made by hand, and yet the manager…

Handbags at Full Moon

And so finally the September sketch for my calendar! Two people suggested the moon, as associated with the Autumn Equinox. This confused me as I was under the impression that the equinox is all about the sun and the moon has nothing to do with it… Well of course, this is true: the equinox is simply when day and night are of equal length, and that would all be down to the sun, but, though I’d heard of a Harvest Moon I’d not realized the significance of what the moon is up to at this time of the year. My…