Mum & Dad

I WOULD like to tell you a little tale of my beginnings ... because I was brought into this world 28 years ago by two wonderful artists, who have passed very valuable things onto me. Not only do I have their eyes for looking at things and their art in my blood, I have seen through them that it is necessary and possible to make one's own work and a living at it. I know that I am lucky indeed to have a rich childhood treasure chest in my head to draw upon: of being surrounded by sculpture and art, of interesting places, of Bedford van travels across Europe, of strange bedtime stories, and of being a little different from everyone else.

My parents continue to make their art in their home, and have recently dipped their toes into this strange 21st century web world ... with a website, etsy shop and blog where you'll see delights indeed. To celebrate this, I thought I would show you some of their wonderful works and give you an idea of the inspiring household in which I grew up... with these creations on every windowsill, stair and shelf.

My parents met in the 1970s in the plaster room of City & Guilds of London Art School where my mum was studying sculpture and my dad teaching it...

My mum grew up in the wilds of New Zealand and finds much of her inspiration in memories of those hills and the nature there... She trained as a nurse before travelling through many countries to finally arrive in the UK to study sculpture, a discipline that was long bubbling in her, even as a child scraping clay from the riverbed to make forms... an example of this on the right, a young horse laying on its side, which she made when she was only 9.

My dad was born in South London 10 years before the second world war, and on being asked what he would like to do when he grew up, would answer: "either a fighter pilot, a priest or an artist!" This last choice seems to have endured all his life, with a particular focus on his love for woodcarving. He has made a great variety of works in stone, wood and clay over the years, making figures for churches, architectural stone carvings, lettering, and a great body of his own work, in varying styles.

I remember vividly the curls of wood on the floor of the workshop when I was small, and the smell of resin, and learned at a young age about the progression of a piece of art from its beginnings as a piece of wood, through many stages, agonies and hoorays to the final work.

From my mum amongst many many other things, I have inherited a sense of colour, design and form, and a fascination with people. My dad has passed on to me, amongst many many other things, a love of the medieval, words, wooden things and wonkiness.
And I know that I am privileged to have such masters of the field as critics and encouragers... and I would like to thank them for always inspiring me, for this art in my blood and for truly knowing me. I hope that I can create works as beautiful as these one day.
Please welcome them and spread the word of their masterpieces...



The images on the left are my dad's work and on the right, my mum's.

The Game

I THOUGHT I'd show you an interesting little something which I made a few years ago as the final piece on my Book Arts & Crafts degree...

This piece is an ancient opening casket board game with an accompanying book which tells a story. The story, which I have written in rhyme, is set in a ‘Dark Age’ land not unlike England, and describes a man’s journey around his land in search of its people’s lost happiness and to overturn the evil king. Meanwhile two children dig up an old game and begin to play it. The journey takes a year and a day and as the main character travels, he passes through the four quarters (seasons, directions, elements, and times of day) which echo the four corners of the game and meets important characters on the way. Each move in the children’s game is mirrored in real life and a desperate battle between the rich few and the downtrodden masses builds momentum. The characters’ names are all Anglo-Saxon words which all have particular significance to the story. A glossary is included at the end of the book.

The story encompasses many themes –

~ The struggles of ordinary people under the rule of the dishonest rich and powerful, and a dream for equality, justice and a voice for us all;

~ My love for the earth and anger at its destruction;

~ A search to find value once again in life’s simple truths;

~ An exploration of ancient Pagan beliefs and Dark Age ideas about the world;

~ Ideas about balance and the wheel of life – accepting both life and death, day and night in all things;

~ A longing for a time before cars, concrete and all things industrial and corporate;

~ A desire to reawaken a love for stories and recognition of their importance in society.

The Game

The rules of this board game are based on an Anglo-Saxon game, ‘Hnefatafl’ popular in this country between about AD 400 and AD 1000 when chess arrived. It was carried here from Scandinavia by the Norsemen who were continuing an ancient tradition amongst the northern European tribes. A more detailed history is contained within the accompanying book. This game is appropriate to the time in which the story is set, and the opposing forces are of unequal size and have different objectives. This ties in with the political theme to the book.

Board games in ancient societies played a significant role over and above that of mere entertainment. The grid or chequerboard pattern has been described as a form of cosmological divination, representing the land, the universe, or the human body. The central square, as in Hnefatafl, signifies the city or the navel (indeed the word ‘hnefi’ - the king-piece - is also thought to be cognate with the word navel). Often this central point in a country was marked out by a sacred tree as in Glastonbury or Carmarthen, or a stone as at Tara. This place is one of central convergence, often the setting for fairs and obviously in the case of cities it is the seat of the ruler. The rules of Hnefatafl require that for the king’s side to win, the king must reach the edge of the board, signifying his complete dominion over the land. The opposing larger force must capture the king.

The Illustrations

The illustrations are based loosely on a gospel page illumination from the Book of Durrow (St Matthew's Gospel Folio 21v). This manuscript was produced around the 7th century at the monastery of Durrow, County Offaly which was founded by St Columba. Saint Matthew is depicted with a chequerboard body, echoing the idea of the board game/body, and the decorations are examples of Celtic and Pictish design.

The Font

The font design is based on alphabets in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and other illuminated gospel books like the Books of Durrow and Kells.

The Board

The board is made from spruce wood, stained and antiqued, making it look as if it has just been dug up. It is decorated to echo the illustrations from the book and each side corresponds with the four directions, seasons, elements and times of day. Each gift given to the main character by those he meets on the way is illustrated on the four sides. The board also displays symbols from the Ogham – an ancient magical script – the Celtic equivalent to the Runes. Each Ogham letter relates to a particular tree and time of year and is correspondingly displayed around the board.



And here is an extract from the story:

...In warmer days the greenness came
As summer fullness smiled;
In contented, heady, pregnant air
Our Faran’s time was whiled.

Then around a corner one midday
Beside a meadow sweet
Came fiddle music, frisking-fast and
The sound of tapping feet.

Faran neared, intrigued to find
A flabbergasting sight ~
A motley stranger, red and yellow,
His costume chequered bright.

A wood contraption round his shoulders,
And hooked onto one end
A wobbling little whimsy-man,
A dancing puppet friend.

As the jester played the devil’s tune
And jigged all up and down,
It caused those puppet feet to tap
Of the wee lopsided clown.

By his side, a patchwork knapsack,
All bulging, tied with twine;
Some strange light from out the bag
Mysteriously did shine.

Faran tiptoed, quite bewildered
Closer to the gleeman;
‘How-di-do?’ The stranger asked him,
‘I s’pose you must be Faran?’

His face was funny, his eyes were fiery,
He’d a lilting, joking voice;
The puppet danced whene’er he moved
Because he had no choice.

‘My name’s Fyr’ grinned the jester,
‘I’ve come to join the dance;
Come sit awhile beside me here
And play my game of chance.’

The harlequin, ungainly-tall,
Sat his bright body down;
The wood contraption clacked and rattled;
The puppet seemed to frown.

So Faran sat and watched in awe
As the motley-magic-man
Reached inside his coloured sack;
And wild his blood it ran.

Out came dice and playing cards
And curiosities
And jumping beans and dominoes
And candles, tricks and keys.

And tiny phials all filled with fire
And stones and beads and sticks
And rare glass balls and wooden spoons,
A mad embroidered mix!

Chancy games and fateful tricks
The harlequin did play;
And all the while the puppet watched,
Not one word did he say.



Copyright © Rima Staines 2008

Sunlight on windows and water

THE SUNSHINE has been glorious these last few days and Tui and I have been out delighting in it. Down the lane a bit and round the corner is the place where our horsebox is parked, and there we've been spending our days toasting our noses and getting sawdust-sweaty working on our home on wheels. We've been up rickety ladders adding the first Very Exciting Thing to the lovely Bedford ~ a round window that hobbits would be proud of! It's a swiveling-opening delight which we put four quarters of glass into and now it lets lovely sunlight into the bedroom-quarters to be. And since there are no hobbits about, we're being very proud of it ourselves!
And then after a cup of coffee on the tailgate I leave Tui to the sanding and climb down the steep hill to the stream below to sit and paint while the swallows swoop happily past almost skimming the surface of the water and an interested mother sheep and her two stripey-legged lambkins visit me closeby.
Yesterday I fell asleep in the heat of the afternoon and woke with my head in the oil paints!
So today I ventured down there with a pencil and sketchpad instead to draw imagined interiors for our home-to-be. And when I wasn't drawing, I sat by that cold Scottish splashing rushing stream in the hot May sun and read a frosty arctic tale of hot air balloons and bears in Philip Pullman's newest book Once Upon a Time in the North, featuring lovely little wood engravings by John Lawrence.

Manipura

A YELLOW painting on a yellow day for you. The sun is shining beautiful warmly out there and here is the third in the series of seven paintings I am making for a client, finished a little while ago. There was going to be a stage by stage series of photographs for you of this painting progressing, with mistakes and changes and developings.. but alas they were on the hard drive. I am very pleased with this third character and his ram and with the yellowish scratchy paintwork, and so, I am happy to say, is his owner...
The painting series is to take place over some time so that even though there is a cohesive theme to the paintings, hopefully a development in my work will be evident in the seven pieces when they are all done.
I am finding it fascinating to read the thoughts of my client after he receives each painting. I find that the ideas I might subconsciously communicate in the works are not very easily accessible to me in a verbal way, which I suppose is why I paint. But to hear the thoughts and reactions of the "commissioner" written eloquently, is a luxury I am not used to, and encourages me that I must be doing something right. Number four will begin soon. A happy yellow monday to you all...

Wet socks and disappointment

NEWS AT LAST, but it's bad news I'm sorry to say. On the day when folk like this cheerful bunch on the right might be flinging themselves eagerly around a garlanded maypole, I have far less fancy-free tidings.
The hard drive people have sent me the final "diagnostic report" today following its £200 visit to a "sister company" to be fixed. Alas no data could be salvaged from it, and so that's apparently that. How very very disappointing this is. I am trying hard not to be suspicious about this company who may well have known that it was a dead end job at the beginning (they offer a no data, no fee service), so told me that it had to be sent to a "sister" company for a non returnable £200 to be fixed before they would know if the data was recoverable. I don't know. I would rather think the best of folk, so I am just going to have to swallow it and accept the loss. I am having it sent to my brother who has the right kind of brain and fiddly tools and who might just be able to do what the experts can't, but really I think that indeed is that.
I will be gathering any files lurking in the odd dusty corner of other people's machines, and unsold paintings can be rescanned. As for everything else... I will just begin again happily, and not dwell on what else might have been on that hard drive. Thank you again to everyone for their goodheartedness and words of hope. I've spent the rest of the kind donations on a new robust hard drive to replace the old one so that I can begin archiving my work again; it has a rugged orange off-road rubber protective jacket and an estimated maximum "drop height" of 35 inches!

Hey ho ... in other news... Telling the Bees now have a lovely new website, which I have been busy making this week, and the album is receiving jolly good words from folk all over the place.
We've had dreadful weather lately.. pelting hail storms and thunder and lightning. A visit to town the day before yesterday to get groceries and glass cut for our round window left me with squelching shoes and shivering soaking socks.
The mystery painting is to be completed this very evening and while the potatoes bake in the oven I invite you all to dry your wet socks by our lovely fire...

A box of beads on a foggy day

YESTERDAY'S FOGGY misty moisty morning brought an interesting box all the way from Utah.. and inside I found this - a delightful box of handmade beads, sent to me by an admirer of my paintings ~ Sharon Bourke, who makes these lampwork beads and gives them to friends and strangers and leaves them in nooks and crannies on walks to be happened upon by passersby.
A delightful treasure-trove to arrive on our doorstep on this grey day. The beads are made by heating coloured glass rods in a flame and wrapping the molten glass round a steel rod to make the hole. Centrifugal force keeps the beads spherical and mysterious chemical reactions between the different colours produce the one-off jewel-like results.
She enclosed a quote too:

"Beads are gypsies: glittering, magical, and primitive hitchhikers. You slow down to take a look, and they attach themselves to your soul."

Carolyn Manzi, Bead Power.

We have had some sunny days too though, enough for Tui to clamber up on the horsebox and begin work proper on wooding our new home. This front section was covered with metal and is now expertly bedecked with Honduran Pitch Pine. It will soon boast a lovely round window (unearthed on ebay) in the middle, but at the moment it has no glass in it!

Meanwhile I have been busy with the mystery painting.. which I am very happy with still, despite some struggles involving painting green glass ... anyhow it is almost done and those of you expecting a little surprise in the post'll be receiving something soonish. The dastardly hard drive people are making me wait even longer while they source parts from America apparently...
I am still expecting the worst.
Ho hum... time to light the fire.

Deadly Curios & Wardrobe Clearouts

TODAY I BRING you a motley collection of tales, the first few from a delightful book that I was reading last night in the bath. Timpson's England ~ A Look Beyond the Obvious by the late John Timpson who was a well loved presenter on BBC Radio 4 as well as writing a delightful collection of interesting books about local English oddities. I found some intriguing stories and photographs from corners and byways of England and wanted to share three on a rather deadly theme.

First there is the Old Coffin House (left) at Brixham in Devon... the father of a local girl is said to have told her suitor that he would sooner see her in a coffin than married to him. The suitor, being sharper than most, duly constructed the house in the rough shape of a coffin. The father was so impressed by his ingenuity that he relented and the couple lived happily in their coffin ever after.

Next we have a grisly memorial to the days of hanging - Steng Cross Gibbet (right) in Northumberland, where the body of William Winter was hung in chains after he had been hanged in Newcastle in 1791 for murdering an old woman in a lonely cottage near Whiskershield Common. He is said to have been urged on by two tinker-women who'd been given hospitality by the old lady. This strange band broke into the cottage, killed the old woman and took her belongings away on a donkey cart. A shepherd boy spotted the goings on however, and Winter was brought to justice.
Gibbets are places where the dead bodies of the hanged were displayed.. the Steng Cross Gibbet even has a wooden demonstration head! A great deal of uneasy tales and superstitions have sprung up about gibbets and the land they stand on, understandably. This one, rather bizarrely, is said to cure toothache if you take a splinter from the gibbet post and rub it on the offending tooth!

Last I bring you the Temple of Vaccinia or the Cowpox Temple. It was built in the Berkeley garden of Edward Jenner, the discoverer of vaccination. Mr Jenner was born in 1749 and devoted much of his time to the study of smallpox, a terrible blistering skin disease which killed thousands of people in those days. There was a tradition in Gloucestershire that milkmaids who caught cowpox whilst milking were immune to smallpox. So a small boy named James Phipps was used as a guineapig by Jenner to test the theory that an inoculation of the cowpox virus would protect against smallpox. It did and Jenner achieved great fame... celebrating his success by building this delightful little temple (above) in his garden.

Finally .. I bring news that I am having a major wardrobe clearout ... so if anyone fancies a rifle through this raggedy pile of old gypsy gladrags then feel free....
No news on the hard drive yet, so fingers are still crossed.
Wishing you all a happy end of week from sunny, haily, lamb-bedecked Scotland.

Telling the Bees

A WEEK after the Sunday-of-Lost-Data I have a little honeyed tale for you. Yesterday the postman brought a thrilling package of CDs, all printed and proper... my first ever album artwork for the fabulous debut release by Telling the Bees ~ a band of four lovely Oxford based musicians who might describe their music as ...darkly crafted folk, classical, cinematic, prog, acoustic-chill, psychedelia!

Untie the Wind, as the album is called, is a wonderful conjuring of a darkly imagined England, and for me has a very strong flavour of something friendly yet strange, and it is this folkloric old and yet not old world that I have tried to conjure in my drawings for them.


I was inspired by the old folk custom that inspired the band's name: that in English villages back in the days of superstitions... it was very important to inform the beehives and their inhabitants of any news: changes of ownership, births, deaths and marriages, otherwise they would take umbrage and leave their hives en masse. The custom was for a newly bereaved widow or heir to go up to each hive, tap it three times with an iron key and then inform the bees that their master had died. Sometimes the hives were adorned with black ribbon to show that the bees were in mourning, or left a small piece of wedding cake to share in matrimonial celebrations.


Telling the Bees will be performing at gigs and festivals across the country and if they buzz through your corner of the woods, I urge you to go along and dance to their evocative mandolins and English border bagpipes, fiddles and cellos, concertinas and songs.

Do click on the pictures to enlarge them.


"A Bedfordshire woman was telling me the other day," says a writer in a Northern daily paper, "how her son had been stung all over by bees. 'And no wonder,' she said, 'he never told them he was going to put them in a new 'ome, and everybody knows that before you goes to put bees in a new 'ome, you must knock three times on the top of the 'ive and tell 'em, same as you must tell 'em when anyone dies in the 'ouse. Ef you don't, they'll be spiteful, for bees is understanding creatures, an' knows what you say to them."

Just the same as a month before,--

The house and the trees,

The barn's brown gable, the vine by the door,--

Nothing changed but the hives of bees.

Before them, under the garden wall,

Forward and back,

Went drearily singing the chore-girl small,

Draping each hive with a shred of black.

Trembling, I listened: the summer sun

Had the chill of snow;

For I knew she was telling the bees of one

Gone on the journey we all must go!

Then I said to myself, "My Mary weeps

For the dead to-day:

Haply her blind old grandsire sleeps

The fret and the pain of his age away."

But her dog whined low; on the doorway sill,

With his cane to his chin,

The old man sat; and the chore-girl still

Sung to the bees stealing out and in.

And the song she was singing ever since

In my ear sounds on:--

"Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence!

Mistress Mary is dead and gone!"

some verses from TELLING THE BEES by John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)

Thank yous and News

WELL HELLO, and here's news for you... it has been a week of to-ings and fro-ings and frustrations and phonings. After much deliberation, I settled on a particular data recovery company that seemed to know what they were talking about and had a commitment to not over charging... so I packaged up my dreadful hard drive and sent it off into the wilderness (well Pall Mall in London actually!), content in the knowledge that the cost would not exceed £250 and that the chance of getting my work back was fairly good. I have now heard back, however, that it has to be sent off to another place for specific specialist rebuilding before the data can be removed and that this will cost a further £200 and that the chance of recovering lost work is now down to 60% or 70%.
I'll not bore you further with the ins and outs of data recovery negotiations, suffice to say that they have you over a barrel somewhat when you are desperate to get your work back again.

Well that's the depressing and fairly boring bit over.

Here's the happy bit:

I am just unbelievably smiling at the response to my dilemma that I received from you lovely people. Thank you so very much all of you .. not only for all the pounds and pennies so kindly given, but also for your words of encouragement. I turned off the donation button yesterday as I had received a goodly amount .. just enough to cover the costs. I was pretty speechless that people who, on the whole, I have never met, could worry in solidarity with me for my lost work and give money to help. Actually I found this so touching that it made me want to cry more than did the fact of my lost work. And this, I think, might just be the point of this whole fiasco! It has highlighted how very kind people are and how it is possible to build friends and communities of creative people who can help each other achieve their goals. How's this for an idea: that any of you who have a big project or problem or a dream or a plan that may be stuck a little with lack of funds.... ask for help here in this strange land of blog. I know that I would be happy to give what I could to another plea for something worthwhile given out by someone whose work and thoughts I respect.

In the meantime of waiting for news of lost work, I have been able to focus on my painting, which I have to report is coming along very well, and it is not like me to be quite so pleased with an unfinished painting. It will remain a secret... until those of you who helped me have received their prints, but for now, these mysterious-person-snippets are fragments of a hint, and she says to you all with a smile

♥ T H A N K Y O U ♥

Of nature and technology and of being caught between

HELLO all ... I write with a tale of woe, of epic disaster that summarizes perfectly the precarious tightrope that I walk, strung between a happy rustic home-made wonkyness and useful yet bamboozling modern technology.
Earlier today with the sun in the sky, we went out for our usual walk, happily trip-trapping past our favourite fields, photographing mosses and sheep, checking on the horsebox and on a tree we planted last year and collecting slightly damp sticks with which to start the fire on our return.
So we came in the door and kicked off our shoes, scooped up some coal and knelt by the hearth to start sweeping out yesterday's ash... and as I did this, one of the darstardly kindling sticks that I had in my skirt swept my external hard drive onto the floor. And now it whirrs and clicks and will no longer reveal its contents to me.
This hard drive stores all of my work ... every painting I have ever done, photographs, my half begun animation, my website and those of others that I have made, all my print-ready work which is my means of making a living. I feel sick. And I know, I should have backed it up.
I have spent the afternoon phoning various "data recovery" places with horrifying results... most of them saying that it's possible that my data might not be recoverable, but if it is, it will cost me anywhere between £250 ($500) and £1200 ($2400) (-this last figure was quoted to me by a man with indeterminable accent apparently shouting at me from the middle of a busy inner city roundabout!) I am panicking and hoping and panicking and hoping. Perhaps I might get cheaper quotes tomorrow from companies who don't work on a sunday.
It really makes you realise how at the mercy of these machines and this "data" we are. What on earth is it anyway, if not a series of 0s and 1s? And amazingly it is these same 0s and 1s that enable me to show you my latest paintings or a picture of newly fallen snow on our rooftop, and enable you to buy a print of these paintings or tell me how they make you feel.

I am at a loss as to what to do really. I have a new painting sitting on my desk ready to be done, but this has taken the wind out of me and makes me feel like giving up. So I have decided to try to call on these same wonders of modern technology which have put me in this predicament to help me out of it.
Here below is a little donation button, which, it occurred to me, one or two of you might not mind pressing and donating even one tiny little pound to help me pay for this "data recovery".. and then when the nightmare is over and my work is (fingers crossed) back with me I'll send each and every one of those who donate something a little print of this as yet unbegun painting. How does that sound?



I leave you with some photographs from our unsuspecting walk of beautiful unaware orange moss on a wall; the newly born and completely oblivious Rowan bud that is the tree we planted last year; and lastly, some delightfully skipping, chewing sheep who are chewing and skipping without the slightest jot of a worry about my lost data.

There's a Stair in Her Hair

"There's a stair in her hair" he said.
"Where?" she said.
"There"