New Births on the Edge of Winter

GREETINGS to you all, should you still be here on this quietest of blogs!

This is a small note to you from the depths of my busy creative, mothering days as we descend into another wintering. As you might be able to see in the photo above, taken by Tom recently, I am pregnant with our second child! We await their arrival any day with tender and jubilant expectation. As this year turns into next, we will be four!

Here, I am standing with our son inside a Bronze Age hut circle on Dartmoor, marvelling at the thousands of years that have passed in that place, and wondering about the people who made their hearths inside those stones, who raised their children there on the high moor, who went in and out of those doorways and whose house walls still stand, even in these strange days at the furthest end of now.

And this brings me to tell you about something that I have been thinking on for some time, and which now seems timely to share with you. As you may have noticed, my painting and blogging and general artistic output have been very quiet for the past three or so years since my son was born. I am still wrestling with the challenges and gifts of trying to be an artist and a mother, and this second child coming has caused me to think on this more urgently, and finally to boldly ask for support. In a world where we are connected to community across the world in such a uniquely creative way, and at a point in my artistic life where I feel that in order to keep making work I must call upon the energies of those who have loved what I do for years, I have launched a Patreon, which I invite you to go and read ~ it tells my tale and explains my request.

As I write over there on my Patreon page, the hope with asking for this kind of support is that I will be able to create a regular financial stability underneath my work at a time when it's particularly and uniquely hard to be able to devote focused time to my artwork. If you have enjoyed and been nourished by this blog, my posts, paintings, writing and thoughts over the years, I would be massively grateful if you would consider signing up to be a member of my Patreon community. You will be adding rich black compost on these art-seeds I am planting. This is the place I will be sharing my works in progress, artworks and writing from now on. Those who have signed up will be able to see these, as well as choosing from a variety of other delicious offerings...

I do have a new blog, too, as well as a newsletter, if you'd like to sign up to receive those.

Portrait of Tom and me on Dartmoor, pregnant with our son in 2015 by Ishka Michocka.

And there I leave you, with warmest appreciation for your continued interest in my work and wishes for your wintering to be both restful and enchanted. I shall likely be quiet for a time over these dark hibernatory days while we welcome our newest one into our family, but I hope that with the coming of the new year and a renewed strength grown from this Patreon community, I will be creating more paintings and wonders to share with you, wherever you are...

  

Babes in the Wood

THIS BLUE PENCIL that has been sharpened regularly during my hard working spring, sprung once from the branches of a tree, as I was reminded here when my knife met a little knot in the wood. Here in the village we had weekend Mayday celebrations: a fair where I and others sold wares; morrises and maypoles were danced and daffodils yellowed all the shop windows. A little drizzle came in its English way to the fair too. And the maypole ribbons in my brain are still spinning. All the colours of things I have to get done are merging in a mad spiral of panic. Inside my head there are little girls and boys spinning in their beginning-of-summer costumes and their giggles have tumbled out onto my drawing board.
Littl'uns amongst trees has been a theme of recently completed commissions.. and I thought I would show you a couple.


First of all a little watercolour a bit like a gentle nursery rhyme. In it Rue and Noah, two little yellow-haired boys-of-the-woods run through the trees hand in hand. The painting was commissioned by their mum Helen for their dad Jim on his birthday. And a lovely family they are too. The words either side of the illustration are Rue's. He has been singing his own version of a couple of nursery rhymes that don't quite match but which his ma thought would be lovely in the picture.



So there they run. In pencil and watercolour.... Here for you are some of the pencil drawing stages and the painted thing in its completion. I had photos of the boys to work from, but as is usual for me with commissions like this, I like to try to make portrait-ish sorts of images, but they are translated into my world somehow, rather than being slavish copies.



A light spring breeze has blown over this. It is gentler in tone and more playful than my work often can be. Less heavy. I don't know why.

(click to enlarge)

I do struggle with trees when my paintings are not set in deep midwinter. You see there is the problem of leaves, and how on earth to do them! You cannot possibly paint them all, but it has to somehow look as if you have. I am lucky to have the staggeringly brilliant illustrator Virginia Lee as a neighbour and friend, and I must say I would be very happy to be able to paint trees just half as well as she can! I have looked at many different artists' trees, the great Russian turn of the century illustrator Ivan Bilibin for example, who managed to achieve incredible leaved trees with just flat areas of colour, drawing no doubt on his experience as a stage set designer. For these trees I ended up taking inspiration from Samuel Palmer's Early Morning (1825), and for reminding me of Samuel Palmer's wonderful bucolic work I have my dear friend the wonderful artist of paint and felt and melancholic toys Gretel Parker to thank!

(click to enlarge)

No soon as I had wrapped up this little treasure, I leaped into the branches of the next commission, time ticking on as ever and terrifying Eight-Legged Deadlines creeping out of every corner toward me tapping their watches.



This next painting was to be the biggest watercolour I had ever painted, and so I had to order in paper specially, from the excellent Paper People in Devon.


A lady called Margaret had once bought a print from me in Scotland and wanted to celebrate the first birthday of her baby daughter Anja by placing her inside my painting. She asked for something almost filling an A1 sheet of paper, a horse chestnut tree, in which baby Anja was to sleep, curled inside a conker shell, and gathered all around she asked for woodland animals and fairy folk.


Now I must add a note here about 'fairies'.. though I fear it should take a longer paragraph than I have time to write just now. Many folk assume that my work is fairy-ish. But it isn't. You'll not find a gossamer wing, no matter how hard you look, in any of my paintings! Old wise folk, gnarled gnomes, riddles and stories of strange-goings-on are much more my cup of tea. I find there is far too much pink and glitter, too much superficial fairy (or indeed faery) fancy about these days. You must understand I do feel my work is rooted in an old magic, in stories of oddness, the wild creatures and disappearances, the other realms in the fairytales. But so much nowadays isn't that, and consequently I deliberately avoid wings and all their insubstantial fluff. Perhaps it is a dislike for the flimsy fakery I feel in the depiction of many fairies. I feel they need to be wilder, earthier and more unnerving. And this is pretty much the sort of thing I told Margaret when she asked for fairies. I said well I'll paint woodland folk, I'll paint little men with knobbly noses and funny little hats. That sort of thing. Just not fairies. You see to me these strange little people are indeed people.. the odd ones, the marginal ones, the ones who are not noticed or noticed for the wrong reasons. They are my fairies.


I hope that makes sense? Margaret understood and let me set to work depicting a gathering of these little folk.
It took yonks longer than I had planned... weeks and weeks. And I found it overwhelming at times. I sent Margaret a very rough sketch, as she asked for one, but usually I do much of my workings out in the final piece, it seems to suit me better. Gradually the painting took shape. Little folk appeared in corners and branches offering baby sleeping Anja conkers as gifts. And amongst the roots and branches sat fox and badger and squirrel, owl and mouse and hedgehog.
Anja is watched over from above by sun and moon and a kind yellow bird. It is an honour to make an artwork for one so young. I hope Anja grows up with fond memories of the strange little people who brought her horse chestnuts on her first birthday. I hope she remembers them and is kind to them.

(click to enlarge)

Anja in the Horse Chestnut - print available here

(do click on the images to enlarge and see them all in detail)

This large creation was posted off just in time for baby Anja's Mayday first birthday and I have the astonishingly talented illustrator David Wyatt to thank for the use of his large scanner! Without which I wouldn't be able to show you this in such good quality. David's rather brilliant at doing trees too, and goblins :)

And to complete the forest tale, I bring you photographs from a trip I took a few weeks back with friends Miriam and Damien and their own dear babes in the woods... to Wistman's Wood, the most incredible mossy wonderland of trees I have ever seen. Truly I understood then where all the tales of being pisky-led had come from.


You approach the little forest from across moorland, eventually half noticing in the distance a grey patch of shrubbery... can you see it? Far off where those two hills meet....


That is Wistman's Wood believe it or not. It looks like nothing more than a clump of dry gorse or low shrubs until you get close and step inside. When you do, your whole world turns green.


Green hairy moss covers everything: the granite boulders and tree trunks gnarled as a fairytale. It isn't big these days Wistman's Wood. Centuries ago it covered miles of moorland.
And it was easy to become lost inside.


Now this enchanting copse of stunted and gnarled ancient English oak trees is small enough that you can see beyond it to the moor and river, giving an eerie sense of I'm not sure what.


There are many legends and tales about this Wood. It is an unusual and enigmatic place. I am told that a particular moss grows only here and two other places in Europe. You can read in depth folklore about the wood here. Of particular interest to me is the supposed origin of the name. Wistman's Wood is derived they say from Wisht-Man's Wood, this refers to the Devonshire word Wisht meaning pixie-led or haunted. Others relate it to wissen, the Saxon / German to know. "From the same etymon comes also wise: ‘sapient; judging rightly; having much knowledge' Thus Wissman’s or Wistman’s Wood signifies Silva Sapientium, ‘the wood of wisemen.’"


Whatever it means it was a wonderful place to experience. The trees themselves look like wise men. I shall return there when the weather warms with my pencil and sketchbook on a quiet day, and perhaps I shall come back to show what I drew...


That's the wood, and so to the babe...
I have just enjoyed a happy weekend with my brother Jan and his lovely Maria who came to visit me here in Dartmoor and enjoy the May celebrations. With them came a kicking seven month old bump, my first niece or nephew who will make its little self known in July, and begin wandering in the mossy forest of this world ♥

The Woods

TODAY'S TALE TAKES US INTO THE WOODS where things are not quite what they seem, where children get lost and maybe never found again and where the trees alone are witness ...
I have always loved the combination of music and strange imagery which has sparked my long interest in animation and all things puppety.
Stop frame animation holds a particular charm for me in its wonky darkness, its dark wonkyness; especially the masterful works by animators from Eastern Europe like Yuriy Norsteyn and Jan Svankmajer.
Thus inspired I took up the challenge of making a cut-out stop motion animated video for Polly Paulusma's single "The Woods" released earlier this year on One Little Indian records from her latest album, "Fingers & Thumbs".

Below is the result .. a five-and-a-half minute extravaganza of cardboard legs, wire butterflies and many painted backgrounds; each piece moved tiny bit by tiny bit ... at 24 frames-per-second ... which actually means that I made between 8000 and 9000 single captured images for the whole video.
It was a labour of love and I learned a lot as I went along .. It is filmed with a fairly high res webcam and the characters and sets are laid on layers of glass ( a trick I learned from reading about how Mr Norsteyn works )
Polly's lyrics inspired the forest-as-witness-to-a-dark-happening story ... which calls to mind a rather less than sugary Hansel & Gretel tale and conjures imagined fears of the archetypal forest as well as a real horror of a terrifying bogeyman, in more tangible guises. It speaks too of the turning of the year ...
I am pleased to say that it was received with smiles and kind words and even got played on MTV in Italy! And I must add that I would never have made it to the end if it weren't for the patience and brain of my kind brother.
It was my first ever animation .. but not my last!
I will be making a new and quite different and gentle-beautiful animation for the new Orla Wren album due out next year ...

Click here to see the video if you are having trouble viewing it.

Move-click-move-click-move-click-move-click ...