The Gate at the Edge of The Village

UP ON THE HILL we climbed yesterday, you could smell sun on the low morning air and see specks of buzzards fly far below. Our lungs and hearts stretched and filled with the day, we drank a thermos of tea and looked down over the roofs of the houses of our village. Small as a train set, arranged at the foot of these two hills like the imagined place of a child's game, set out on the green patchwork carpet of Devon in their nursery.

There's been a conversation crackling the airwaves lately, about blogging and the mysterious interconnectedness of it, why we do it and how it inspires.. et cetera. It all began with questions brought up in an interview I did recently. I am the latest to be invited Around The Table With Howard and Rex - the duo behind the emerging graphic novel John Barleycorn Must Die. Howard Gayton, its writer, is the husband of Terri Windling; and Rex van Ryn, its artist.. well, I'd best not shed any light on this shady character... I leave you to investigate further yourselves.

This was the first time I'd been interviewed face to face like this, and it was mighty interesting as a process, especially since the discussion was with people working in the arts themselves.

Part One was posted last week and Part Two is up today. Reading back over what I said has the slight awkwardness of hearing my own voice on the answer machine, and at times I think I made more sense in speaking than I do in text. Nevertheless we touch upon some delicious topics, like inspiration and tricksters, being true to your art, and the nuts and bolts of the creative process, which is what they have been exploring in all the Round The Table With interviews so far. Do go and read, there's even music from some Imaginary Gypsies...

So from here a baton was taken and quite a team has grasped it and run on. So far with varied and fascinating reflections on blogging, there's been musing going on at: Terri Windling's Drawing Board, A Mermaid in the Attic, Ravenwood Forest, Theodora Goss' blog, Lunar Hine's blog, Midori Snyder's In the Labyrinth, and Erzebet Yellowboy's blog. In fact Tom and I even continued the conversation on blogging with Terri and the dogs on top of the other hill overlooking our village the other day:

What a strange and cumbersome word that is - blog - but I like where it came from: a web log, like a ship's log, you can perhaps imagine us all pegging our log entries onto a huge web for the general perusal of spiders everywhere.

The friends above all give their reasons for blogging, which touch upon connection, friendship, and the sharing of delights. Once this Hermitage was mentioned as an example of artisan blogging, a term I liked very much. It has become a vital part of the work of so many self employed artists and craftspeople, and as I say in my interview, I would not now be lucky enough to spend my days painting for a living without it. But I am amazed at how blogging is still catching on, and gathering new enthusiasts daily, I thought I was late to the party when my talented friend Gretel Parker urged me to begin a blog some years ago. (I am continuously thankful to her for this!)

But, the other themes that seemed prevalent to me across the On Blogging posts mentioned above were those of time and boundaries. How near to your garden gate do you allow your followers? How much time can you give to this? Can your blog act as a sort of butler to answer your door - an intermediary between your studio and the world?

I find myself like a child in a sweetshop with a great long list of visually inspiring and well written posts popping up in my reader daily. But in my topsy turvy way, this frequency and abundance is also terrifying to me. Soon enough I tune out and find the never-ending stream overwhelms me. I put an awful lot of energy into the posts I make here, and they are fewer and farther between than most folks'. I am continuously amazed at the apparent productivity of the artists whose doings I follow, and the fact that they can also find time to write about it all.

I think the internet is a truly wonderful thing - a knowledge disseminator, a connector of like minds, a democratizer, a mind expander... but we must handle it carefully. It is easy to become lost in its forests and, most unappealingly I find, become dulled with the brain-fug of too much choice. I would like to find a simple path through this wood, where we do not forget the feeling of damp earth under our feet, and the breath of things that do not contain a silicon chip.

The wonderful and appreciative things you all say here and on email really do make me smile, your words encourage me and remind me that I am apparently tending a good garden here. Thank you. I love too that many of you settle down with a cup of tea with my posts. I am flattered and delighted at that quiet appreciation.

For those of you with a whole pot of tea beside you, I have written before on similar but different threads: Vagabond Villages & Transient Towns (from my travelling days), and ...Considerations on Artistic Conversation.


This little blog-torch-passing phenomenon has been described as A Moveable Feast, an Imagined Village.

The minuscule village scattered below us yesterday is just that - an imagined and manifested community of wonderful artistic folk, amongst whom I am lucky to live. But I think too on the transience, the moveability of our arts.. the way the inspiration is passed along from one to the next to the next and back round again. We are all travelling and standing still, looking down from the hilltop. Artists as gatekeepers, we are, oiling the hinges of the gate to that Other Place...

Look, there in the distance - the beginning of Dartmoor - the wild expanse beyond.

Gnarls in the Branches

LAST NIGHT brought a sprinkling of snows that seemed to fall underneath the streetlamps only, but this morning the snow is gone. This corner of the country is the bare toe poking out from under the snow blanket that covers the rest of England. The skies have a leaden lowness to them here and the winds are chilly. We have discovered a little track that winds behind the carpark fence and takes you into muddy fields and eventually forests, where we've seen treeroots knotted like old ladies' contemplative fingers, abandonded trailers and puddles which turn the trees upsidedown. And we've eaten peanutbutter sandwiches and talked to horses with coats on, and worn our legs out walking for miles.


Back in the truck I have been hunkering down at my desk with an oil lamp and headphones and painted fervently, trying to pretend that the view out of the window is not tarmac.
Melanie has commissioned me to paint four seasons of crows, the winter aspect of which I made last October. She has been waiting patiently for the next one and I have finally completed it.
This painting has been through a gnarled struggle of sorts.. mainly because I drew it out onto the watercolour paper way back before we left Scotland and it has sat tucked inside the sketchpad ready to paint since then. Somehow the momentum of a work gets lost for me if I leave a gap that long within the process of working on it. So I tried to paint it and there were moments when I thought it might be getting somewhere but by the end I despised it. Really it was so dreadful I had to start again. And of course when this happens my confidence plummets to a place where I am convinced I can no longer do it.


I needed to replensish my reserves of inspiration and so buried myself in various Arthur Rackham books... A master and a half he was, and also an accomplished drawer of crows and gnarly branches. I looked in close detail at his lines and tones and marvelled. I think to try to emulate the old masters is a good way to learn, but it raises an interesting dilemma for me: because imitating a contemporary feels very wrong, epecially the copying of ideas ... so why is it alright if the artist is dead? Artists in days gone by would have always learned by copying their predecessors and I think this is an extremely valuable learning method, for somehow the knowledge enters you through the pen and bypasses your rational brain, eventually becoming lodged inside your subconscious fingertips.. so that you are just better at it than before!
It seems to me similar to the oral tradition of passing down stories from generation to generation, but instead of tales, design ideas and specific ways of making image are passed down, and over time this knowledge is naturally subtly altered with each person it passes through.


Ever since my schooldays, I have had an aversion to someone looking over my shoulder and copying.. it makes me cross, it is as if I am being stolen from. I remember an occasion when I was about 9 and we were asked at school to draw our initial made from all the things that represented the thing we loved to do best. I painstakingly drew a letter R with the straights made from pencils and paintbrushes and the semicircle was a protractor. (not that I was keen on maths, it just belonged to the contents of my pencil case which meant drawing to me) But being a slow dreamer-Rima, another boy whose name also began with R had taken my idea and got to the teacher to show his drawing first. I was very annoyed, but this beady-eyed teacher knew what had gone on, and told him off for copying. I was inwardly relieved. And to this day, the idea of someone taking something that represents me and passing it off as their own somehow panics me. It's as if on some inner level I am being erased I suppose. I think this is more relevant when it comes to ideas... it's ok to learn by copying another's technique, beneficial in fact. But it must be filtered through your own eyes and ideas before becoming an artwork I think.

So, I have studied Rackam's works at close proximity these last few days and been inspired. I have made a work not nearly as wonderful as his, it is different... it's my own ... but I was helped by a skilled teacher long dead.

Wonderful Wheels

WHEELS, as you will probably know by now, are one of my favouritest of favourite things - Especially when attached to things they are not usually meant to carry along, like people, musical instruments, artifacts and best of all, houses :) Whenever I come across another artist who puts wheels in their work, my heart does a little leap of comradeship.
Our own wheeled home is growing, growing, and we are at present looking for a set of seven 20 inch wheels for it, which will be easier to find tyres for on our travels.

I thought it time to show you some treasures amongst the work of other artists I have tripped over on web wanderings recently. From time to time I like to show you works that have made me smile and inspired and gladdened me instead of joining in with the blog award thingamyjigs that get passed around these parts. Over the last months Moonbindery, Qi Papers, Dogberry Hill, Snapper & The Griffin, Krisztina Maros, Amy Short, The House of Edward, Lost Stones, Ink Haven, Mille Fiori, Moonroot, Bimbimbie, & Gypsy Root have all been so kind as to pass me awards and tags, and for their appreciation and lovely words I thank them heartily. Apologies if anyone is left out in the cold there.. my brain is still all a-scramble. I have also received the most kind and appreciative writings by the two most recent clock recipients, Nina and Allegra.

Indeed Allegra sent to me in the post a most thoughtful gift, a good-journey talisman made with an old piano key, charms of significance and a photograph of me as a young wheeled-home dweller :) All the elements of it are intended to connect us like a knot in a long string to the old gypsy journey tradition and it is to be nailed with a horse nail to the door to bring us luck.

Also in this beautifully wrapped package came a book Tres Deseos (~Three Wishes) illustrated by a recent blog discovery of mine, Gabriel Pacheco ...
It is a wonderful earth toned book with very up-my-street illustrations of an old couple squashed into a chimneyed little house. Thank you Allegra for such appreciative words and thoughtful gifts.



Whilst perusing Gabriel Pacheco's work, I found a strange wheeled apple and so thought to theme my latest gallery of inspiring artworks... here I bring you a wonderful wheeled world in both two and three squeaking dimensions.



Gabriel Pacheco is a Spanish illustrator who creates hazy other worlds of strange beings with subtle colours and textures, and was introduced to the arena of children's literature by his sister who asked him to illustrate a story. I can't find out a huge amount about his creations as my Spanish is non-existent, but by the looks of it he employs a very clever mixture of digital and traditional techniques. As far as I can gather these illustrations shown here are from a tale (Calabacina) about a pumpkin.

* * *

Next I wheel on the incredible creations of Akira Blount of Akira Studios. She lives on 70 acres of land in Tennessee raising goats in between making these wonderful dolls with twigs and wheels and delightful characters. Cage dolls form a large part of her work and inside the cages hide other little people and birds and things. Akira's cage dolls often sport wheels and are for me like a strange circus performance and performer combined, and the twigs conjure a foresty-ness that I love.

* * *

Third and fourth I present two Russian artists who both make sculpture and paintings of a strange naive folky sort that make me smile no end, and which are so brilliant I can't quite find the words.
Vladimir Gvozdariki makes wooden toys, animations, paintings, drawings and dolls, and here above are some of them that have wheels... how wonderful is the old man inside a wheeled barrel with a chimney and lantern swinging!

* * *

And lastly Boris Ivanov ... whose painted wooden sculptures are like automatons, puppets, and toys all in one.. and whose paintings are exquisitely done naive worlds populated with large, wide people, flying, fishing, playing and dreaming. Boris says of his work:

"Once upon a time - it was about 15 years ago - an idea came to my mind: to create a new World, kind of a new Planet, and populate it with People. So I did. As time passed new personages came to existence. This planet became inhabited by its population of Fatties. Currently there are more than 1.5 thousand of them."

Here below to complete my gallery of wheels is a man driving a wonky beer vehicle, both in paint and in wood. Boris's work creates a world that I find familiar and wonderful and it makes me very happy indeed to look at these works. I suggest you take a good long time to visit his website and peruse the treasures there.

* * *

And for more wheeled creatures I mustn't not mention the beautiful watercolours and felted toys of my talented friend Gretel. Wheels have cropped up rather a lot in my work too of course, which I wrote about a while ago here ... you can also see there where Allegra found that photo of my early days :) My paintings seem to me novice-ish and un-developed next to these great works above, but at the same time their work spurs me on to new levels of excellence.
I hope that our days on wheels will bring my work inspiration of a new kind ...

PS - Do click on any of the pictures for a larger view.

Postcard from the Hermitage

MY WALLS have always been covered in pictures... my bedroom at home was a patchwork of postcards and magazine snippets, drawings and quotations: from skirting board to light fitting there was imagery. Many of these postcards have travelled with me from home to home and still adorn my walls now, dog-eared with old glumps of blu-tack mixed with flakes of paint and plaster from various walls on their backs. Others have been sent to me or picked up along the way.
My liking for patchworkings of clutter means that our walls are peppered with pictures of quite beautiful things, in every nook and cranny, they inspire me and feed my eyes wherever I look, and I thought that perhaps you'd like to see some of them....

On The State Of My Paintbrushes, Clock Parts & Book Corners

THIS DREADFUL scratty state of affairs to the left is, believe it or not, my most used paintbrush. I fear it's had its day... so I was delighted to receive a little package in the post from my mum with these sleek specimens below enclosed. For those interested in the minutiae of painting tools, I like best to use tiny acrylic brushes with a nice resistance to the bristles, which I find best for painting on hard surfaces like wood. Canvas has never really grabbed me because of the give in it as you put your brush to the painting surface.

Meanwhile in the Hermitage workshop, any thought of a trip away has been thwarted by our old friends the rainclouds.. so Tui and I have thrown ourselves into truckbuilding and clockmaking respectively. Our wheeled home is approaching the Very Exciting stage ... there'll be photos soon.

And Once Upon O'Clock number three is almost done! I must say, that on receiving a lovely new clock order from a geographer, I am beginning to grow into the idea of making clocks for professions: The Perfumier's Clock, The Fencer's Clock, The Geographer's Clock .. and so on. Tho this is not a requirement in each commission, I like the concise idea of it.
I have enjoyed drawing inspiration with this latest one from Russian icons and lacquer painting. I was asked by Yoli the Fencer to include swords and reds... and I am very happy with what has emerged. Here below you can see a bookish corner in our house with the three titles I have been referring to for inspiration on such things as heraldry and horses, as well as the rich, muted broken-paint colours of the magnificent Russian icons.


The books shown are:

• The Encyclopedia of Illustration by Gerard Quinn
• Russian Icons by Konrad Onasch
• Drei Zarenreiche - Russische Volksmärchen gesammelt von Alexander Afanasjew (- with wonderful lacquer illustrations by Alexander Kurkin)

Do click on the photograph if you want to look at the books in closer detail...

I must return to the grindstone now, while rain pelts the window.
I leave you with a smattering of tickings of the recent clockmakings ...


Oh, and I have just listed the Once Upon O'Clock Illustration for sale as prints in the shop...

Inspirations, Illustrations, Imaginations

I THOUGHT IT TIME to pass on a few threads of inspirations that I have received from other lovely people hiding in the hills of blogland. As I have mentioned before, I'm not a keen passer-oner of "awards" and things like I'm s'posed to. But I do appreciate those given to me and in turn, I will from time to time show you some lovely things I've found on my web burrowings.
Morna, Erica, Ciara, Jo, Lindsay and Terry have all been so kind as to give me little blog awards recently, and so today I wanted to show you some artists and their illustrations that have made me smile and feel inwardly connected to them.


A little while ago Victoria Usova contacted me to ask if I fancied doing an illustration swap, which I hardly ever do.. but this time, I felt something warm and familiar in her illustrations, and so after much trouble choosing, decided that I would like this Foxy Fox watercolour original on the left to come and live with me, in return for my Button Mouse travelling over the sea to New York. Victoria is a Ukraine-born New Yorker and said of my work that "your painted world seems close to mine, but more in the evening or nighttime. Perhaps we travel to similar locations just during different times of the day." I liked that.
She has a "Chest of Fairytales" etsy shop here and flickr page here where you can see her enchanting works. For me they have a playful sunniness and very distinct Russian flavour which is delightful. This Foxy Fox will be framed and enjoyed on the wall of our truck.


Next I wanted to show you the wonderful otherworldly paintings of Yoko Tanaka. She paints a muted Other world peopled by strange beasts, surreal objects and melancholy tales. Yoko was born in Japan but moves from country to country, having been educated in the US and living at present in Thailand where buffaloes stroll around the house and cranes fly over the nearby Mosque's call to prayer. On the right is her painting Remnant. Do take a while to wander her world, which I feel very drawn to, here.


Thirdly, another Japanese illustrator, Yuko Michishita, who is currently studying in the UK. The inspiration for her fine pencil drawings dwells in an interest in folklore and nomadic ways of life and she says of her work that she has always loved "meticulous patterns of Asian traditional costumes, shades and shapes of trees, furry animals and human faces that look slightly like fish", and is greatly influenced by these likings. This illustration to the left, Apples Be Ripe makes me smile no end ... and includes lovely wonkyness, detail, colour and lettering. Do have a look at her work here.



And lastly but not leastly, Oliver Hunter, a young Australian artist whose work I have known of for a little while through Endicott Studios. His imaginative, surreal and strange mythic world gives away his obsessive and cerebral imaginations and love of tale and spirit. I find his creations extremely evocative, and a little influenced by the character of the world conjured in Terri Windling's book The Wood Wife. On the right is his painting After the Hunt. Those of you who are aware of Goblin Fruit, a relatively new online mythic poetry magazine, will have seen his work there. He also has a little "Cupfull of Oliver" website here, and there's a fascinating write up about his work, background and inspirations here at Endicott.

Thank you to all those people who have sent me words of encouragement and told me that my work makes them feel familiar strange things ... these kind nods lift my fragile self confidence enough to keep me creating. And thank you to these artists whose works make me feel these familiar strange things too.

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.

Ringing bells in other people's spirits

YOU KNOW when you stumble across another person's work and you are drawn into their world in a tumbling ecstasy of combined respect at their skill, delight at their creations and enjoyment of their mind?

Well the internet is a wonderful place for this sort of thing to happen and for this I applaud it and its magical wires that aren't really there and that seem to pass paintings and tunes and thoughts and words and films along them as easy as if all of us were sitting in one big room sharing stories. Not so long ago we would have fallen backwards off our chairs to hear of such a contraption. But now it has become an extra limb, and a very useful limb indeed for those of us who are trying to make things at home, trying to paint and create and make a bit of money (not that we like it really but it helps to pay for teabags), very useful it is indeed for those of us who want to hide away in our nests but also want to show people what we do in case others might like it, in case it might ring bells in their spirits.

And so that brings me to the odd world of blogs. I was a novice at this not so long back, but find that I have connected with others who are also making beautiful things and this is helping us all to make a living doing what we love to do. From time to time I have seen that people pass on "awards" or "memes" to one another for their work, thus promoting them.
I have never been a fan of those brash chain emails that under a charitable guise, whip up a sort of superstitious dread that some terrible luck might befall you unless you clog up ten more people's inboxes within the soonest few minutes.
The point of me telling you all this is to say that I received a one of these awards the other day from Cliodhna Quinlan and have found some other lovely things written about me and my work here and there and here and there and here and there. Thank you to all of these people ~ it is genuinely appreciated. I even found someone who included me in their commentary on artisan blogging.
As you may have guessed, I don't really want to follow the crowd in this matter, but I would like to show you some lovely work by some people whose creations drew me into their world as people above have been drawn into mine...

Carson Ellis paints and draws after my own heart. Her work is strange and sad and she seems to share my fascinations with lettering and Russia and accordions. She blogs here occasionally and her lovely website is here. You may have seen her work adorning the albums of the Decemberists.

Gretel Parker is a lovely friend whose work enchanted me as soon as I saw it. She is a fellow lover of wheeled creatures and tales and a master watercolour artist, conjuring tales of melancholy and loss in a far off toybox world. Here is her lovely collection of work and here in the middle of nowhere is her well read and so well written blog. I was lucky enough to have the loan of her studio where I painted my first watercolour.

Lisa Hurwitz I discovered via the lovely land of Etsy and I was very glad. Her paintings are scratchy and large-headed, melancholy and strange and her drawings are beautiful. I am a great admirer of her work. Read her blog here and see her portfolio here.

And finally the fabulous Cart Before the Horse folk art of Jo James makes me smile no end. Her creations are beautifully made and suitably strange and topsy-turvy for my tastes. Read her lovely bloggings and doings here.

These tagging businesses are supposed to include seven facts about yourself or somesuch.. but ... well... for that you'll just have to keep reading this blog! Suffice to say.. as you may have noticed, I like beautiful things with a little bit strange and a little bit of sad.