Wayfarers' Nativity

THE NIGHT COMES EARLY these days, leaning up against our old rattly windowpanes, which ooze condensation and owlsong from four o'clock on. The long evenings afford us time to do Things Indoors by the fire, or at our dark desks. In the picture above, you might just be able to make out the image emerging on the paper below the lamp - but only in the reflection in the window.

It's a new winter painting - a ritual I've kept for some years now - to make a new snowy painting at this dark end of the year. No other time of year seems to call me to paint it so regularly, and these winter paintings always end up on my Christmas cards when I send them. 

This year I decided (at long last) to make Winter Cards to sell, which meant completing this snowy painting early so that the cards could be designed and ordered in time for fairs and for you to buy to send...

Which meant that I couldn't labour over a detailed creation for weeks on end, and since I've been trying to force a freer looseness in my work of late to combat my finickity temperament, I made this a watercolour of quick light sketchy strokes, and tried to draw with the paintbrush in splodges rather than with hair-thin lines. I deliberately used a paintbrush slightly too big and determined to finish this in two days. 

So here follows the progress of this work in pictures....

The image - a kind of gathering of nomadic folk, stopping to set up camp and collect firewood amongst the trees in the snow - I drew quickly, without worrying it too much, and without "finishing" the figures at the pencil stage which I am prone to doing:

Then I splurged on some sky, and put colour on clothing, not worrying if the paint ran over the edges, or colours mixed in unintended spots...

My accuracy with the too-big paintbrush was a little haphazard around the trees and I intentionally left watermarks where wet and dry paint met. I put on loose washes over the faces and left a space for the firesmoke too...

Gradually, each little figure was put in, suggested rather than drawn...

All of the painting came straight from my imagination, drawn and painted without reference to anything, except my inner snowy, firelit world.

Some of the scenes were very small...

And then I began to add other details around the figures - small blueish brown splodges for snow-footprints all around the encampment, and twigs in hands and on backs...

Finally, when all the paint was painted and dry, I coaxed the important bits out with a pencil, sending back the darks and tucking in the edges...

Though I decided in the end to leave the trees and their edges with the sky alone - just rough seagreen watercolour, not heeding its proper boundaries...

But I drew in the faces softly where I could...

And then, almost to my own surprise, it was done.

And here it is, Wayfarers' Nativity available to buy as a print in my shop now.

The tribe, whoever they are, gather wood for the fire in the midst of cold white winter to warm the stew in the pot, and to warm the babe in arms, just visible inside the bender. I didn't know this was going to be a nativity painting to begin with, but it has become somehow an alternative to the story we all know, yet really the same: where we all bring gifts to the child of light in the dark days of winter. The gift in this case is the gift of firewood, which in a life on the move, mostly lived under the sky, is the most important gift of all: warmth.

And so to Winter Cards....

I've been busy selling at Advent Fairs and setting up my little December exhibition in the bustling Courtyard Wholefood Shop and Cafe in Chagford, where my cards are for sale next to the cakes. I'll write about this soon, but meanwhile... here are the cards, a selection of eight of my wintry paintings from the past few years, packaged all together, or as single cards and packs of four.

They are printed on lovely heavy white card stock, with a very subtle matt sheen and come with recycled brown envelopes. The eight designs included are: 

Baba Yaga
Balalaika
Telling Stories to the Trees
Father Christmas
Picking Up Sticks
Winter Crow
Wintersong
Wayfarers' Nativity

The cards are all wrapped up and sitting in the shop waiting to be posted out to you. I hope you like them. If you live overseas and would like to send these on before Christmas, you might be wise to order them soon before the postal services get too hectic.

Days are getting chillier here on the edge of the moor, and the first noticeable frost crept into the fields around our house on the first day of December. Macha has taken the warmest spot on the rug by the fire, and we busy on, readying ourselves for dark lamplit evenings, mulled-wine-stitched musical gatherings, and gathering plenty of firewood to warm the Winter Child. 

***POSTSCRIPT***

Also, I have a giclée print of Baba Yaga up in an auction which is running til December 18th in aid of our dear Terri Windling who has struggled financially lately due to a combination of health and legal difficulties. Her worldwide circle of friends and fans have gathered an enormous amount of creativity and support and this auction is full to bursting - a veritable Goblin Marketful of delights. Please go and support it in any way you can - either by bidding or offering or word-spreading. Terri has inspired and helped so many of us, she deserves this support. 

• Here's the link to the main auction page where you can browse the wonders on offer.
• Tom has one of his most beautiful blood red and ember yellow harlequin masks in the auction too - here.
• My Baba Yaga giclée print's auction page is here.
• There are many other jewels on offer, not least artwork by Brian Froud, Alan Lee, David Wyatt, Danielle Barlow, Virginia Lee, naming rights for a forthcoming book by Catherynne M Valente, handwritten postcards from Ellen Kushner to you, and a fairytale by Jane Yolen in which you star, and many many more...

Northern Nomadings

HELLO! We are home again after a good long meander around the north, and itching to be off again already.
Our wheeled home is just so almost there that we now have a proper sense of how it'll be when we're in it for good, and it is wonderful. We've made a beautiful home with a view that is always changing. Of course there are still cupboard doors and plugs and taps and bookshelves and desks and hooks and pictures to go in yet, but it isn't a horsebox anymore!

This last week's travels took us through towns and villages, along bumpy backroads and under chimney-scraping bridges and back again and we met some lovely folk along the way.
We parked in shady forested corners, on tops of moors, beside streams and down little lanes. We sat in the evenings in candle and firelight with the dinner cooking and pigeons cooing overhead.
We had fires in the woods with friends and woke in the mornings to take our wares to sell in town or just to wander about like tourists, drinking coffee and looking at cathedrals.


Up above are some views of our stops and here below are some views from our windows.

And if it's all sounding just a little too romantic, know that we also came across some people who didn't want us there.. which is the inevitable difficult Other Side to the freedom of a nomadic life.

We were delighted however to meet up with some fellow bus-dwellers who despite being parked just a few miles from here, found us in the land of blog. Andy and Mel of the Black Bus Company and their cats and dogs have found a lovely little corner of Scotland to park their wheeled home and we were happy to meet them for tea and talk.
And further along our way we were welcomed warmly by another young creative couple with exciting plans for wheeled journeyings and woodworkings around Ireland.

A day's meander around Durham's little lanes and the whispering Norman arches of Durham Cathedral was a joy (the bronze cathedral door-knocker growls to the right and there's a peep through an arch below); as was my visit to the excellent Seven Stories Children's Book Centre in Newcastle. It is a seven-storied warren in celebration of the supposed mere seven stories in the world and the thousand different ways of telling them. In this child-centered book haven, there are corners with cushions and books to read, and little doors to open, children's artwork, audio books in the arms of chairs and 3-D recreations of tale worlds. There's a wooden-beamed attic with dressing up clothes and a stage, and there are wonderful examples of original illustrations and manuscripts, opening up the worlds inside the creation of books as well as the worlds inside the tales inside them.

I had the place virtually to myself and was able to amble about one of the current exhibitions From Toad Hall to Pooh Corner, which is based around children's stories set in an idyllic and almost lost English countryside. I sat at the hearth in Badger's Kitchen, with birdsong twittering overhead and admired the just exquisite pencil and watercolour illustrations by Australian artist Robert Ingpen (whose work I have long admired) for a new edition of The Wind in the Willows. There were also EH Shepherd originals, and book manuscripts, layout roughs and authors' notes. Seven Stories holds all sorts of story based events and grown-up books are wholly not allowed! I'd thoroughly recommend a visit, especially since I see a new exhibition in the listings of local author David Almond's work Winged Tales of the North.

Our Geordie-land wander took us past Tui's family where we were mobbed by curious local kids on bikes who we let inside the truck to look around and in their bouncy exuberance wanted to look iside all the drawers and come along with us and hounded us with questions like "are you English?" and "where do you wee?".
"In the woods" I whispered to open mouths and raised eyebrows.
Perhaps if the people who see us and wonder but then call the police would remember the boldness of youth and come over to us with their questions ... There they would find a cup of tea and plenty of answers and obligings, instead of the threat of the unknown fear that lurks like a highwayman on the dark roads of their minds.

I know the negative stories of gypsies stealing your lead piping and/or children, and leaving piles of rubbish. But surely there are just as many nasty house-dwellers as there are nice ones... why tar everyone with the same brush? Indeed it is the home-dwellers who come by the green spot where our black bus friends are parked and dump their unwanted rubbish, and it is the bus-dwellers who clear it up.








Well, anyway, we are returned for a while to busy ourselves with finishing the truck, and I'll make a few more clocks. There'll have to be plenty of clearing upping and freecycling, and I even have a passing notion to have a wee sale of my original paintings... because of course they can't all go in the truck. Would anybody be interested in such a thing?

The sun has come back to Scotland with us, as has a flat tyre. We are now on the hunt for a good set of new tyres for the truck before we leave and we seem to have the rarest wheel size in the world. It is nice to be back amongst blog friends ... the doings of blog land can easily whisk out of your grasp when you leave them for a while so I am bumbling to catch up a little. All your kind kind words are appreciated and enjoyed as ever, and it will be incredible when we have our mobile internet and can blog on the hoof. I leave you with an evening scene in the truck, parked somewhere between here and there... outside there are ominous forest rustlings, and inside, a cup of Horlicks.