The Day The Dunnock Died

Little soul in a grey chest
You died in my hand
Once you sang for spring
And flew on those dun wings under the sun
Today you trembled at the roadside
And lay your last heartbeat in my palm
Your graphite claws clasped in prayer as you left.
Here is my pencil prayer to you.





♫

The Mad Hatter Clock and some spring fairs

GREETINGS from amid the paintbrushes! I grow industiouser and industriouser this month, with many lovely commissions to complete and work to prepare for exhibitions hither and thither. There doesn't seem to be quite enough time to get it all done, but deadlines always add the extra nudge of fear necessary for this particular last minute artist to complete her work on time.
There's something about April it seems which makes us get out our dusting cloths and our mouldering motivations and fling all that thought it could still crouch by the winter fire out onto the sunny doorstep and into spring busyness.


March madness and the whiff of Wonderland about has meant that many Alice-themed things have been going on of late. I am delighted to announce that I will be contributing this just-completed Mad Hatter Clock to an Alice In Wonderland exhibition beginning on April the 18th at the wonder-ful Imagine Gallery in Suffolk where I exhibited work last year. My clock will be in excellent company indeed, as it is to be sharing wall space with my friend the immensely talented artist/paper automata maker Lindsey Carr, and the writer/illustrator extraordinaire Jackie Morris who also happens to own one of my early Once Upon O'Clocks. There will be ceramics, masks, paintings, photography, Arthur Rackham and Mabel Lucie Attwell prints and goodness-know-what-else. But I am most excited of all that John Foley the gallery owner has managed to procure for our delight the actual original seven-years-in-the-making Alice In Wonderland painting by Bulgarian illustrator Iassen Ghiuselev, whose book I wrote about some time ago. I can't wait to peer at the brush strokes and marvel up close at his Bruegel/Escher-like gouache-on-wood Wonderland.

~ ~ ~

Anyway, here for those of you who can't make it to Suffolk, is The Mad Hatter Clock. He peers with more than a hint of lunacy into his cup of tea. And in the tea his own gravestone-toothed grin is reflected back at him past the ticking hands of a backwards-clock. And all around, against a checkerboard background wind words from the tale:

"If you knew Time as well as I do", said the Hatter,
"you wouldn't talk about wasting it. It's him."

The Number 13, an escapee from the clock face perhaps, sits in place of the usual 10/6 hat price.
This is larger than my clocks usually are, though not as large as last year's. I don't know what the wood is, it was kindly sent to me in the post by my friend Sarah.
Hollowing out the backs of these clocks has become a blister-inducing job and a half, and takes even longer when the clock spindle is shorter (as is the case with reverse movements). And so I was very pleased with these drill attachments (picture below, top right), a birthday gift from my brother. Forstner bits they're called, they drill flat bottomed holes and make my clockmaking life much easier!
Here below are some snippets from the clockmaking and painting progress, do click to enlarge:


Wonderland lends itself to oddness in perspective I think, and I enjoyed playing with strange proportions, diminishing words and slightly untrue checks to add to the sense of nuttiness.

And here it is finished, on a sunny afternoon bench, ticking away the hours:

(do click to enlarge)

You may notice the first instance of a second hand in one of my Once Upon O'Clocks, which I like very much.. it is nice to see it moving anticlockwise around the Hatter's cuppa.


Here are a few more close-ups of the distressed paint surface ...

(do click to enlarge)

And a mad green stare...


As well as exhibitions, with spring come fairs.. May fairs and Wood fairs. Over there on the right (up a bit... yes, there) ---> I have pinned a few fliers for the Things My Work Will Be At over the next month or two, so do come along if you are in the areas.


And so I return to the painting table, where numerous pieces of primed hardboard, hand milled watercolour paper and wood await me... Time is Ticking! But which way?

A spring walk one sunny evening by the river

At sixes and sevens

I WONDER IF you remember that I was making a series of paintings of the seven chakras as icon-like characters painted on Ikea breadboards? Well the last of the seven was completed recently and as I go to tell you about it I realise that I never showed you the sixth. So here we are, at sixes and sevens.

The whole series was to be painted over some time so that development and change showed in my work. Each image is that particular chakra personified, astride an associated animal, set against a background of appropriate colour and holding an apt symbolic item. Each time the figure alternated between male and female, and with the progression of seven they aged. The characters all point to the appropriate chakra point on their body and the horizon line crosses behind them there too.

So here we have indigo Ajna .. the sixth chakra, a wise white haired owl-riding woman holding a crystal ball of magic mushrooms. This point on the body is the third eye, and it symbolizes far-seeing, intuition, psychic perception, imagination, dream interpretation, luminescence.
Here are snippets of the painting in progress...


And here she is as a finished piece:


There is an incredibly intricate iconography surrounding this spiritual system, involving sounds, minerals, planets, psychological states and demons, as well as animals, colours and so on...
I have based the colours of this sixth icon a little on those that can be found deep inside the feldspar minerals like labradorite (also linked with third-eye things). I was given a beautiful piece of this (right) on a necklace by my grandmother when I was younger and remember being happy to look inside it at the beautiful refracted colours for hours. Almost as if the northern lights had been bottled.



And so from indigo to violet. From watery mineral to gold. For the final piece in this series, Sahasrara, I thought about how this ultimate breadboard icon should differ from the previous six, standing, as it does, for a kind of enlightenment, wisdom and understanding. I decided this figure should be ageless, sexless, facing forward unlike the others, and crowned in gold like an iconic saint. Our seventh character also is seated this time, not on an animal, but a winged chair, and holds the very same painting of which they are part. Perhaps a sort of self-awareness, or weird ever-diminishing quantum realization?


I am particularly pleased with the golden halo, made with gold wax over layers of oil paint. The nimbus or aureole was used widely in both western and eastern religious art to denote sanctity. Here I have connected it with the crown chakra and its associated enlightenment.



And so with the seven completed, I await eagerly a photograph of them all together on Bob's wall. I have always considered the icon amongst the most beautiful of all arts, and so was delighted that to follow on from this series, Bob has commissioned me to paint an iconic triptych. The details and story of which shall have to wait some long while until I have the time to uncover them at length.

The Hedge Brother Clock

HOTCHI WITCHI he is called by the Gypsies, Pal of the Boor - brother of the hedge. And in my latest clock he crouches shortsightedly amongst the weeds holding up an umbrella clock.



The hedgehog was highly thought of amongst Gypsies, who compared him to themselves because he lives on the fringes of the wild, neither in the open field nor in the deep forest. In addition he is subject to Gorjo (non-gypsy) rumours that he steals eggs, impales apples on his spines to take back to his lair and sucks milk from reclining cows. Hedgehogs also made for the Gypsies a tasty (and free) meal, often roasted in clay over the open fire. The meat is rich and was only shared occasionally. There is tell in folktales that the liver of the hedge brother, a great delicacy, was eaten to overcome deceit and find the truth. Since the hedgehog represented the Gypsy's ideal inner self, the eating of this animal became like a sacred totemic act.

To read more about the Hotchiwitchi, there is an interesting chapter in The Traveller-Gypsies by Judith Okely. Here, in a photo from the archive of The Museum of English Rural Life, a Gypsy family outside Snow Hill near Birmingham roast a hedgehog in clay over the fire.


My Hedge Brother Clock was made for Gina who told me she loved gardens and umbrellas and hedgehogs and who gave it to her husband Jim on the occasion of his sixty-fourth birthday. This little fellow is waiting timidly for the rain I think, under his circus-tent-coloured clock-brolly. He is nestled amid Dürer-inspired weeds.



This clock was made with apple wood again, I think it is the preceding slice from the same tree that bore the hare-violinist. Here you can see even earlier branch intentions.


In my new Hermitage whilst nesting amongst my own weeds I have been industrious with the paintbrush. And in between creating I have been occupied with more prosaic tasks, like collecting a second hand washing machine from a lady in the next village, wrestling with furniture-that-refuses-to ascend-the-steep-and-narrow-stairs, and finding interesting old carpets, brick-a-brack and other magpie delights. I managed to connect the washing machine myself (the first one I have ever owned!) and found in the outlet pipe a dead snail, (a hedgehog feast if ever there was one!) which I removed and put to one side on the windowsill. This morning the "dead" snail was gone! I eventually found him contemplating life half way up a kitchen tile. And there I leave him, and you.

The Hare Mycomusicologist Clock

MARCH IS MARCHING on and mad March hares abound. I promised to bring you clocks and so here is The Hare Mycomusicologist Clock. It is for Andrea, who asked for hares and mushrooms and music and the Bronze Age burial chamber of Pentre Ifan in Pembrokeshire.



This March hare (for I am sure he is one even though I painted him in January) sits atop a mushroom and violins his moon-thoughts to the Welsh mountains beyond. I suppose this clock has a faint Wonderland-whiff to it, what with March hares and sitting on mushrooms and all, though that was not planned.



Things are seen from an insect-eye-view as I needed the mushroom to be more or less round for the clock face. The clock is a slice of apple wood this time, with a little protrusion where the apple tree had begun to think about a branch. Into this convenient niche I poked the ears of this shy red-waistcoated fellow.


Do click on the photos to enlarge them (though if you do you'll discover a disgraceful scattering of dust motes on the paint surface!). Hares conjure many varied folk superstitions and beliefs worldwide. There is a hare in the moon of course and I was particularly intrigued by the legend that tells of the moon in anger heating a stone and burning the hare's mouth, causing, like Shakespeare's Flibbertigibbet, a hare-lip.

"This is the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet: he begins

at curfew, and walks till the first cock; he gives

the web and the pin, squints the eye, and makes the

hare-lip; mildews the white wheat, and hurts the

poor creature of earth."

King Lear | Act III, scene IV


My friend Terri Windling (whose wonderful paintings are twitching with rabbit ears) wrote fascinatingly on hare and rabbit folklore too, and she quotes at the end of her essay a children's poem by Walter de la Mare, which, to add to the hare-witchery, I pass on here:

In the black furror of a field
I saw an old witch-hare this night;
And she cocked a lissome ear,
And she eyed the moon so bright,
And she nibbled of the green;
And I whispered "Whsst! witch-hare,"
Away like a ghostie o’er the field
She fled, and left the moonlight there.

* * *
POST SCRIPT : Thank you dear folks for the warm welcome back to blogland! I have since listed the original of Väinämöinen Sings a Ship for sale (EDIT: SOLD!) in my etsy shop and little prints of both Väinämöinen and A Girl Mad As Birds too.


POST POST SCRIPT for the extremely observant : One of my painted characters has a hare lip in Leg Wheel And Jew Harp.


POST POST POST SCRIPT: It seems that the hare witchery truly is abounding this March - my artist friend Danielle Barlow has also been painting lunar witch-hare tales!