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The Spoon-Eared Child
THE LEAVING DAY is approaching fast and Tui and I are building & dismantling in clouds of sawdust & bookdust respectively. He has made more wonderful shelves and cupboards and the truck is getting more and more nookish by the day. The days here are not at the moment quite what you'd call days.. the darkness of the nighttime gets a little greyer between morning and afternoon and then it's night again! And all the while we are lashed with freezing rain.
Anyhow, from nookish things to bookish things ... I am now sitting amongst stalagmites of books, towering in teetering spires around and about me, and breathing in the floating blankets of dust that have been softly mustering atop the bookedges over time. I think I have selected my most used and treasured and least heavy books for the invitingly lovely bookshelves ready in the wheeled house. Some more good but un-squeezable-inable books will go to my parents' house :) and the last lot ... is for you! Yes.. indeed, I thought that you discerning Hermitage-reading folks would be interested to virtually browse my book shelves and avail yourself of a bargain. There's to be a Hermitage book sale! I have been a book hoarder for a long time, and I have had to be brutal. So there are some great books there .. on such diverting subjects as: tree lore, book arts apprenticeships, elvish, devils, medieval books of hours, runes, nursery rhymes, holy wells, tin whistles, fairground transport, children's book illustrating, fairy tales, anarchism and a plethora of stories...
I have put the books all on one long page, in sections by subject. And the sale can be found by clicking on that there rusty book sign to the below right. As soon as a book is bought, I'll remove the paypal button, but if two people should buy the same book whilst I am sleeping, I'll send it to whoever got it first, and I'll refund the unlucky one! If anyone can suggest a more hi-tech way of dealing with this problem I'd be grateful, but as it is I have spent two days listing everything on here... I'd love to write a little something about each book, but I think I might be going crosseyed with the effort. 
Just imagine yourself standing in one of those old rickety-shelved second hand bookshops in cathedral towns where the proprietor is reading a tea-stained newspaper and customers shuffle past each other apologetically peering up and down the bookspines. There'll be a spiral staircase up or down to a chilly room with even more interesting and obscure books in difficult piles and a damp anorak draped over the radiator. To leave, you'll have to cough quietly, step around many boxes of unpacked unshelved books (possibly from the houses of dead people), and you'll emerge into the day having left a substantial number of hours behind, wedged between the yellowed pages of silverfish-nibbled academia.
I have just finished a small commissioned watercolour painting of a crow, sitting up in winter branches overlooking a small hamlet in the hills where a chimney smokes and reminds him of the origins of fire. This painting is for Melanie who loved the Lenape legend of the rainbow crow and the smoking chimney is a remnant of the fire in this tale. I delved into my lovely brand new box of watercolours for this painting and used a smidgen of gouache for the snow on the branches.
As he is packaged up and readied for a trip to the post office (a windy six mile journey for us) I am stacking books upstairs into "going", "staying" and "mum and dad's house" piles... there's rather a lot to fit into our compact little rolling home.
The other day I bought a tiny locally grown pumpkin which we roasted in the oven, and after we'd eaten it we curled up to watch a lovely film which we had already seen at the cinema, but wanted to see again. It is a Gaelic film, a tale of a grandfather on the isle of Skye and of the tales that he tells to his grandchildren, and of the mystery in the seas and trees of the island. It is a beautiful film, all spoken in Gaelic using unknown actors and painted sonically with a haunting musical score. Here's the trailer... I highly recommend you buy it, download it, enjoy it. It's called SEACHD: The Inaccessible Pinnacle.
CLOCK number six has been drawn from the hat, and with it a hand of tarot cards. This commission was a little bit of magic for Allegra Smith who asked for a clock with sprinklings of gypsies, of tarot cards and Egyptians, and a suspicion of a well loved cat.
I had a deck of tarot cards when I was young but have never known a great deal about the history and meanings behind the tarot, so for this clock I read a little and learned of the history of the iconography and significances. The early tarot decks are delightful, mostly woodblock printed and hand coloured. For more delvings into the history of these 78 images, I recommend this excellent tarot history site.
As this is to be a gift from Allegra to her beloved, a gift of time for someone whose time may be short, I chose the ace of coins for an important or valuable gift, the hermit for time and triumph over it, and the star for hope and rejuvenation. I hope that this little painted "spell" will wend its way over the ocean and be enjoyed by the recipients. The cat is a sphinxy version of their own cat, and time ticks around the Egyptian coin and over a broken palette of ochre-sand and azure sea-browns.
This is the painting I have chosen for the first in the series of original painting sales that I mentioned a while ago. These are now our last six weeks in this little Scottish cottage .. we have planned and hope to be off for good by the beginning of December, and of course there are a million and one things to do before then. The truck is looking just lovely and Tui is working like a man possessed to get it ready, making a cupboard a day almost! I am finishing off clock orders and other things, I have an animation to get finished as well and on top of all that there's a house full of stuff that we've to squeeze into a truck! Therefore .. things will have to go! We cannot hang all the paintings I have here on the wooden walls of the wheely home, and so I thought to have a wee sale, so that anybody who might feel inclined can snap them up. These sales will help us get on our way too... for though we nip out weekly to earn a penny or three in town, it is usually spent before we get home on the weekly wood and screws for more house building, a bag or two of groceries and a thimbleful of diesel. I am selling these at a lower price than I usually do for original oil paintings on wood so that perhaps someone who might not have been able to afford it before can do this time.
THIS BLOG is one year old this October, and to celebrate I thought it time to give it a new hat. So as you see, I have painted one. My parents gave me some gouache paints for by own recent birthday and this is my first ever experiment with them. At first, having only used oils and watercolours before, I was unsure how to wrestle with these strange opaque yet watery paints... I tried painting in great sloopy washes and scrubbing it off again with loo roll, and then tried dense thick colour which I laid on with the finest of brushes in lines as thin as a ladybird's eyelash.
Gradually I warmed to the gouache, and found my own way of using it. I build layers and model with both watercolour and oil paint as if I am drawing with it, putting in little colour washes, then darks, then lights, and more washes, and it seems I attack gouache in much the same way. I found it excellent for lettering.
Though with watercolour I use pencil lines as an integral part of the final image, this time I wanted to see if I could do it all with the brush. I am moderately happy with the result.. though last night I hated it. I have much to thank photoshop for - because I thought my final painting altogether too blue and dingy, and by employing the clever modern digital tools of colour level adjustment and contrast boosting, I have rescued a painting that might have otherwise gone on the scrapheap. It's only a first attempt anyway, I shall most definitely enjoy my further gouache adventures.
Also in my birthday parcel were a couple of photos of a little Rima that my mum had found in her fossickings. Here I am drawing at age five and three quarters, sat at the kitchen table with pens and pencils, more of my drawings on the walls behind me and a milk-toothy grin that I seemed to wear in all photos at that time :)
I find it fascinating to think that those little hands are these hands and that those eyes saw to draw people like that then and see to draw them somewhat differently nowadays. Odd isn't it?
I'm off to paint another clock, make some attempt at clearing stuff and put the kettle on.
And speaking of tea, if any of you should be pining for the old blog hat Penny Farthing Tea, you can now buy it beautifully glazed into a handmade stoneware mug by Gina at Phenix Pottery, providing they've not already been snapped up. And if they have, there are more in the kiln as we speak!
I drew that image yonks ago for the front door of my website; its title is a play on Pennyroyal Tea and it depicts some strange tea-powered travelling contraption.
You'll see teapots and kettles a lot in my paintings. Tea is one of life's essential fuels I believe. I drink copious amounts of it, mostly good ol' builder's tea: strongish with milk and no sugar.
PS ~ If you want a closer look at the painting, you can click on the snippets up there.
THE FIFTH CLOCK is done! Here for you to see is my newest Once Upon O'Clock creation ~ a clock for narrative jeweller Nina Bagley, who asked for reds and rooftops and moon and moth, because moths have been visiting her rather a lot lately. I also decided to include some text in this one. I am fond of entwining words around my images and thought it appropriate for this one since Nina puts words inside her jewellery. I hunted for suitable moth poems and found just a few.
The words that curl out of the moon's pipe smoke and chimney are from the T.S. Eliot poem The Burnt Dancer about a moth. O danse mon papillon noir is the refrain ... and on further investigation I found that a "papillon noir" is also an antiquated French expression for a melancholy thought, and I liked that.
For the small cluster of houses below, I took inspiration from medieval woodcuts of towns, where the whole group of buildings in enclosed within city walls, and the perspective is knowledgeably awry, with rows of houses piled simultaneously on top of and behind one another.
The moth is a Luna Moth, since it is sitting on the moon, and since they visit Nina from time to time too.
I think she likes it, and I do too... it'll be fluttering over the atlantic now, and I hope its fragile dusty wings can manage the long flight ...
I THINK I HAVE FOUND work by another artist that is the closest thing to my own sensibilities that ever I have seen, and I'd like to show it to you ...
A few months back I was given a little local Scottish magazine by a neighbour who thought a particular article in it might be up my street. And Oh it was. I read in there of a Russian kinetic theatre of wooden sculpture hidden in the heart of Glasgow. And two days ago I went to see it.
Down a narrow alleyway and round the corner was a door, and on the door was a drawing of a behatted crow with a bell in its beak. Behind the crow were stairs, and at the top of the stairs was the most unusual wonderland I could ever have hoped to come across. A roomful of contraptions, huge automata-like machines, moved by and moving small painted woodcarvings with hooked noses. There were endless wheels, cogs and clocks, old pieces of scrap, sections of sewing machines, typewriters and lawnmowers, bicycles and bells, and delightful characters ~ melancholic, strange and grotesque in the best possible of ways. 
Fat bellied mice, nuns and hunchbacks, clowns and skellingtons, monkeys with donkeyheads for hands, grinning jesters and snap-jawed monstrosities, bears, saints, artists and alchemists, monkeys with wayward willies, and organ-grinders and ravens of all sizes and sorts joined in a mechanical dance ~ macabre and humourous, sad and wise and utterly fascinating. They seemed to be telling me tales of the world turning, of lives and deaths and back again, of torture and spirituality, of the wheel and all its spokes. Lights shone on the pages of this kinetic story and took me from one character's part to the next, and all the while music played ... something from a far off circus, a dusty street musician, an echoing dungeon, a shtetl in winter.
Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre is the work of Russian artist Eduard Bersudsky. Born an outsider in St Petersburg in 1939, he is a self confessed black sheep or "white crow" as the Slavs say, who began his work amidst the struggles of Soviet Russia and and left in 1994 to settle in Scotland and bring with him his magnificent theatre. His work has been brought tirelessly into the public eye by Tatyana Jakovskaya, theatre director and critic who he met in 1987. Sharmanka (which means organ grinder or hurdy gurdy in Russian) has its base in Glasglow at present but a touring version can be seen here and there and elsewhere, and Eduard's works have been commisssioned to stand in various town centres, museums and private collections in places as far an wide as Scotland, Jerusalem, Russia, Denmark, America.
Eduard requests that he never see his audience nor they him, and speaks only a handful of English words. I was lucky enough however to meet him briefly and see his workshop and new piece in progress which will incorporate an old set of bellows into its heart. He is a man dedicated utterly to his work and collects like a magpie more bits and pieces of machinery to incorporate inside his creations, which have names like The Clock of Life, The Hunchback, The Tower of Babel, The Little Organ Grinder, Time of Rats, The Rag-n-Bone Man, Willy the Barrel Organ, Brainwashing Machine, The Tower of Medieval Sciences, The Leg, Eternal Triangle of Love, The Tree of Life, Druid's Clock, The Autumn Walk in the Belle Epoque of Perestroika ...
I cannot express adequately quite how in thrall I was to these little wooden men and the wheels that turned them. Bersudsky has been described as "an icon painter for our times" and that he is. Really it is impossible to convey in words how brilliant this kinetic theatre of woodcarvings is. You simply MUST go and see it. Even if you do not live in the UK ... get a plane, a boat, a train, a bicycle, a tricycle, a donkey, a snail, a unicycle! Just come to a show! They are on thursdays and sundays. Photographs cannot evoke the magic enough, so here are a few videos, but even they are like weak imitations compared with standing close to one of the beautiful Sharmanka machines as it creaks into life. Thank you Eduard.
And here it is in action ...
HELLO! We are home again after a good long meander around the north, and itching to be off again already.
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 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.
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?".
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?
ANOTHER PICTURE PATCHWORK for you to nose about (enlargeable for the extra nosey)... our gradually growing interior. It is very exciting to see our home becoming more and more like a moving log cabin! Tui has made great sturdy wood frames for the kitchen and storage seats.. there will be doors on them soon. A lovely gnarled piece of wood has become the kitchen bench, the sink is in place but plugless, there's a small temporary cooker, there are little secondhand cupboards on the walls with nothing in them but a bag of teabags, and we have tested out the undersofa storage space with stacks of our picture frames.
It seems we are living in a permanent cloud here... being 1531 feet above sea level (down the road is the highest village in Scotland you know!); I have begun the fifth clock which has reds and roofs and moon and moth, is for the talented and lovely narrative jeweller Nina Bagley, and will be ready in a while.
The day after tomorrow, I will be turning nine-and-twenty and we plan to drive off out from underneath this cloud, somewhere foresty and have a birthday fire and something nice to eat. And then we'll head away to try and find the sun.. if we do, and there happens to be a largeish town underneath it, we shall stop and sell pictures!
The mornings are misty and we'll be driving off inbetween clouds into the world. Meanwhile these two will stay huddled together at home. They don't live with us, they just think they do.
I shall return soon, a year older, and a weekend wiser.
