Sun Drenched

Just before I go off for a sun drenched weekend I wanted to show you my new work.  I've been working on a collection of small landscapes for a new print collection.  I thought it might be interesting to take photos as the work progressed and I've embedded a slideshow in this blog's sidebar.  Let me know what you think!

New Day

Full Moon

Sun Drenched

Quiet

Before Winter

I try to live with the seasons and focus on their merits.  It gets hard at this time of year as life accelerates in to winter and all things Christmas.  At home, the top of the piano is a visualisation of the seasons.  In Summer there are the things we find on holiday, fossils and pebbles, postcards from our travels.  This Autumn it's been decked with seed heads and grasses.  I remember collecting them at the end of September, the day my youngest started full days at school. Soon it will all make way for a display of light and sparkle to take us through the darker days of winter.  But before then, my display captures for me the Autumn.  I love the bleached out stems and subtle colour of the seed heads.

Winter dreaming

Back in the summer I started a series of small works using up the detritus of my studio!  Because I use book pages in my work the board book backs start to make piles, all in lovely muted colours.  The end pages find their way into my larger pieces but small offcuts find themselves stock piled for another day. Beautifully worded inscriptions are pinned to boards or tucked in to sketchbooks and I was determined to give these snippets their own glory.  And so this year's Christmas card designs were born.

Christmas cards available on 'Folksy'

I have a robin who lives in our garden and inspires me with his resilience.  His forebears lived here before him and the card 'Earnest Robin' celebrates him.  The inscription that I'd salvaged from an old book seemed just the greeting my little robin would utter.

'Earnest Robin'

It's at this time of year I long to hibernate so 'Christmas House' allowed me to dream about the cabin in the woods I would hibernate to.  Who or what would you take to your secret cabin?  I'd be sat in front of a log fire with the cat on my feet, listening to Stan Getz and knitting.  Oh Winter is such a dreamy time!

'Christmas House'

In the deep midwinter

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter.  Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.  ~Andrew Wyeth