Happy Easter!

By the time you read this I will be in Wales, attempting to understand a bit of Welsh and hiking up mountains in Snowdonia. Happy Easter! I hope your long weekend is filled with joy and adventure.

Canterbury Cathedral

Inside Canterbury Cathedral

Columns stretching high
flagstones smooth from the feet of
pilgrims of Becket.


The Black Prince's Feet

Memory-heavy air
hushed voices, tales of murder
spirits lurking near.


Columns inside Canterbury Cathedral

Outside, the sunlight
flickers, ghosts disappear and
more tourists arrive.

In Progress: Portraits

My painting; Noa Noa catalogue

I'm interested in painting faces at the moment, as well as mucking around with how to use the watercolour paints. I like the layers you can get with the watercolours and sectioning parts off into different pieces of colour.


From Lucian Freud's painting of Francis Bacon

The one above is my favourite.

I'm actually looking for some photographs to paint from... I'm after photos where the faces aren't too white, where there are some good sections of light and shadow. I would love it if you would email/send me a photo for me to paint. My painting probably won't look much like you but it will look interesting!

Stockholm

There is no question about it. I went to Stockholm because of the artist and illustrator Camilla Engman. I was intrigued by the colours in her photos and I wanted to see the world as she saw it, a little bit.



I saw the light the way she sees it. Somehow different from English light, Swedish light is tinted blue, different shades of ice. I loved certain colours in particular: blue-greys and rosehip red and washed-out yellows like grasses waving next to lakes.




I came away with a long, slow memory of cosy afternoons spent in cafes drinking from giant mugs. Walking through dark, rainsoaked streets arm in arm with Lauchlin, holding a too-small umbrella between us. And wishing to return to this place where the colours of winter are somehow beautiful.

The colours of a place soaked in water and the changing seasons.




*Note: I wrote this back in October 2008... it was Autumn.

Short Beds for Shakespeare

Nash House - a property owned by Shakespeare

According to vicious rumour, Shakespeare may not even have written his plays. Apparently, there are no draft copies of any of Shakespeare's work. Word has it that he was a canny businessman and outsourced the writing work to somebody else. There is, of course, no evidence that anyone else has written the plays either but it is an interesting concept. NotShakespeare.

Ken, Karina, Lauch and I went to visit NotShakespeare's birthplace and place of death in Stratford-Upon-Avon. In case you are like me and have wondered why the English name their towns -on-something, the Avon is the river that runs through Stratford. Therefore, Stratford-Upon-Avon.

We had cream tea (that is, scones with jam, clotted cream and a big pot of tea) and wandered through quiet streets full of fake reproduction Tudor buildings that Shakespeare and his various relatives have lived in. There is Shakespeare's birthplace, his wife's house, his daughter's house and his mother's house.


Reconstructed Tudor buildings in Stratford-Upon-Avon

Inside the house where Shakespeare was born is a very short bed with very large cushions. Why the short beds? In Shakespeare's time, people believed that they needed to sleep sitting up. Only dead people were laid out and that was how they let God take their soul. So just in case God thought you were dead and took your soul, you had to sleep sitting up all the time. I wonder if anyone ever slid sideways in their sleep.


Ken and Karina

The prettiest house was Anne Hathaway's cottage, which has a thatched roof. It was a mile or so out of the town and across the road from it was a babbling brook surrounded by wild primroses and bluebells and little white flowers like stars with ducks that had shiny green feathers on their heads. It was straight out of an Enid Blyton book. After that we went to look at a castle that is 900 years old. Days like this I feel like I've found the real England. But not the real Shakespeare.

Radish

It was perfect red with a cute little tail. Lauch cut them into fancy shapes and put them in a salad for dinner tonight.

Back Down the Rabbit Hole

I went back to Oxford because I couldn't shake the feeling that there was something magical about the place. Was it the sand-coloured College buildings? Those doorways? Or just the fact that we visited on a sunny day? I half expected it to become a dingy ugly place on second visit.



Nope, Oxford still had a certain charm about it, despite the weird weather conditions we had - little showers of hail all afternoon, bouncing off my umbrella, then back to golden sunshine.



It might be the air of secrecy that lurks about the place. So many colleges and Uni students with their minds full of dreams. So many alleyways and locked doors leading to mysterious rooms. You can hear the odd stream of piano music escaping, a conversation here or there echoing through stairwells or cloisters.




To add to Oxford's charm, we found some fantastic places to eat. We had high tea at the Grand Cafe, which served cream teas on tiered cake stands. For dinner we ate in this Chinese restaurant that was all dark wooden tables, filled with steam from the kitchen and the scent of chilli and rice. It was incredibly atmospheric and the food was great. We stumbled back on the train buzzing from so many cups of Chinese tea and half wishing we'd lived in Oxford for a while.

Tree Man

Man in the Tree, Hyde Park, London

My dreams lately have been filled with fairytale creatures - tiny two-person aeroplanes fighting giant robots, people inside trees. Even the cat wailing on the fence at the moment sounds like a fictional character.

Is this some kind of reaction to the real London? The industrial, isolated city where people drop rubbish because there are people who are hired to sweep it up?

But really England IS the place of fairytales. There are tiny little stone cottages, castles and a place called Sherwood Forest. There is a countryside where stories of King Arthur began.

And even the streetsweepers dance... sometimes.