Daisy

Daisy and I earlier this summer. She loved that sheep wool rug

 Work-in-progress: Self Portrait with Daisy

Since my last blog post I have had surgery and Daisy has been put to sleep (it happened when I was in hospital; they let me go home for a couple of hours to say goodbye to her). She was over 16 years old, semi-blind and -deaf and had cancer on her nose and kidney problems. She was with us for one year, and it is nice to know that she experienced all four seasons in Spiddal. The scab on her nose had progressively got worse, and the monthly injections to prevent it from becoming infected no longer helped. Towards the end she was very disoriented, walking in circles and disappearing into the polytunnel - she loved her sauna - for long periods of time.

Animals feel it when we are suffering, and Daisy was so good to me. After the miscarriage she would lie on my belly, and she would curl up to me (or climb onto me as shown in the painting above) when I was unable to move during the worst times of the chemoradiation and nearly always cover or touch the affected area. I believe I received a lot of healing from her.

We miss her, but it was time to let her go, and we are so grateful for the year she kept us company. It is eerily quiet in the mornings without her demanding her breakfast.

Slower

 

Daisy is more affectionate than ever. Animals really are able to tell when somebody is in pain. She seeks my company and purrs at the loudest volume possible for her 15-year old self. I regularly fall asleep on the couch with her in my arms.

I am finishing illustrations for a sweet story about a walking stick, and Rab's new book (with my drawings) has just been published.

One thing the last two months have taught me is to slow down. I am quitting self-sabotaging, energy-robbing actions that used to be so much part of my daily life that I wasn't conscious of how corrosive they had become.  And I have only myself to blame for most of them. One example: Now my default is that I only check e-mail once a day unless I am in work and don't have it open in another tab while working on the computer. I have never been tied to my phone: I have very few apps, it is on flight mode half the day, and it doesn't ping. But on the laptop I used to have e-mail open, and since even the awareness of your phone/e-mail in your periphery affects your cognitive abilities, I make sure to clear as many of the surrounding distractions as possible.

The days I work from home I have been taking breaks to do some gardening. Earlier this week I removed all the dead dead plant debris that was in the way of the daffodils that are trying to emerge. I only spent half an hour outside and gathered three wheelbarrow-loads, but it cleared my head and it was satisfying to see the transition from brown to green. 

I re-read Oliver Burkeman's piece on underachieving, a timely reminder. The fortunate side-effect of all this slowing down and doing less is that I am doing more of the things that matter as a result.

Two cats

Last month, through sad circumstances, we became guardians of a 13-year-old, semi-blind, semi-deaf cat, for an unknown duration. We quickly fell in love with her. She teaches us mindfulness, as John puts it, since she moves in such a slow and considered manner, and it is lovely to have an animal sharing our home.

The day we were asked whether we would look after her we were hanging out with the cat in the second picture, whose portrait I posted to the cat-parents this afternoon  - a precarious walk along the prom to the post office in a gale that turned the parcel into a wing and lifted my dress (after all this time I still have not learned to dress for the weather). I got drenched - the parcel was waterproof, thankfully - but by the time I reached home, the wind had dried most of my clothes.

Usually I do not post pictures of commissions online before they have reached the recipient, but I am pretty sure that in this case they have no idea this blog exists; I never tell people about it.

This cat lives above a beautiful historic cemetery in London that includes the graves of William Blake and Daniel Defoe, so I had to use it as the background.

Pink-tinted

Some more antidotes to excessive worrying (which is ongoing, but I have decided to stop whinging):

|  Painting. I am finally back at the easel painting for myself. What took me so long? Also, why do I always end up with the same colour combinations? I am determined to have at least one painting without berry colours by the end of next month.

|  Spring was here in the form of a mini-heatwave, then disappeared briefly, and now it's back. This was a note I came home to last week. It turns out it is safe to swim down at the shoreline that is a three-minute walk from my house. That only took me six-and-a-half years to figure out (simply ask a local).

|  A pink flower sans stem spotted on the ground by a neighbour I hadn't seen in a while and handed to me through my car window as a spontaneous gift. I put it in a glass of water, and it brightened my window sill (and mood) all week.

| Baby feet and cat-in-armchair. Whenever I visit it is like stepping into a quirky picture book, which of course is a completely rose-tinted view that ignores the sleep deprivation and other realities...

Floating away...

'Float Away' - artwork for Múscailt 2015 | Acrylic on paper

...for this year's Múscailt Spring Arts Festival.

In the painting the land in the distance was inspired by what I often see of County Clare from my window: tiny rectangles of white houses on greenish grey. At the weekend we went down to Clare for our escape from the busyness of this time of year and ahead of Blue Monday, today, purported to be the most depressing day of the year. I was too busy with work and being cold to ponder the latter, and my mind was still filled with the right kind of Blue - the colour, in this case of expanses of water and a cloudless sky all day yesterday.

Dog and waves, Spanish Point

Interior

Ever since I painted the above for our arts festival poster and programme in February, I have been meaning to paint more interiors. And, completely unrelated, botanical illustrations. After years and years where nine out of ten of my paintings would feature a face or a figure, human or feline (the tenth would most likely be a seascape), I find myself drawn to other subject matter - though I doubt the figures will disappear.

hazy light in my kitchen

I love Hammershoi's muted, restrained interiors (and of course the enigmatic people who inhabit or pass through many of them), but my own style is much looser. This reflects real life: I like the calm a minimalist aesthetic brings, but my house is more homey than bare; I am surrounded by things, though I do my best not to accumulate stuff. Of course it does not have to be a contradiction to like both. When it comes to art I happen to also adore representations of interiors bursting with life, colour and exuberance. Like Hammershoi's paintings, they too provoke a visceral reaction (often the sense of how ephemeral everything is - not as depressing an observation as it sounds -, followed by joy, or vice versa).

So many of the objects around me carry meaning beyond their form, and I like looking at the things that fill my house and enjoy the colour and cosiness of it all and want to paint it. I will always be a bit of a clean freak and would think that living on my own for the last six years surely must have made me more set in my ways. But I find myself getting more relaxed about the level of tidiness - I no longer believe I won't be able to sleep if I leave my notebook open on the kitchen table before going to bed. I can only credit mellowing with age for this change. My hope is that this will enable me to work within a so far elusive creative chaos; my need to have everything odered and tidy before starting work must have cost me months of productivity.

Expansiveness and reading

"The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route, of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest. Being able to travel both ways matters, and sometimes the way back into the heart of the question begins by going outward and beyond. This is the expansiveness that sometimes comes literally in a landscape or that tugs you out of yourself in a story." 

(Solnit, Rebecca: The Faraway Nearby, GRANTA, London 2013, pp.30f.)

As always when away from my usual surroundings, my mind was spinning with ideas, plans and general thought overload while in Germany, all of them things I couldn't wait to get stuck into, but as always this was followed by fatigue descending upon my return and the seemingly very important prerequisite to get organised before any action can be taken.

But I am also a great believer in quiet times and the need to let ideas percolate. I have been doing a lot of reading and thinking, with minimal note-taking for a change, and I am sure it will all come together at some point and in some shape. That painting for my sister and brother-in-law that was supposed to be a Christmans present...still on my easel. In my defense, I am staying at their house catsitting (hence more cat pictures!) and haven't brought many supplies with me. It's just me, the laptop, the papers, and a few books, and the expansiveness of the landscape here.

I have been following Maria Popova's wonderful brain pickings for a few years now, and I want almost every book she features. Her website is also a treasure trove for illustrators and lovers of children's literature, as both form a substantial part of her curated offerings. Thanks to her I have been introduced to the work of illustrators I hadn't been aware of before, such as Marion Fayolle.

I quit facebook a couple of years ago but rejoined it as I was required to have a personal profile in order to become the administrator of - so far - three pages (I still have a lot of reservations about facebook and  spend a minimal amount of time on it, but it is undeniably a great tool for business). When I wanted to share a brain pickings post (Einstein on fairy tales and education) on one of them, I checked whether the website was on facebook and 'liked' it, and thus have been reading and re-reading a lot of the content. Until I realised I have been consuming all this digested material online, but so far have only read a fraction of the actual books that these posts are about, and then probably in most cases because I already owned them. Whereas with reviews in newspapers I tend to buy or borrow the books that have caught my interest soon after, or at least the titles go straight onto a list in my purse. I reckon it is because online content is at one's disposal forever; newspapers get discarded (though I have a drawer full of cuttings). My online bookmarks are adding up, and I know I can always go back. But the sheer amount of all those links is overwhelming. I have been reading too much online, and it is hurting my head and eyes and making me jittery and shortening my attention span. So it is high time I got some of those books.

My new favourite writer Rebecca Solnit has been on my radar a lot, and the next book of hers I want to read is Wanderlust: A History of Walking. This will also be to mark my intention to form a habit that will be non-negotiable (as that might well be the only way to stick to it): On days I don't go for a run, I will go for a walk. And go to the beach more often, for "reinforcement", as Solnit puts it in The Faraway Nearby: "...just to know that the ocean went on for many thousands of miles was to know that there was an outer border to my own story, and even to human stories, and that something else picked up beyond. It was the familiar edge of the unknown, forever licking at the shore." (ibid., p. 31)

Saturday morning, Craughwell

 

Branwell after his shower (he likes to stick his head under the running tap - he is more of a dog, really)

 Bog cotton

 

Sheep bookcase and cat

Spring laundry stripes

 His placemat

Excuse the disproportionate amount of cat pictures here. Like a pregnant or new-mom blogger whose blog content suddenly becomes 98% baby-related, my brain has seized upon a kitten named Branwell, and he's not even mine!

He went missing a couple of weeks ago, but came home after three nights, just in time for my sister's birthday (half an hour before midnight - Anke and Adrian were about to retire to bed when they heard a familiar meow!).

This is a special time for us, as our younger sister is visiting for three months. We have so many plans, but so far we have mostly been talking about our exciting plans, so it's high time for the doing, although this long weekend is reserved for fun and the recharging of batteries, after a hectic two months. Last night we all stayed at Anke and Adrian's house, and the weekend feels like a holiday already. Adrian made us amazing milky coffees from scratch - grinding the fancy coffee beans, foaming the milk. I rarely order coffee, as it makes me shaky and panicky, but prepared-at-home tends to be fine/milder, and Adrian's is perfection.

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Other little things that have been accompanying this month:

Listening to "Bloodbuzz Ohio" by The National (a slightly different live version, a bonus track on the album) on loop

Drinking fresh thyme tea, nettle tea and matcha tea and eating wild garlic (on top of brie on toast - the best combination!) and micro vegetables such as pea shoots grown as per James Wong's instructions - all the green things

Smelling kitty breath and kitten paws - I had to end this post with one more cat reference!

 

Visiting the kitten, poetry and a beautiful memoir

Juxtaposing completely unrelated things, as I am wont to do here on occasion: 

|  Branwell is growing so fast, or at least it seems like that to me, as I only see him every two weeks or so. He is at the stage where the shape of his head is trying to keep up with the growth of his features, and he has the cutest long nose. He is more like a dog in character, following you around in outbursts of enthusiasm, not afraid of water and generally a loyal, attention-seeking companion.

|  The third Skylight 47 issue is out, and I am delighted to have one of my paintings in it. If you like poetry (I certainly do), you will love Skylight 47.

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I am also reading Staring at Lakes by the Irish Times columnist Michael Harding, which ended up being kindly lent to me via serendipitous circumstances. This is a memoir filled with beautifully rendered insights into depression and anxiety, middle age, love, Ireland and the human spirit, told with warmth and often self-deprecating humour. I am neither male nor middle-aged, but it feels so right to be reading this at the moment (and it is another example of Gretchen Rubin's observation that we often learn more from "one person's highly idiosyncratic experiences" than from more general, universally applicable offerings, even if we have little in common on the outside.)

Warm glow among the greys

 Crows and pale pink light

 Horses in blankets

Artwork for festival brochure/poster on the theme of  Laugh | Nourish | Love

Since returning after Christmas I have only managed one walk in my neighbourhood. I have barely been at home, as it is the lead-up to the annual arts festival we organise. I was delighted to be asked to provide the artwork again this year. (In the photo the colours didn't come out properly, and for the posters and brochures our talented graphic designer gave it all an even warmer glow.)

The theme is a nice antidote to the grey skies and raging storms and short days. But it was exhilarating to go walking in the unpredictable weather, passing horses in blankets and startling a murder of crows, with the sky a thick sheet of clouds that occasionally tore open to reveal the light behind.

This morning I finally tackled the one plant trough that had no drainage holes, where the bulbs had been sitting waterlogged. Between a corkscrew and a pair of scissors (do not attempt this at home - I had no other tools) I managed to bore two holes. Now I can step outside my house without a nagging reminder of things left undone greeting me.

There is a new soap in the shower, the laundry is done, and a semblance of order emerging (let's not go into the corridors of my brain). I am looking forward to a weekend of calm and nourishment - papers,  brunches, cleansing salt scrubs (thank you, Elly!) and good company.

Catsitting

Skyping with kitten wrapped around my neck

This week I am catsitting Branwell. When he is not in play mode, attacking my face, feet and hands, he likes to nuzzle my neck while purring loudly. This must mean I am mother number 4 (after real mother, my sister and my brother-in-law); he is scenting me and claiming me as his.

On day two I got sick, and he accompanied me and watched as I vomited countless times. I like to think it was concern on his part, although it is more likely that it was simply tremendous fun with a novelty factor. He is wrapped around my neck as I am writing this - bad news for my back (although he weighs only 1.6 kg), but we have become very close friends. Apologies to my sister for calling him a monster (he has yet to learn the meaning of the word 'no' and a raised voice, or that a claw dug into the thin skin under my eye is not a good idea).

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The Jumbo book is now available in Charlie Byrne's and the NUI Galway bookshop (thanks to the lovely staff there for putting it in the window display!). I am excited to be working on a new/old book for children - it started life as a children's show, and it will be great to have it in a printed format. More on that soon.

Daily drawings | Work-in-progress

I like the idea of regular posts with a specific theme, but so far have never managed to incorporate any in this space. Featuring my daily drawings here (but only once a week) might provide me with the self-imposed accountability that I often need in order to stick to a new habit.

A while ago I committed to drawing something just for fun every day, but when there are other projects to work on it is too easy to let it slip. After a busy couple of weeks I sat down again today, with fresh inspiration from a visit to my sister's house. 

Matt and Branwell were reading the paper together, and Branwell was all eagerly outstretched front legs and eyes. I am working on several drawings of this scene. Fathers with their babies are always a heart-warming sight, but for an animal lover who doesn't want children herself nothing beats a man holding a tiny four-legged.

Tiny

My week included tiny feet (photo taken during a little rest from playing while babysitting) and a tiny kitten my sister found (or rather it found her, travelling in the engine space of her car unbeknownst to her after having made several appearances in her garden. Some of its whiskers seem to have been chopped off. The first weeks of its life must have been tough, but already it trusts people and purrs loudly and eats until its belly resembles a balloon. They think it's a male; if that proves true, he shall be named Branwell). 

Both these playtimes helped me get out of my head. Not that I have had a lot of time to wallow around in my head recently; October has been a very busy month so far. But it always strikes me how easy it is to switch off the endless chatter in your mind when you are forced to because a small being needs your attention or you get absorbed in how it navigates the world (or its sheer cuteness and life-affirming joy). Something I struggle to reach in meditation can be so simple. [My emotional wellbeing would only be one of many many reasons I would get a cat. Seriously thinking about it again. Especially now that my sister and brother-in-law live nearby and are available to cat-sit and also after reading this. I, too, seem to have become "an expert in future living" in some respects.]

Happiness is... a new book

 

This week I finally treated myself to Judith Kerr's Creatures: A Celebration of her Life and Work, published in honour of her 90th birthday in June. What a treasure! While this is mainly for the sheer joy and pleasure of it, I also consider it essential reading for my work (not that I feel I have to justify this purchase, though it did come at a time when I had decided to work my way through a pile of unread books I already own before buying any new ones).

It is beautifully put together, down to details such as the endpaper - I have a slight obsession with endpaper - and imbued with Kerr's humanity and warmth. 

I was delighted to revisit the Mog story we had as a book when we were children, which is reproduced in its entirety - he's my favourite Creature. I hadn't looked at those pictures in years, and yet they were so familiar - it shows how intense a child's experience of a picture book is. I have a whole world of imagery from children's books nestled somewhere in my memory, and the shapes and lines and colours have become part of me.

The book is filled with Kerr's art, illustrations, sketches, photographs, notes and other memorabilia. She tells the story of her life and work herself, and I love her explanation of the title of the book, given opposite the frontispiece, a photograph of her family: "My Manx husband always referred to his parents as his creatures, so this title includes not only much-loved animals but also a much-loved family."

There are countless reasons I would love to have a cat again, and this book reminded me of one of them (see last photo above): that blissful feeling when painting/drawing/writing with a purring cat on your lap (who will occasionally decide to sit on whatever you are working on). One of the best things in life.

This week

 

|  The programmes for this year's Colours Fringe Festival (I seem to be using a lot of turquoise and seagreen these days, as my sister pointed out). My work-related To-Do list is getting shorter, and I can feel myself slowly transitioning into summer holiday mode.

|  Still enjoying the remains of flowers I received a few weeks ago, which now populate various smaller vases. 

|  Judith Kerr turned 90 this week. There is something special about her books and her illustrations. I have fond memories of Mog the cat, who existed in real life, and cannot wait to get Creatures, the new book. Click here for a slideshow and here for a video of Kerr reading from and talking about her work.

|  Wearing my Noa Noa balloon pants (they look better with wedges, but around the house it's mostly flip flops/ barefoot). The sun makes an appearance every few days, then it's back to wind and rain. The latter was what greeted my sister and brother-in-law's arrival, but so far they remain in high spirits. And it looks like it's a sunny day today, so it might yet turn into a weekend for the beach, like last week.

Snow cat

I am borrowing my sister's cat* to say Merry Christmas to you all!

(the snow was temporary - today it feels like spring)

* edited on instruction to clarify he is also my brother-in-law's cat (when really it is clear that it is the other way around - my sister and her husband are Leopold's humans)

Monday at home

 

|  Simmering lemon, vanilla and rosemary. I burn essential oils almost every day, but occasionally I like to use the stovetop method. And it always strikes me how different the oils smell from the plants they are derived from. Today I needed to focus, and rosemary is great for concentration. I didn't have any fresh rosemary - that would have been even better.
|  Thinking of outlines as shared boundaries rather than lines is vital in learning how to draw and paint. Incidentally, I photographed this quote after spending a few hours doing black-and-white line drawings. I was given this book (Creative Scribbles - Where Dreaming and Drawing Cross Paths) recently by someone I had told I felt stuck - such a thoughtful present. It is filled with prompts such as "Don't think, just draw" or "Draw a brawl between four colours".
|  Still trying to manifest a cat sartorially and to perfect the shoulder stand (no picture). 

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I may have posted this before, but I found this again while sorting through my bookmarks - Peggy Fogelman from the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Bad Hair (4 min audio with slideshow). She was one of the speakers at a conference I went to earlier this year, and I looked up the Met's website afterwards - I love the Connections feature that Bad Hair is part of.

Kitten in garden centre

This got me through a tough few days:

 

I had to include both photos. The first one, where it looks past me, graced my computer screen all day on Friday. I have been working on myself a lot, I have been reading extremely helpful self-help books (more on that soon) and am investing in counselling, but sometimes it only takes a little innocent feline face to feel better about everything.

And then there was this:

I love what the last kid had drawn (the feet!) and the transient nature of drawing on a blackboard, that visitors can only see the latest portrait. There is a real chicken in the photo, too. 

Its housemates look like cotton wool.

The kitten and the chickens live in a garden centre I like to escape to that is close to work and has a café and seas of heather in beautiful colours.

 

I also had delightful human company (you know who you are).