Knits, reads, paints

 

|  Knitting cushion covers in two-purl-two-knit squares and washcloths with leftover yarn from my jumper (bamboo washcloth pattern by John's cousin Lisa. My sister also makes her own washcloths) - I love spotting and noting random beautiful colour combinations, such as this one in my knitting basket: sage green, mint, magenta and silver grey.

|  This is not my current reading list (I am always late taking photos, and I already posted this on Instagram), but some highlights from last year, though not all recent publications. I am trying to remind myself to incorporate what I learnt from James Nestor's Breath (especially taping my mouth at night and doing coherent breathing: inhale for 5.5 seconds, exhale for 5.5 seconds), Glennon Doyle (stop caring what other people think, for example) and of course Pema Chödrön's wisdom. I read so many self-help books, and while I often take notes, once the books are back on a shelf, it is easy to forget the aha moments.

|  Working on a portrait of John: I am taking a lot of photos along the way, as he has given me permission to use this as an example in the online classes I am teaching, and I might add the work-in-progress shots to my website, if I ever revive the art blog I sporadically update on there (I am thinking of merging it with this one). The above photo is cropped; the painting is portrait format and will include seaweed, flowers and a bee when it is finished, symbols of John's love of nature, gardening and the sea and his new passion beekeeping.

In the studio

 

 

Just a few glimpses of my studio/office (a spare room in our house), where I am spending even more time now that I am also teaching remotely:

 1  |  I have four of these bamboo picture ledges in two rows on one wall, with finished canvases and paintings that are drying. On the wall opposite I put this one up behind my desk to keep pencils, pens, small brushes and other supplies I use frequently within reach, but where they don't clutter up my desk. This is currently the backdrop for the majority of my video calls and classes.

2  |  One of these skinny drawers (which are great for storing work on paper) holds an antique letterpress tray I got John as a gift, with the type pieces he had bought. We use these to make cards and similar and are going to create the text for our next picture book with them. The plan is to get a glass lid made for the tray and put it on a frame with legs, so it can be used as a side table, but for now it is stored away in this drawer.

3  |  I have a couple of desk easels for smaller canvases and one standing easel. I try to paint standing at the large easel as much as possible, and the desk easels are great for displaying work-in-progress, as I tend to have several paintings on the go at any one time and like being able to have them all in view.

4  |  For oil paintings I mainly use water-mixable oils, for environmental reasons and so I don't have to breathe in turpentine fumes and other toxic solvents. Cleaning up is much easier with these, too. I bought a Dyson purifying fan heater (with a cooling function and a detailed analysis of potential pollutants) a few months ago, as I was worried about the air quality in the room, but it tells me everything is in the green range, so that is reassuring. We also had the house tested for radon after I was diagnosed with lung cancer as a young non-smoker. I try not to worry too much about all the external factors that may contribute to cancer, and some, such as electromagnetic radiation, are beyond my control to a large extent, but it gives me peace of mind to have these tests done. 

5  |  Marion Milner's books have their own shelf (most of my art books are kept in this room). I have started using my ink pen (not pictured) and bottled ink more again. The beautiful glass pen was a present from my aunt - I had kept it at my mum's house for years and finally took it with me after my last visit. 

6. We have plants in every room of the house and I am trying to keep these two happy. The vegetation in the self-portrait is a field with thistles close to my childhood home in Germany.

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The window is to the right of my desk and I can see a large part of the garden, including our three new hens and one of our bird feeders. There is a white horse in the field across the road, which offers some consolation in the wake of the departure of 'our' beloved donkeys that used to come to the wall in our back garden. They must have been moved to a different field, as that land was sold recently. We miss them a lot.

I have rituals around working from home that I have been using for years to mark some sort of division between work and home life (though the lines are blurred), but now they have taken on extra significance. At the moment I am recording videos for some of my classes, and I plan my outfits, jewellery and nail polish for those, whereas on days nobody will see me I put on my large painting jumper or apron (I am looking into sustainable boiler suits and dungarees for more coverage, even though I am not that messy a painter, but I still manage to get stains on unlikely areas of my clothes).

In any case I attempt to generate a 'going to work' feeling by getting ready as if I were leaving the house. This also involves a few morning routine clichés such as meditation, a yoga sequence, making celery juice and writing my morning pages. I air the room for a few minutes and clap to clear stagnant energy, and I mix essential oils for the diffuser that are stimulating and help with concentration or create an uplifting atmosphere, so a lot of peppermint, rosemary, clary sage, geranium, lemon, orange and lemongrass. There are endless mugs of (mostly herbal) tea and some of them get spoiled by accidentally dipping my brush in them, but I try not to eat in this room (as I want to eat mindfully - nothing to do with weight control; I am trying to put on weight!), though snacks will find their way in here.

I have my laughing Buddha on a bookshelf to the left of my desk and a stuffed elephant my younger sister made for me on my desk for a similar reason (or up on a shelf when I am recording videos for children and the elephant represents my audience - this was a tip we were given) - it keeps me in touch with my inner child and the playful side of life and is a reminder not to take anything too seriously.

Portraits

I have been painting and drawing a lot of people and animals, especially portraits of family and friends. If anyone is interested, I posted some work-in-progress photos of two of the paintings above on my long-neglected art blog (though the plan is to merge the two blogs in an effort to simplify). At one point I had all my nephews keeping me company in the studio, albeit in 2-D!

While I sometimes have people sit for me, the examples shown here were all based on photographs and screenshots of paused videos - the latter works very well, as I can choose the 'pose' from a much wider range. I tend to start out with a very rough sketch and let the face emerge gradually.

In Enda's portrait (third picture above - when he was one year old and pre-haircut, for those who know him only with short hair) he is wearing a soft knitted top my sister had made for him that is tied at the back with a ribbon. I loved painting the stocking stitch and the ribbon and the light in his hair. With Henry (fourth picture) it was the oval of the snap fastener on his little shoulder that caught my attention - sometimes it is those small details that I find particularly poignant.

Birthday, houses and home

From Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (we sometimes put on subtitles in German if available, as John is learning it, or French or Spanish, as a brush-up exercise, but I put on English subtitles when I rewatched some of this, as there were so many quotes that I wanted to see in writing in addition to hearing the voice; it can add a layer of something I can't quite put my finger on)

‘I realised [the novel Play It as It Lays] was about anticipating Quintana was growing up. I was anticipating separation. […] I was actually working through that separation ahead of time. So novels are also about things you’re afraid you can’t deal with. In that sense that a novel is a cautionary tale, if you tell the story and work it out all right, then it won’t happen to you.’

Joan Didion, in Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold

What I paint and what I read and think about and feel, and things that come into my life without my prompting them, seem to constantly interweave in astonishing - or perhaps expected - synchronicity.

It was my birthday yesterday, and talking to my mentor and friend Margie, the themes of home and rebirth and becoming through coming home to ourselves came up. I am working on the painting above, which was also born (excuse the pun) out of conversations with Margie and inner child work (my younger sister had recommended the book by Stefanie Stahl, which is about accepting our ‘shadow child’ and thus freeing our ‘sunshine child’) and may call it 'Birthday' (also as a nod to one of my favourite paintings). 

Margie had asked me a while ago whether I had something symbolic that could represent the child in me, and while I searched I kept thinking of a blurry sepia photo of me on a beach that I had saved when my sister sent me a digital copy of it and that I had been meaning to use as the starting point for a painting. 

The book I mentioned in my last post, On Chapel Sands, starts with a girl – the author’s mother - disappearing from a beach, and the memoir is about where we come from, among other things. And incidentally, I just started swimming in the sea again last week.

The house my sisters and I spent the best part of our childhood in is being transformed into a home for my younger sister and her family, with an integrated apartment for our mum. I am so glad they will be under the same roof (the guilt of having left my tribe and moved to another country remains), but there must be something potent in the symbolism of the dismantling and rebuilding, as a lot of my dreams these last few weeks have been about home and a nostalgia for my childhood. Not being able to go to Germany at the moment comes into it as well, no doubt. There is a walk John and I like to go on here that, even though it is at the edge of wild dramatic windswept Connemara, has a softness that reminds me of the fields and ditches surrounding our village at home.

In a sense a lot of art is ultimately about the journey home; it is one of those archetypal themes that underpin pretty much everything. Yet I am still struck by how it is such a dominant thread in my reading and painting at the moment. 

John gave me the recently published Lives of Houses, a collection of essays about the physical homes of various artists, literary figures, composers, politicians, etc. and how they shaped their lives and work. And I bought (and have read the first few pages - then I put it away, as my currently-reading pile is about to topple) Elizabeth-Jane Burnett's The Grassling, about place and landscape, memory and grief. It also includes wild swimming.

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We watched two excellent documentaries that are available on Netflix at the moment. Becoming, about Michelle Obama’s memoir of the same title, which also has some moving scenes of her revisiting her childhood home and reminiscing about her late father, and Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, a portrait of the iconic writer, created by her nephew. 

I realised recently that I had quite the collection of literary works dealing with grief and packed away some of them to donate, but I still have Didion’s exceptional memoirs about the deaths of her husband and daughter, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, and I want to reread them after watching the documentary.

A lot of my recommendations these days are the opposite of feel-good escapism*; between my choice of books and TV and the themes of my paintings (and the sea-swimming!), salt water is featuring heavily at the moment!

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* We are also watching After Life.

All calm

My current moisturiser, made by my sister

A present for a friend

Milk and mask

December can be stressful at the best of times, but we have a choice in how we deal with it, and while I never really got that worked up about the season and am striving to eliminate the word 'stress' from my vocabulary (I am a big believer in the power of words and Marisa Peer's approach), this year we simplified it even more by agreeing to no longer give presents to every family member and generally opting for low-key in all areas. I kept up the tradition of baking different varieties of German Christmas biscuits, with my nephews helping me. The highlight of the pre-Christmas period was hearing John sing with the ConTempo Quartet again, in three different venues. The last gig had me in tears throughout.

It is an emotional time of the year for me. Christmas heightens the absence of those we have lost - the other day it struck me that I am the age (36) that marks the point where I have had half my life with my dad and half of it without him. Two years ago I miscarried a week before Christmas on the day of our 12-week scan and then was diagnosed with stage III lung cancer out of the blue a few months later. Both last year and this year I had CT scans of the brain, thorax and pelvis in mid-December with all the scanxiety surrounding them, and last year around this time my mum had tests that would lead to her being diagnosed with breast cancer. My feelings are swinging wildly on the pendulum between exhaustion and fear on one end and immense gratitude (my new mantra, given to me by my amazing hypnotherapist, is "Thank you Life") and joy on the other: right now, my mum and I are doing well; we have food and shelter and peace in our countries and loving humans and animals around us. I spend my days with fulfilling and rewarding pursuits, and in a lot of ways life is good.

Self-care is high up on the list of priorities this month and always. Two calming and grounding elements I find easy to incorporate into every day are aromatherapy and nature. I painted the forest scene above as a present for a friend, and it was quite meditative and therapeutic. Forest bathing has become a vital part of my healing, and in a way it has returned me to my roots (excuse the pun): we grew up in a village close to a forest, and my friend still lives there (as do my mum and younger sister). It brought back memories of foraging for wild mushrooms and hiking with my dad and all the exploring and playing we did in and around the forests of our childhood. I loved using so many different greens in this painting. Patients looking out at green from their sickbeds tend to recover faster, and luckily the views from our house offer an abundance of green.

My sister made me a lotion containing frankincense essential oil - I have been using this oil in various ways since I found out about its anticancer properties (I put it in a diffuser during my daily yoga practice, for example) - and geranium oil, one of my all-time favourites. I haven't asked her for the recipe yet, but a quick Ecosia search (I still use 'google' as a verb, even though I switched to Ecosia) yields a lot of great homemade beauty products including frankincense oil. It works well for all skin types, and the scent is heady and musky.

My friend Vu gave me the Weleda lavender bath milk when I was going through treatment. The combination of lavender and a milky consistency makes for one of the most soothing baths. It comes in glass, as does the seaweed face mask from a local company worth supporting, White Witch - their products are organic, vegan and ethical. John bought the mask for me, and I first used it after the worst of the chemoradiation, on the morning I finally felt stronger again, as in strong enough to apply and take off a mask (the things we take for granted when we are well!). I visualised myself emerging renewed and clear of all toxins and illness after rinsing off the mask. It smells energising, as it also contains mint, which together with the seaweed and the green tea forms a perfect trinity of green.

In the studio

Sibylle and Emil on Spiddal Beach

The finished painting

These days I am painting more than ever and finally finishing the book John and I are collaborating on. He says I tend to go from zero to 50 really quickly (the initial enthusiasm for a new project), then to 95 soon after, but then the remaining five per cent get dragged out. For me the last five per cent are usually a mixture of 'it's not as good as I wanted it to be and I need to start again' and frustration surrounding technical problems - I am self-taught in InDesign and Photoshop, and there are some gaps in my knowledge that are ultimately time-consuming and draining. I hasten to add that I do not procrastinate like this when there is an official deadline, so perhaps I have been too lax about working as part of a husband-and-wife team.

While I appreciate having a type-A high achiever by my side who always pushes me to do better and whose compliments often come with a flip side, I am proud of myself for having completed so many illustrations and paintings since my diagnosis. It has been therapeutic, and getting lost in something you are passionate about is the perfect antidote to scanxiety and worrying about the future.

Projects aside, the painting flows more easily now that I just paint whatever I feel like and have stopped worrying about themes and writing artist statements that could be straight from the arty bollocks website. It is so liberating, and the themes emerge after a while - I think I have always been drawn to the stream-of-consciousness approach to art-making.

I have been painting sea- and landscapes and family portraits and am working on a life-size (!) self-portrait, in the largest format I have ever worked in. To balance it out I am also painting mini canvases of nature studies.

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I am watching The Durrells on Netflix. It is wonderfully escapist, and I only regret not having read the books first - they are on my list. My sister is also a fan, and as a seamstress extraordinaire she has been inspired by Louisa Durrell's wardrobe, in all its high-waisted 1930s glory. It is a pleasure seeing her latest creations whenever we meet up.

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.

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.

On the easel | Three starts

 

1 |  A mini painting in preparation for a larger painting I want to do of Furbo beach

2 & 3 |  Hydrangeas (work-in-progress) for my mother-in-law, who is a wonderful gardener and was tempted by a print of pink hydrangeas a while ago, so I decided to paint some from our garden for her

4 |  A Full Table (John at the Kitchen Window), work-in-progress, though I quite like it sketchy like that

I got a commission framed this week that I cannot show yet, as it will be a gift, and while putting the finishing touches to it, I started the kitchen scene above. This is how I want to spend my time, and in these August weeks I am doing at least a little of what I thought would be my summer. Instead there were other commitments and a stream of (very welcome, I hasten to add) visitors, and together with housework, gardening and general day-to-day happenings, my time in the studio dwindled to windows of an hour or so snatched here and there.

It is so freeing to paint with no agenda, whatever takes my fancy. With all the space we have in this house, I have been thinking of going bigger and perhaps bolder. In a lovely act of synchronicity, a woman in my class gave me several large canvases she has no use for, which was so kind and generous of her. They are leaning against a wall in my studio, beckoning.

On the easel | Irish landscapes

The first land-(and sea-)scape is a recent commission, which prompted me to paint another one in the same format. I look at the first one, and certain elements and colours make me think of the writer Ali Smith, whose Desert Island Discs I was listening to while working on the painting and whose book How to be Both I read a few weeks ago.

These formed associations can be strong and lasting - the painting or drawing will bring back memories of whatever I was listening to at the time, down to flashes of sentences. That's why I am selective in what I listen to in the studio (no radio apart from Lyric FM) or work in silence.

Which makes me think, my students have no choice - I can only hope that my playlists of 'mellow music for the art classes' (the general consensus seems to be that background music is desired) do not offend anybody's audio/visual synthesising.

Four o'clock is teatime and other rituals

There are a few pages in one of my notebooks where I jot down things I feel I 'ought to' do daily (and another section for 'weekly', and one for 'monthly') in order to have a good day insofar far as my own actions and choices can influence it. It has grown to quite a substantial list, and if I were to run through this list every day, it would leave me exhausted and frantic, but I like to write things down when they occur to me or when I come across advice that I think might be useful to incorporate, and it serves as a choose-from menu rather than a to-do list.

The 'daily' things range from kitchen tasks such as 'clear all the dishes, make kefir and soak almonds before going to bed' to work-related activities, for example doing a daily sketch and using paints in some form.

We all know what we can do to be happier, healthier and better people, but so often we choose not to do those things, at times to the point of sabotage. 

Some items on my list have become habits by now, such as doing yoga (almost) daily and going for a walk or working in the garden. Others I dip into and then might forget for weeks or months until I return to them. What I am likely to forget or ignore I try to tie to another activity, until it becomes a habit to do B while doing A. For example, I stand on one leg while brushing my teeth or filling the water filter (balancing on one leg is one of the easier exercises I should be doing  two or three times a week for my patellofemoral pain syndrome) and having all the windows in the house open for the four minutes the coffee is brewing.

Recent additions include washing my eyes every morning (an ayurvedic practice I didn't know about) and drinking matcha tea every afternoon instead of every now and again. I cannot say whether my eyes are actually more refreshed, but I love the strange feeling of splashing cold water into them, and just thinking of all the green in matcha tea gives me a boost when drinking it.

My daily painting these days can be for hours on days I work from home or quick sketches with acrylics when time is short. I finally, finally am going through all the photographs I took of the view from the chalet, where I lived for almost seven years, and from our new house (with a very similar view, as it is just seven minutes further west and on a similar height) and making them into small paintings.

Festival artwork | Victorian bathing machine

 

It feels good to return to my normal routine after weeks of working for a festival. I spent yesterday morning in a cleaning frenzy - I had missed domestic chores when my only time at home over the last few weeks was occupied by sleep. Some people thrive on working for events and being surrounded by people and getting home late, but I am not one of them, although I do enjoy all the design work.

This year I also ended up doing the festival artwork again. I didn't even know what a Victorian bathing machine was five months ago.

I created two versions - one in coloured pencils, placed on a flat background, which I used for the invites and for the web, and one in acrylics for the posters and the programmes.

Now that all the stress (a word I swore I would not use anymore but that left my lips at least once per day) has fallen away, I look forward to following my Victorian lady's lead and immersing myself in the water of the local hotel swimming pool, courtesy of John, who got me a voucher, and soon the beckoning sea. 

On the easel, outside the window

 

The storm slashed open our poly tunnel, and our shed has a hole in the roof. The flooding on the roads got so bad the cars in front of me hesitated that little bit longer in front of the lake that had formed. But just as we regretted not having moved to the Sunny South-East, the West got a day of picture perfect sunshine. Then, one morning, we awoke to two new neighbours - horses just a few metres away from our window (I took the second photo through the window). Every morning I sit and watch the birds at the bird feeder and the horses and the sea - the view just keeps getting better.

Maybe I am running out of ideas, because these days I seem to keep copying myself - this is the third time (in five years, though, and in different colours!) I have painted this figure-in-bird. A more likely explanation is that the books I am illustrating still take up most of my free time and headspace, but apart from some computer-related frustrations this is a wonderful place to be in. And at least I am painting again. Like half the internet I am reading Big Magic, with its delightful mixture of encouragement and reality check. The important thing is to keep doing the work, regardless of the outcome, and it is of course true that most of the enjoyment is in the process, not the afterwards. Big Magic's "central paradox" of "art is absolutely meaningless. It is, however, also deeply meaningful" and the reason why it is vital to live both parts is a good reminder.