Art books: Peter Campbell - Artwork

 

"One mark of an artist is that he or she alerts us to a world. Modest and wholly without pretension this Campbell repeatedly does. Unsurprisingly he was a lovely man." Alan Bennett on Artwork by Peter Campbell

"Dogs.I thought it was the dog I wanted pictures of, then I found it was dog plus shadows and dog plus spots plus green grass. But I didn't know that until I had taken the pictures. Snapshots are a way of thinking after you have seen something, otherwise you could just have a camera with no film."

Peter Campbell, "Art Lessons", in London Review of Books, 13 August 2020

The second extract is from a lovely piece by Peter Campbell, a letter to "Anna" (Anna Fender) that combines a selection of photographs of Italy with the "art lessons" of the title: his "notes [...] about what I looked at and noticed". He repeatedly emphasises the subjectivity of art and perception: "You would take different pictures and see different things in them". One of the photos, of a Dalmatian walking on grass that is broken up by the shadows of trees branching out, prompts the above observation. 

In a conversational and seemingly effortless tone, Campbell walks Anna and subsequent readers through his snapshots and the thoughts they spark, taking in themes such as composition, architecture, mark-making, light and shadow, abstraction, pattern, and art history along the way. The result is a unique lecture on art appreciation, his own philosophy of art. 

Peter Campbell was a Renaissance man (designer, artist, typographer, critic, children's author, amateur botanist) and a vital part of the London Review of Books from when it was first published until his death in 2011. He was the LRB's designer and art critic and created the cover artwork for every issue over a period of nearly twenty years, mainly in watercolour. The last one was of a view from his window when he was dying: a fox passing by in the street. Apart from the title no text was superimposed on this final cover image.

The letter to Anna prompted us to buy this book of Campbell's illustrations and designs and a set of postcards featuring work by Campbell and other artists, including Cressida Bell. This website was created to catalogue his work and make it available to the public. Both the book and the online archive are a treasure trove of his wide-ranging subjects and styles.

 

I am a big fan of Maira Kalman's work, and while Peter Campbell's illustrations are often more restrained, I find the two artists share a certain whimsy and wit, and both elevate the mundane and ordinary. There is a playfulness to Campbell's work that, together with his deeply caring view of the world, makes the viewer appreciate the beauty of the everyday in new and often surprising ways. You might even fall in love with your washing machine.

Around here

 

Dotty

Matcha tea ceremony

Some fiction highlights from last year

Sideboard still life

Work-in-progress: John and Cillian

"She walks back, more slowly, the way she came. How odd it feels, to move along the same streets, the route in reverse, like inking over old words, her feet the quill, going back over work, rewriting, erasing. Partings are strange." O'Farrell, Maggie: Hamnet, Tinder Press, London 2020, p.214

 

|  I like to knit all year round, but often abandon it during the summer months. At the end of the year, while on an unplanned break from work due to a health complication (neither cancer-related nor COVID), I picked up my knitting needles again and have been knitting every day since. It can be addictive, and even though I am a morning person, I can see how my sister is able to stay up past midnight while working on a project. You don't notice the time going by, and the movement of your hands keeps you alert, albeit in a lulled, relaxed way.

|  I had been drinking matcha tea for years and John never showed any interest, until one of his favourite podcasts dedicated an episode to it, which prompted him to order a matcha tea set and introduce a weekly ritual.

|  Books are my weakness when it comes to acquiring things (outside of lockdowns I also use the library a lot) - even though there must be dozens of books in the house that I haven't read yet, I keep getting more. I always have several books on the go and make sure at least one of them is fiction, and I exchange books with friends and family and often pass on novels when I am finished with them.

|  Apart from the books that are scattered everywhere, I lean towards minimalism and try to limit clutter (of course everyone has a different interpretation of what constitutes clutter, and the definitions of minimalism are equally varied), but I do get aesthetic satisfaction from the objects surrounding us, including the jars of fermenting kale that are currently fizzing away on the sideboard (not pictured). The Irish Times recently featured Kopper Kreation, a Dublin brand that makes homeware out of reclaimed and recycled materials, and John bought a copper pipe candelabra. It has been brightening up our dinners.

|  A couple of weeks ago, when my energy had returned, I gave my little studio some TLC and am now back in there for hours every day, preparing videos for my art classes, finishing commissions, working on illustrations, and getting started on a new series of personal paintings on wooden boards - as much as I love the texture of canvas, I want to experiment with smooth surfaces.

Flowers

From Lindgren, Astrid & Hartung, Louise: Ich habe auch gelebt. Briefe einer Freundschaft, Ullstein Verlag, Berlin 2016

I have been filling a sketchbook with botanical illustrations, experimenting with different styles, though most of them are quite realistic. I adore both the highly detailed botanical drawings of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries and more stylised modern interpretations and am not sure where to go with mine, but enjoying the ride.

The ones in my sketchbook are all done with watersoluble coloured pencils. I only started rendering flowers in oils and acrylics as the main subject of a painting in recent years. Art history is filled with stunning examples of floral art, and they are hugely popular as a theme, yet for some reason I had only ever used them as part of a composition and rarely let them take centre stage.

I love Georgia O'Keeffe's big and bold sculptural paintings of flowers opening and blossoming. And cut-paper flowers and of course the real thing, fresh and ephemeral or preserved: For my birthday my nephew gave me a card with pressed flowers (which I will frame) and a beautiful necklace containing a daisy (and my sister's card was her own gorgeous botanical drawing). I've been revisiting The Paper Garden with Mary Delany's intricate botanical collages created with scissors and coloured paper and thinking about the lovely gesture of adding flowers to diaries and letters. Throughout their correspondence Louise Hartung would send Astrid Lindgren flowers in the form of bouquets and bulbs or pressed and attached to paper.

Since Christmas we've had two different amaryllises indoors, red and pink. Ever since my older sister pointed it out, I like to think of it as the plant of the three Wild sisters - my sisters' names are Anke and Sibylle, so bits of our three names are included in Amaryllis, in chronological order (I'm the middle child...).

The red variety, as so many red flowers, is a symbol of love, but in Victorian times, the amaryllis was associated with pride (which was seen as a good attribute, denoting beauty and strength) and in China the red amaryllis signifies luck. A pink amaryllis is a friendship symbol and I have been drawing it on cards. All varieties represent hope as well. Our two specimens brightened up our rooms in the darker months before the garden came into its own.

A fairy tale in boxes

 

 

When I am at my mum's house, I love rediscovering books from my childhood. My sisters and I didn't divide up all our books when we left home, so our mother still has a substantial collection. Now that she has four grandsons, they are being introduced to our old books, and the last time I was there, I saw that this version of Rumpelstiltskin was in rotation for Emil, whose fourth birthday is this week. My sister feels conflicted about this strange primal story, with its explicit male dominance, and finds it rather bleak.* 

The book includes a note about the origin and possible meaning of this ancient tale (there are, as always with fairy tales, a lot of different theories and psychoanalytical interpretations), and when she reads the story to Emil she reads that bit, too, without missing a beat. So perhaps little Emil has an acute awareness of the potential motives of Rumpelstiltskin, who may be able to spin gold out of straw, but cannot attain human status and is therefore desperate to possess the queen's child, a 'living thing'.

This book has my name written in it and was a present, and I have a vivid memory of being in the sitting room of our first house and looking at it. The cover and one of the pages as well as a couple of details were imprinted in my mind, but I was surprised at how much I had forgotten. And it didn't register back then that the pictures were actually photographs of staged scenes of wooden cut-outs, made by Nanni Luchting.

Now that we are inundated with digitally created illustrations, it is extra special to see a book where every illustration was painstakingly created by hand, in this case using a method based on an 18th-century technique called 'Bühnenrahmen' ('stage frame'): for each picture Luchting built a framed wooden box arranged like a stage with a foreground, a painted background and partitions and peopled with 2-D wooden figures and props, adding in other materials such as gold thread and the straw visible in the second photo. The characters and objects cast shadows and look like they might slide across the page at any moment. The effect is eerie and reminded me of the so-called 'silent companions' from the 17th century, life-size cut-out portraits that served as a welcome for visitors to a house. 

I couldn't find any information on Nanni Luchting; online there was only evidence of one other box creation by her, and when I check now it no longer comes up. Whoever she is or was, I am grateful for these beautiful mesmerising worlds within boxes she gave us.

-----

*My other sister recommends this book about fairy tales.

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.

---

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.

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.

Drawing | Book without words

This week I redrew all the images for the book about my nephew and Branwell the cat in 0.1 fineliner on larger sheets of paper. This will be a book without words, and I am keeping it quite minimalist, using the black-and-white of Branwell as inspiration.

I have also started work on two new books and am wrapping up another one, all with an eye on the end of the year, although that is of course a completely arbitrary deadline.

Meanwhile my share of garden tasks has been woefully neglected, even though the workload is much smaller at this time of the year. I can appreciate the beauty in the austerity of a winter garden and the cycle of life, and at times I manage a Buddhist equanimity about the pointlessness of human endeavour, but part of me is sad to see so much of the effort we put into the garden torn out or disappear, and I feel exhausted at the thought of having to start all over again.

This year I have shed several things - responsibilities, some part-time work, hobbies - that were taking up time, in order to prioritise my work and the people in my life, but nothing is set in stone. One of the pastimes I gave up is knitting and crocheting, but now, with the darker evenings, and inspired by a book my sister gave us, I want to start the large-scale, no-thinking-required project I have been meaning to make, a moss-stitch blanket. I just haven't found the right type of yarn yet (knowing my taste for luxury wool, this blanket will end up costing me an arm and a leg!).

In the wonderful world of picturebooks

 From Beatrice Alemagna's What is a Child?

A page from Oh No, George! by Chris Haughton - note the fair trade symbol on Harris's bag

 Collages and one of the final illustrations for Shh! We Have a Plan by Chris Haughton

 From A Lion in Paris by Beatrice Alemagna

Collage workshop

A little visitor enjoying the children's artwork

This week I have been guiding tours and workshops for the Baboró exhibition 'A World of Colour' in the O'Donoghue Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance at NUI Galway. This show was curated by Sarah Webb and features artwork by two of my favourite illustrators, Beatrice Alemagna and Chris Haughton, so I am in my element.

Alongside their work there is a growing gallery wall/window of photographs the lovely volunteer and I take of the amazing collages the children make (they can take the originals home, and we tell them it is a process similar to how the books were made). The children's creativity and their responses to the illustrations blow me away.

 I wrote a piece about the exhibition here.

Three

1. A recent commission for a concert hall that has been renamed after this lady (they kindly gave me a photo-op backdrop banner with my drawing on it). Apparently no photos of her as an adult exist bar one small photograph in a newspaper article, hence the request for a portrait based on that image.

2. Evening light in the studio and the beginning of the 'layout wall' for a new book, a collaboration with John. The studio is one of the colder rooms in the house, and many times during the winter I would move my work to the kitchen table, but in the last few weeks it has become the space I spend most of my time. I have been working in and on the studio (the walls still need painting, but it is much more homely now) - more on this soon.

3. My cousin made the envelope for a wedding card out of this, and I put it in a frame, as I love the sentiment the title evokes and it is a beautiful piece of music. In my head it is a synonym for 'Kinderspiel', the figurative meaning of which is 'piece of cake'. Along with my tiny Laughing Buddha and other pieces it serves as a reminder to lighten up and not take life so seriously - a good word to look at when heading out the door.

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. 

Sketchbook | Baby and cat

While I really need to dedicate time to finishing a collaborative project, I have been sketching ideas for my first solo book project (if it all goes to plan - it's very early stages). In fact, this will most likely be a book without words, so there is no writing for me to do.

It is the story of the special bond between my nephew and Branwell the cat from their initial mutual wariness to the games they play together and their shared adventures. 

My sister (a pencil version of her is in the first picture above) has started a blog, which I am very excited about. She creates the most amazing things (see also our Etsy shop) and now has a place where she can document and share them, as well as writing about her life with her little family in rural Ireland and her love of books.

I am looking forward to my first free weekend in a while, to new books (borrowed from my sister - this one, a sequel to Rebecca, since I am in a Du Maurier mood) and maybe a half-day trip. And to time in the studio - I have been getting a few commissions, and there is nothing like a deadline to focus you, so I am in the zone, and everything in the studio feels warm and active instead of stale and dead. All the tubes of paint are handled, pencils sharpened; the candle and oil burner are on rotation, and drawers get pulled out and easels adjusted. It is funny how using objects makes them come alive. I can see certain people rolling their eyes, but there is a lot of wisdom in Feng Shui.

Book launch

My lovely friends in the office organised a book launch for the three books I illustrated that were published this year. I am so grateful to them and to everyone who came and supported us - I was touched to see so many familiar (and some new) faces. Unfortunately none of the writers were there (due to geographical distance - Amie is in the US - and illness), but Amie's family plus friend came up from Co.Clare, and it was great to meet them. Another writer - the one and only June Favre - read from Ulysses to mark Bloomsday.

My little nephew was in entertaining form, and it was wonderful to have him and my sister there. People are so good. It is occasions like yesterday and the get-togethers we have had at the house over the last few weeks that I have to pinch myself - I am so lucky to have such good friends and that part of my family is over here as well. My other nephew and his parents were visiting last week, and I miss them (and my mom) more than ever now. The older I get, the more acutely I feel what family means, but that's for another post.

---
First photo by me, all others by Deirdre Lydon

Red's Road to Green

 

Busy Red Tractor has made the journey across the Atlantic, and Red's Road to Green, the children's book by Amie Ní Nualláin that I illustrated, is now available in Ireland and all other EU countries via the Etsy shop I share with my sister. For the US, the book is available via The Indie Celt.

I am looking forward to furnishing our new studio bit by bit, so I can spread out all the drawings and paintings for upcoming projects and get stuck in. Some of my paints are still stored away, and I still need a desk, which is my latest excuse for procrastination.

Windows

 Windows to the world (and hopefully lots of visitors!). The door is a minty green on the outside.

..and windows into a children's book 
(paperback version, which doesn't allow anything printed on the inside cover, hence only one page of endpaper)

The first quarter of 2016 has been full of new things so far. Two new books that I illustrated are out (Red's Road to Green is only available in the US at the moment, but will be here soon), and more to follow. The excitement of our new house and coming home to see it changed every evening. Being engaged (since before Christmas), though not making any plans for a wedding yet (that part fills me with dread).

Today was my first time back in the garden this year, and it was glorious. I had been working 12-hour days for a festival, and it is only now that I am back to my normal routine that I realise what I have been putting my body through by spending so much time indoors, hunched at a desk. We went for a walk up our boreen and another walk down to the beach and filled our lungs with sea air. A fire in the stove, lovely surprise guests this morning, who didn't mind the layer of fine dust (from sanding the walls) everywhere - this has been a perfect day.