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.

Light and white

 

I am growing mint in a cup (fingers crossed) and looking forward to using these hand-printed napkins (thanks again for these beautiful gifts, Sabrina and Christoph!). Kitchen roll is banned from my kitchen - though I do use it when teaching painting -, and while I keep a packet of paper napkins in the drawer, especially for meals featuring ingredients likely to cause permanent stains, I use proper cloth napkins 90 per cent of the time.

My house has been painted white - badly needed it -, and I have added gladioli and lemon balm (both gifts as well; I am very lucky) to the potted plants outside my door. Everything feels fresh and light and adds to the lovely blank-canvas-feeling of this time of the year.

72 summers

"There are only 72 summers in one lifetime" - this sentence jumped out at me in a piece by Hilary Burden about her decision to move to rural Tasmania after years working in London (her book is called A Story of Seven Summers: Life in the Nuns' House). 72 - more perhaps or less, but even 100 seems a pretty small and precious number.

Previous summers in my life passed by almost unnoticed in a daze of personal problems, rain and unusual cold and staying indoors too much as a result, but this year we got a proper summer, both in Ireland and Germany.

A couple of years ago in the Avoca shop in Dublin I was leafing through a whimsical book about summer pursuits. It conjured up a picture book atmosphere of picnics and garden parties and walks in the countryside, summery foods and drinks, sun-drenched beach life - I remember a pang of regret at not having done the majority of the things it described in a long time, magnified into a panic of  "I am not living my life". This year I made a point of really noticing and drinking in summer's flora and light and general summerness. I was able to wear all my summer dresses, attended a wedding in a beautiful setting in Shropshire, had impromptu barbecues in the garden, swam in the sea for much longer at a time than the rest of the year allows and jumped through the water spray of the lawn sprinkler at my mom's with my younger sister, drank rosé (my sister wrote a beautiful post about the colours of her summer) and water with fresh mint and ate homegrown vegetables.

Now it feels like autumn is coming and summer was too short, but at the same time I am glad to be living somewhere with four distinct seasons.

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- I loved this interview with one of my favourite writers, Deirdre Madden. Just when I am pondering here how time goes by so relentlessly fast, it is reassuring to learn she thinks "one gets more cheerful as one gets older" (she attributes the melancholy of her earlier novels in part to the fact that "one tends to be quite gloomy when you're young".)

Art highlights

 In the Rivera Room at the DIA, with sunlight streaming in

This summer I was lucky to experience two art highlights:

- I got to see Diego Rivera's Detroit Industry Murals, something that had been on my bucket list (which exists loosely in my head and across various notebooks; I have never written one as such). It was impressive, and the new audio iPad tour is worth listening to in full.

- Earlier in the summer a friend invited me to a film about the wonderful artist Pauline Bewick. It explored her creation The Yellow Man (and her Grey Man, representing a darker side, who emerged from sessions with a Gestalt psychoanalyst) and was absolutely beautiful.

Yellow Man Grey Man is available from the director Maurice Galway's website. He currently has a gorgeous picture of Pauline from the film on his home page. There is more information, including a short video, in the news section of Pauline Bewick's website. 

"It's rather sad really. I was searching for the perfect society. That's why I went to The South Pacific and that's why I invented The Yellow Man. He to me is perfection. I created The Yellow Man because if our society were made up of Yellow Men it would be a marvellous place." ~ Pauline Bewick

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On a much smaller - but personal - scale, I was delighted to come home to the second issue of Skylight 47, a poetry publication, which included one of my paintings. 

 

A little preview: Jumbo illustrations

I took an unintended break from blogging, as my mom and I went to the States for two weeks to visit a friend, and Blogger wouldn't let me log in from over there because I was signing in from an "unusual location". I appreciate their efforts to keep my account secure, but the step I had to take to prove I was me involved getting a code sent to my phone, which, being of the old-fashioned kind, wasn't working either (nor was my work e-mail). I decided it was a good idea to be disconnected.

We got back today, and despite getting no sleep on the plane, I am buzzing. This summer is turning out to be a busy one, four countries within a month. I have so many plans for the next few days/weeks/months, I don't know where to start (travelling, even just the being-in-motion element of it, always does that for me: new perspectives, enthusiasm, ideas).

In the meantime, here are four illustrations I did for a children's story written by Lionel Gallagher (I have shared snippets before). This book is in the process of being printed and is the first in a trilogy about a baby (later teenage) elephant's adventures.

These are photos of the original pencil sketches. For the book, our graphic designer Conor Gallagher had the idea to colour-code the animals with subtle washes, which worked out beautifully.

from Jumbo Wants to be a Hippo

With "completeness and intensity"

"That afternoon was brimming with a loveliness peculiar to that particular place; he knew that I was appreciating it, and I knew without any doubt how profoundly he was penetrated by it. He was a man who, with the help of the right wife, had finally found himself the place and the life that fulfilled him, and lived it with a completeness and intensity more often seen in an artist than in someone who should have been a farmer, had to become an army officer, and ended by teaching people sailing, and growing oysters, on the edge of the North Sea. What filled him as death approached was not fear of whatever physical battering he would have to endure (in fact there was not, at the end, any of that), but grief at having to say goodbye to what he could never have enough of."

(Athill, Diana: Somewhere Towards the End, Granta, London 2008, p. 74)

Books about ageing and dying might not seem the most obvious choice for summer holiday reading, but nature at its most alive and abundant is an indication of the passing of time as acute, if not more, as when the trees go bare later in the year.

The extract above describes an afternoon Athill spent sailing with her brother shortly before he died. Most of the women in her family made it into their nineties, and she wrote this book in her ninetieth year (she is 95 now). While parts are inevitably depressing, it is imbued with her acceptance of old age and death and written with a lightness of touch, at times approaching cheerfulness, surrounding the subject matter. 

The quoted passage, despite its heartbreaking melancholy ("His trouble was that he resented [death] because he loved his life so passionately." p.73), serves as a reminder to live life with the "completeness and intensity" her brother lived his.

Connections (cutlery, crystal)

 

Not feeling the best, I haven't ventured out much apart from a short walk in the woods and onto the cliff beside the beach (Tolkienesque woods and beach just a few minutes apart is heaven) - and to the local swan rescue. Most of my time has been spent in bed reading The Secret History and tending to domestic things.

Amidst the chaos of moving in, my sister somehow conjured up a three-course meal (berry crumble pictured), and my brother-in-law played his first gig with his old band at the weekend - I can only marvel at how fast they are settling in.

I drove away from their house with boxes of books from my childhood room - my entire art library - that came in one of their containers, as well as fancy glasses my late grandmother had given me and the extensive set of cutlery that had been stored away in my mom's basement for 20+ years, one of those gifts "for the bottom drawer" that relatives contributed to over a few years.

I washed the glasses and cutlery and made space in my kitchen and only noticed then how dull the cheap cutlery I had been using all the time looks in comparison. There are many areas in which I still don't feel like an adult at age 30, but I am in possession of sparkly silverware that includes tiny forks for cake and crystal glasses that I am determined to use for non-alcoholic beverages, seeing how rarely I drink at home. I don't believe in reserving things for special occasions.

But more than giving a semblance of grown-up-ness* at a time of doubts and financial insecurity, these objects are a reminder of home and a link to my family and past, and my inner minimalist recedes in respect for their significance (though I do seem to have way too many books on art!).


* I don't intend to ever grow up fully - note to somebody who keeps saying I act/look like a 4-year-old!