Flowers on Good Friday

Here's the penultimate flower painting from the collection.  This hyacinth is from a charity shop in Pimlico. It took ages to decide whether to get it or not, it's not really a thing of great beauty but I felt a bit sorry for it and I have grown to love it. The colours are very charming, pastel and old fashioned. The little ink bottle (?) is so odd but does a great balancing act and stops the whole picture being too fluffy - clever that.

SMOG ALERT

I thought this a lovely sunny hazy morning view yesterday, the air didn't seem great though and later we got our smog reports, still, can't imagine living anywhere else.

More Mudlarking in the sun

If we get more sunny days like earlier this month I can really recommend morning mudlarking. I googled low tides and picked my day, it wasn't so early but I was the only person there. It's amazing to be in the middle of London and have this environment all to yourself.

I wanted more bits of clay pipe for a new chandelier. I got quite alot but there's an awful lot of bones down there and masses of plastic cable ties. Below is a piece of pipe, quite easy to spot. See my previous post on Mudlarking.

I picked up a few bits of crockery pieces - I like to imagine they all belonged to Samuel Pepys!

I used a piece of pipe in one of these Baby's Fascinators. My friends in Tokyo are opening a new shop called 'g(i)ven' selling smaller antiques and vintage items. I made these especially for the childrens section as it's fun for me to deviate from my usual stuff and make something different. In these I use brighter colours and can use up the odd single beads, but also keys, tiny spoons, buttons and coins.

Flowers on Friday

Here's another flower painting from the collection, I think I have just 2 left to show you after this one. I love this one, the flowers look familiar but I don't know the name of them. This was another surprise bargain, I found it in a charity shop in Brighton for about £3. Brighton is absolutely the last place I expect to find a bargain like this because it's a town known for antiques, bric a brac and bric a brac fanatics. As with the other paintings it's the serious amateur style that I like. This painting is really effective from a distance, when you get really close and look at the brushwork it's less impressive, so, successful impressionism. I get the feeling this painter really loved those flowers, it's a great arrangement, maybe they were freshly picked from the painters own garden or window box.

Child's Play

Looking at my work area at the end of yesterday it struck me how it resembles a child's play area, just transpose plastic bricks for my lovely rusty collection. In fact my work technique of seeing how things look together is probably no different. It reminded me of my early days of selling my work when a lovely customer put her hand on my elbow looked in to my eyes and said earnestly "aren't you clever", really sweet and flattering and I felt about 7 or 8 years old again. A deep feeling went through me as I realised I'd recreated my childhood and made a career out of it.  It felt quite shocking at the time, but, well it's not bad as a lifestyle is it!?