..now and then.

Although I trained in Printed Textiles at Glasgow School of Art, in my home I like plain and simple, and pattern only on things which are brought out occasionally..and usually one at a time. William Morris, Arts and Crafts, the Bloomsbury set and Liberty? I love to visit these kinds of interiors but would not want to live in them. (Too much visual stimulus! I would find it exhausting.)

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Opening all the windows in the morning makes me feel more alive.

If it's cold or wet it may just be for a few moments.

On really hot summer days (we do get them occasionally!) the doors may stay open too.

I love that.

(Taking photographs for the blog makes me feel alive!)


What makes you feel alive in the morning?

a couple of Maori words to my New Zealand book.

Kia kaha means I beleive be strong, keep going.

I am also reminding myself that the negative words don't negate all the positive words - they still stand.


Snow on and off all day meant staying at home, with coffee and a book. I am enjoying William Maxwell's writing in The Chateau.  Perceptive, reminding me rather of Henry James. he evokes post war France in a way that has me reading a few pages, then doing something else (emptying a drawer of the freezer. baking Italian pastries) while thinking about the book, then going back to read some more.

Still blowing a wintry gale here! Cleaning the bathroom this morning I took down the snow picture and the red comb and towels and put up my all-time favourite card with some zingy towels and yellow bits and pieces..

Will you be making a little change somewhere in anticipation of the new season?

I did the cleaning with a little extra care and attention, mindful of all your interesting writings on yesterday's post...cherishing the space. Feeling gratitude.

and a few hardy little snowdrops

 
A free makeover for your kitchen?

Next time you bring your shopping home put everything that is green out on display and everything else in the cupboards.

So you have green apples, green veg, green washing up liquid, green carrier bag, and if you can add a green towel or teatowel and a green plant or two and any dishes with green on them you have a new look and a colour co-ordinated kitchen for no cost....and the next time you are shopping for washing up cloths or sponges buy green, and green soap etc etc. Fun and free. If you have a pinboard a few postcards or greeting cards in green, or pictures cut from magazines will add to the gorgeous effect.

You can of course do it with any colour, and in any toom - I do it with red in the kitchen at Christmas) and am about to try it with yellow and grey in the sitting room for spring.

Colour, as Cath noted in yesterday's comments, can really lift your mood.

i'll be moving this little painting from the hall. It's by Christine McArthur and has the delightful title 'Where There's A Fish There's A Lemon.

That grey and yellow thing....A revival of 1950's styles in recent years first brought the grey and yellow combination to my notice, but not being a fan of that period I ignored it for a while. But I began to notice a rather lovely vibration between the two colours, especially if the grey was not a neutral grey - one made of adding white to black - but a grey with some colour in it, in watercolour paint Davy's Grey (yellowish) or Payne's Grey (bluish) and in fabric the colour known as French Grey (also bluish, sometimes purple-ish). With a very clear yellow as in daffodil yellow beside the pale grey kitchen tiles here it really works for me.

I went around the house today and see that I have quite a lot of grey and yellow things so I think I will gather them together and make it a new colour scheme for the sitting room for spring!

Michael Barclay's guest Sigrid Rausing brought a smile to my face and put the current political situation in a different perspective in her introduction to Ella Fitzgerald singing Anything Goes.  (This week's edition of my favourite programme Private Passions, around 12 mins 47 in on BBC Radio 3 - though I found the whole one hour programme well worth listening to. Fascinating woman.)

Still very much cosy-by-the-woodburner-listening-to-the-wind here.

And there seems to be a grey and yellow theme appearing through the house...

..we had a family meal and took down the tree and decorations and as I always do, I observed how badly this room needs decorated (never do it though! Maybe this year...).

I'll still have candles - but with fresh fruit rather than tinsel.

Have you cleared away Christmas?

For yesterday's book group reading I found a passage in A C Grayling's The Challenge of Things under the heading Darkness which covered, briefly, the history of winter celebrations. This point was one I had not really considered before....

And paradoxical as it might seem, winter darkness was traditionally a time of plenty - the harvest had long been gathered and stored, the pigs slaughtered and their flesh salted - and the austerities of spring, when supplies were used up and the year's hard work had to begin were far off. The dark part of the year was therefore a welcome season of holiday.

This Jubilee jug by Pat Culpin was the first thing I ever bought from an art gallery, and I can't help but compare the experience with my most recent purchase which was online. (Click on photos for full view.)

It was at a private view in a little gallery in the Ochil Hills near Stirling. I had a painting in the show and was thrilled to be showing in the same gallery as the artist Bet Low. The atmosphere was friendly and chatty, there was wine, there was a buzz about the place as the red dots were going up, and I thought this handsome jug would look very fine in our old cottage and we agreed to splash out.

I was very excited by it all and when we went back at the end of the show to collect it we were told that the Duke of Buccleugh had wanted it, but we were in front of him in the queue!

Buying from eBay was a very different experience. (See this post.)

I was confident I would like the print because I know the artist's work so well, and it was quite exciting to wait and watch then make my offer, but I did feel I had to jump through hoops - open an account, create passwords, navigate the site, and communicate with the seller only through eBay for security reasons. Part way through eBay decided that my email and password didn't match. I tried a new password. Still no success. Apparently it was the email address which was the problem (although they were still sending me emails - lots of them). To use the helpline I had to log in - which required my email and password. I was at the same time getting quotes from Shiply for carriage which ranged from £93 to £364 and meant lots more emails.

Thanks to the patience of the seller with whom I finally found a way to communicate directly all ended well, but the security aspects - and I fully appreciate the necessity for them - removed the pleasure of the face to face personal communication, the social side, of the gallery experience.

I have just sold the jug to a potter friend who came to the house to see it. We had coffee and a great chat about our favourite potters, being an artist and buying and selling our art.

I love this video of slipware maker Clive Bowen (20 mins).

..today on the Sound of Shuna

and on the way home, on a brisk cold walk between buses, a shot of the leaning Christmas Tree out on the end of the Coal Pier. It is so exposed. I wonder if it will stay upright till Christmas....

..at dawn and at dusk of late takes my breath away..

Yesterday saw the first snow on the hills this winter, and today around dusk I went for a winter paddle.  After the initial shock my feet felt wonderful! They are still tingling almost an hour later.

The little walk back up my path was gorgeous.

I love living here.

Glasgow Print Studio have an excellent feature on different kinds of prints (see here) and it was where my print was created by artist Elizabeth Blackadder in 1988.

I've always loved her work for it's vitality and honesty. Here is a video of her working. No pretiensions here, just brilliant observation, skill honed over many years of consistent work, and that 'je ne sais quoi' which makes the magic!

Have you bought any original art?

As I often say, there's nothing like the real thing....

There are not many posts in this category (as I have said before we were taught to be modest about them).

I went out for a walk at dusk and found the road like a river although it had not rained very  much, so i investigated and found the ditch which runs along the roadside blocked. Although by this time it was getting dark I couldn't resist going back to the shed for a rake and clearing  the leaves and mud that were blocking it - the satisfaction of hearing the water gurgling along again was worth it!

And I got a nice photograph of the house from a different angle as I walked back home almost an hour later..

Don't be shy and tell us of your latest good deed!


NB  I'm sorry that sometimes my replies to your comments do not appear directly below  but get mixed up and appear in the wrong order. So confusing Weebly!

Altars, still lifes, islands of beauty, arrangements, gateways, shrines, tokonoma, homages, we  all have a word  for our groups of objects we love.

Secular or religious, for worship, as offerings or love tokems, about memories, healing, spirituality ....the things which are important to us in whatever way we treat as precious. It is a universal thing.

My arrangements are intuitive and spontaneous, often created on a whim, and I find I don't want to lay too much meaning on them but want to keep them lighthearted and fun. But after they are done I find it is rather nice sometimes, to put into words what they mean to me.

Of course another word is tribute. All the railings and benches in the town today were adorned with poppies in remembrance of the ending of the First World War and in tribute to those members of the forces who died in it.

..that Human beings can only truly cherish a limited number of things at one time.

Marie Kondo

I like this fact - it's like a relief to know this!

And I think that I do cherish the things that are left more.

Loving it.

..that the 'click point' is when I have no more stuff than I can properly handle.

Getting there...

Are you?

 ..is sometimes translated from the Japanese as 'secular shrine'. The literal translation is alcove and this alcove in my sitting room is probably the most photographed place in my house!

I change it often. It's simply about things that give me pleasure.

I like the sound of this word in French.

I remember seeing one on the top middle stone of the Rialto Bridge in Venice in the  early hours one morning about twenty five years ago. It was a small candle, a leaf and if I remember rightly a piece of fruit. A beautiful mystery. A homage to beaury or love, an offering to the gods, who knows...

Another in a remote part of eastern Sweden - a large flat stone, almost circular, part of the top of a low wall. Something about it had prompted an unknown person to carefully place a tiny bunch of flowers in it's centre. A homage to nature perhaps
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I've always called my little collections of things arrangements but looking at this arrangement on the bathroom wall - something to look at while I dry my hands - I see it as un homage to a friend in Sweden whose barn I sketched, to Venice, to joy and to hope in troubled times.

Here is the passage from A Year To Clear by Stephanie Bennett Vogt which got me thinking about altars.

Though we mostly associate altars with churches or temples, they can be found everywhere. The special flowewr centrepiece on a Thanksgiving table and the good china place settings are a kind of altar. The photos on the refrigerator, the grouping of rocks or shells from a favourite beach or summer experience, the portrait holding court over the mantel, and the wreaths we hang to celebrate the seasons are just some of the ways we remember and connect with something timeless, somthing larger than ourselves.

She suggests we look around at the altars we have created....

But firstly the shed! (I know you must be fed up hearing about my shed but these will be the last photographs. Promise!)

Whew! There are a few things I hope to sell, a good neighbour carted away a sizeable load for the village hall Pound Sale including a set of metal shelves, another load awaits picking up to take to the dump and the old tools which will be made into sculptures will soon be uplifted.


As for Little Altars Everywhere (has anyone read the book of that name?) I've been reading Stephanie Bennett Vog on the subject of creating 'altars' about the house. I do it all the time in creating small still lifes of objects I love and it seems such a coincidence that I was reading about them just now in her book A Year To Clear. I read a little of it every day.

Here is today's little altar. I hadn't appreciated the possible symbolism of the one object from the shed which sparked joy being a spirit level until you pointed it out. Thank you so much for that! I also found the tiny key - no idea what it ever locked and unlocked....but it may have something to do with hearts.

Do you have 'altars' around your home?

Shall I write a bit more about altars? I find it very interesting

..is so much nicer than the inside..