Surprisingly calm actually. The last paintings are done and now with the framer. I’m delivering the work to the gallery tomorrow, and the exhibition opens on Saturday morning at 10am. I’m stitching prints today. The children are all in school, and my lovely Mum is in the kitchen making soup. I’m sure things aren’t usually this calm with only four days to go.

This is the Kilburn White Horse. I finished it at the weekend:

The Kilburn White Horse

I love White horses. My Granny lived near the Westbury White Horse in Wiltshire and I remember clambering across – even sliding down it – when I was small.

I’ve also completed these three smaller ones of the North Yorkshire coast.

Catch Your Breath

Whitby

Staithes

 

Fossiling

We had a lovely family holiday there in October. Bright, cold days collecting treasure on the beaches. My little boy calls it ‘Treasuring’, which I think is a lovely word!

I dropped into Abacus Framing yesterday to see what was ready. They’re done a beautiful job and I am so excited about Saturday!

The studio has been a hive of industry of late. But occasionally I’ve looked up from my desk. This is currently the view through the skylight. How lucky am I?

Less than 2 weeks to go now til ‘Big Skies & Old Stones’ opens at Chantry House Gallery in Ripley. I’ve been working on pieces based on Whitby, Staithes and Robin Hoods Bay, where we had a lovely family holiday last October. The weather was cold and bright – perfect Whitby weather.

Daniel says I’m not to post whole paintings! So here are some work in progress shots of 4 new pieces:

I just finished this one of the swing bridge this evening. It’s huge!

And I loved tiling the Whitby steps.

Not long now…

Somehow it’s April. I don’t know where March went, but suddenly it’s April and I have a new exhibition opening next month at Chantry House Gallery.

The exhibition opens on Saturday May 20th at 10cm

I’m very excited. Last year I spent so long writing the Lost Houses book that very little real painting went on in my studio. I began to feel that maybe I had stage fright; that this lovely room with its large clean desks was too nice for me, and certainly too nice to make a mess in! But once I got started I realised how lovely it was to have this big light space. Large enough to work on more than one piece at once with underfloor heating to help dry things faster.

I have completed 7 paintings so far, with 4 more started.

Here are some work in progress pictures:

I almost named this collection ‘The Great Escape’ after a family free week last summer when I hired a car and drove all over North Yorkshire visiting beautiful places with a sketch book. It’s been lovely to escape into the blue skies over Castle Howard and Fountains Abbey during the dark winter months in West Yorkshire.

 

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I am very excited that Cliffe Castle Museum in Keighley is showing my Lost Houses exhibition in the upstairs gallery. It opens on Saturday February 11th and will be up til April 23rd. I’m going to be in the museum all day on February 11th and April 1st.

My kids love Cliffe Castle. The building itself is almost a Lost House as there’s only half left of what was a fantastically elaborate Industrialist’s grand residence. It used to have stunning glass houses. Now it has a pretty good park. There’s also a wonderful natural history collection (stuffed animals!) and rocks and minerals. I enjoy the horror of random taxidermy case with inexplicable objects (really, I can’t explain. You’ll understand if you visit) and the Hen Pecked Club’s peace box!

In the exhibition there are14 paintings of 10 grand houses, with the supporting research and photographs for each one.

(This is the exhibition at Bankfield in January 2016). All the paintings in detail can be seen here.

The book that accompanies the exhibition will also be available in the museum shop, along with prints and cards.

 

I’ve been trying to strike a balance in the studio this month. Mondays and Wednesdays are supposed to be precious, uninterrupted (loud music and no children) PAINTING DAYS! Back in the summer I had a few days on my own in North Yorksire, drawing and planning for an exhibition at Chantry House Gallery this coming Spring. It’s been lovely, after all the work on the book, to get painty again.

These are Rievaulx and Fountins Abby. I have plans for some Castle Howard paintings too. Here’s another of Whitby. I spent half term there with my family.

I’ve also been hand finishing lots of prints. These have been going out to Heart Gallery and Hawksbys. Print days are Tuesdays, Thursdays:

Weekends, high-days and holidays have been spent on all sorts of silly nonsense…

(there wasn’t much snow in the valley, but we did our best. The conkers Hattie had in her pocket were very useful!)

We’ve also been making folding books out of scrap paper. I love my daughters combination of ideas: All the shapes she knows, with the named conspirators from the gunpowder plot:

I played too. Blob painted birds. Sometimes it’s lovely just to play…

 

 

I’ve been very quiet of late. And I’ve been spending more time in front of a computer screen, and less playing with the inks and beautiful new brushes Rosemary & Co that I bought at Art in Action at the start of the summer. I’ve been busy with the book….

Don’t get excited. This is a blank book provided by the book binder to give me an idea of how it will look.

I launched a Kickstarter campaign back in July to part fund the production. I am incredibly grateful to all of you that pledged. It’s meant a great deal. Not only that you’ve put your faith in me, but also, practically, that I’ve been able to make the book I want to.

I love books. And that’s probably a silly thing to say because I think most people do. When I was little both my Dad and my Grandad instilled in me a respect for the physical form. I don’t think either men were precious about ‘things’, but they were precious about books. My Dad read to me every night, after which I was allowed a picture book. My favourites were the Duc de Berry – Book of Hours and a large Art History book. I can’t remember the name of it, but my favourite in that was ‘The Death of Marat’ by David. I was a peculiar child I think and it horrified and fascinated me all at once!

Many of Grandad’s books were antique. One year for my birthday he sent me this:

I loved the way that it had ‘plates’ rather than pictures. All his books had a special Grandad smell and were full of newspaper cuttings, relevant in some way, that would fall out when you opened them. I still discover them now, when i take one of his books down from the shelf and they always make me smile! Soon after the Edmund Dulac Picture book I saved up for several weeks to buy this little Victorian children’s book.

Books in recent years have become rather un-lovely things. Often cheaply produced and disposable. Perhaps this accounts, in part, for the success of the e-book. Proper bookshops, like the one in Salts Mill, the Ilkley Bookshop, and The Bookcase in my own Hebden Bridge sell books that are tactile; books that you covet.

The Lost Houses book was an inevitable next step after the Lost Houses exhibition. Despite my best efforts to stick to a few simple facts and just paint the houses I had found out so much more in my research! I’d been taken on tangents all over the place and found amazing photographs. The scrap books at Bankfield Museum were so well pawed over that they fell apart, so I knew that visitors wanted to know more. I decided that if I was going to make a book, it had to be a beautiful book.

I still have no photos of the proper book to show! So here are some pictures of my mock up (currently with the book binder for reference). A feature in two favourite books of my own are trace pages which both hide reveal an image behind. I based the designs for each on old Victorian book cover designs. The scripts are loosely based on ones contemporary to the houses they introduce:

I’m always a bit disappointed when art books print a painting across a double page spread. I dislike it when it disappears into the valley in the middle. So another indulgence has been to have the landscape paintings as ‘fold outs’.

I’m doing a few ‘hand-finished’ editions where these fold out pages are going to be stitched and gilded. The glue here is Illuminators glue, for use in books. I’m going to experiment with it tomorrow.

Special editions are going to have a small hand-finished Giclee print inside. Like Grandad’s hidden newspaper cuttings! I’ve not decided which print of prints to include yet. I keep getting asked for different ones.

At the last minute I decided to draw my own South Pennines Map for the end papers. I tried to find an existing one that I could reproduce, but nothing looked right. It was a bit of an undertaking (it took 2 days!), but it was a lovely thing to do. And I did enjoy drawing all the houses in fine nib pens.I hope the proofs for the painting pages arrive next week so that it can all go to press.

I had a lovely meeting with Alison at Heart Gallery on Friday. She pawed through the pages over tea.

We are launching the book in the gallery on Thursday October 20th, at 6pm. More details to follow about the launch very soon.

Heart is going to be selling all three editions of the book (standard, Special Edition and Hand -finished edition). They will also be available on this website shortly.

When we first moved in to our house, 6 months pregnant with twins and feeling a little green, It suddenly dawned on me what a huge project it was. It’s the kind of house where you strip the woodchip only to find that it’s the only thing holding plaster on the walls. You try to replace a carpet, but find that you need to replace the floor boards first.

Oh! And mushrooms growing through the bathroom ceiling. That was a highlight…

6 years on we have done an awful lot. My studio has, up til now, been the spare room off the play room. It’s meant that Hebden Bridge Open Studios could never be actually in my studio; we had to turn the dining room in to a temporary gallery and hide all the children’s toys. But this last year we have turned this…

in to this!

Inside is even more beautiful – though i think the spiders and slugs must miss their home.

It’s wonderful having the space to spread out, and the light to work by. I’m rarely in the house these days. Though i do often have company (only by special invitation).

Please come and visit for Open Studios this year! July 1st / 2nd / 3rd

Hebden Bridge Open Studios 2016

 

 

 

I’ve been playing these last couple of weeks. I shouldn’t have been – there are things that I should have been doing instead. But i wanted to work this idea through…
I met with the retail manager up at The Bronte Parsonage in Haworth a few months ago and we talked about my producing some work inspired by the Bronte home, and by the novels. I had the seed of an idea which I started to work out in little paper maquettes.

This is the Parsonage, Wuthering Heights and Wildfell Hall.

I’d like to do Thornfield Hall too as Jane Eyre is my favourite of the Bronte novels. I’m still working on a decent drawing of the house.

I worked them up in to larger maquettes:

Then i chose to develop one a little further. Here is my image of the Parsonage taking shape; layer on layer…

I’m still working on the colour maquette. I would like this to be a hand finished print as well as a folding out card. Remember those little cardboard theater sets you could cut out and make? I loved those and this is kind of the same thing. Each one is a scene from a novel, or from the lives of the sisters’, inviting you in.

I’m trying to work out now how to get them made.

But for now: here’s the new Parsonage painting.

On Friday January 22nd, we launched the Lost Houses Exhibition at Bankfield Museum. I’d seen this photo some time ago, of the last formal function to be held at Castle Carr (the largest of the lost houses in the exhibition). It is a photo of Ronald Murgatroyd’s 21st Birthday party, taken in the early 1930s.

So everyone was invited to dress up for the occasion. And oh my! Didn’t they make the effort?

Over 200 people came, almost all of them in full evening dress!

This is the Swing Cat’s Trio. They played 1930’s Jazz on fiddle, guitar and tea-chest bass:

It seemed to put everyone in the mood and there was even some dancing!

Bankfield Museum is the former home of Edward Akroyd – a well loved Halifax textile Industrialist who built a model village for his workers. I bet this isn’t the first such party that the house has seen, though I expect it’s been a while. That evening we filled it with people, music and laughter. It was wonderful!

It is a very beautiful building.

Well, now it’s ‘launched’, it’s all up and ready for you to come a visit. Please come…

And if this isn’t enough to tempt you along, maybe I should mention that there is currently a full size TARDIS in the entrance hall (there’s a time travel exhibition on too!).

I’m going to be on hand in the exhibition on Saturday 6th February and Saturday 12th March. I’m still collecting information so if you’ve any information or memories of the houses, then please come and say hello.