White Hart Illumination, Silverpoint and a Winner!

Thanks to all of you who left comments in my last post and shared your thoughts on life long learning. As promised a winner has been chosen and the first name out of the hat is Weaver of Grass. I shall be posting a copy of The Dream Quilt to her in due course.

The weather here has been wonderful and warm, everything in the garden has grown and we have been kept busy with hedge clearing and other chores. We found time to visit our favourite garden in Wales. Bodnant garden is situated in the Welsh hills near to Llandudno, so a visit to one always entails a visit to the other. Bodnant has many different features including magnificent lawned terraces and lakes filled with water lilies, rose gardens and laburnum arches, but my favourite part is the woodland walk where magnificent Japanese Maples and Giant Redwood trees mingle with our native species, if you haven't yet visited you must put it on your wish list!

I finished a medieval inspired illuminated painting which I have called "White Hart". I made good use of some of the lovely new art materials purchased on my last trip to London. The fern areas are gold leaf and the tiny silver coloured dots are shell Palladium.

I have also been trying my hand at silverpoint drawing, using a tiny piece of silver wire and a thicker angled piece of silver set in a wooden holder. If you fancy having a try you need to either buy a piece of specially treated paper or you can prepare your paper using a ready made off white ground. I used one by C.Robertson and Co. All of these marvellous things can be bought from Cornelissen in London or online.

Silverpoint is a very subtle technique, similar to drawing in graphite but more even in tone. It produces pale grey marks which develop over time as the silver oxidises. Unlike graphite it will not easily erase and therefore is a more archival technique, one which was favoured by the old masters and now seems to be having something of a revival.

The White Hart painting is now with the gallery "Art of the Imagination" (Books Illustrated). The two silverpoint drawings are in my Etsy shop, see the link in my sidebar.

I hope the weather is being kind to you too, once again thank you so much for visiting my blog.

Medieval Inspiration

Tony and I recently visited the City of Norwich, an ancient Cathedral City, which also has a castle, built by the Normans over 900 years ago. You would expect buildings as old as that to be a ruin; they are in fact remarkably intact. The castle actually looks like it could be a recreation made for a film set, it is so perfect and undamaged.

Norwich is a truly beautiful city, so many treasures and so little time with just two days to pack in as much history, art, sight seeing and shopping as possible. We walked along the river, peered into gardens behind flint and stone walls, admired tapestries hung on castle walls and wandered around the cathedral and close.

As you would expect, the cathedral houses many magnificent features built to impress kings; Norwich being second only to London in importance. Despite all its grandeur, the thing that I loved most were the carved stone ceiling bosses, over one thousand and each one different. They reflected the thoughts, imaginations and understandings of the medieval mind. You might expect to see biblical scenes and characters like Noah, but you can also see strange mythical creatures, dragons, green men, and acrobats, thieves compete for attention. The carvings show some of their original colours and gold decoration, faded now but still vibrant and lively.

Filled with enthusiasm and inspiration on my return I set to work embellishing my owl prints. I finished the painting some time ago, you may remember I wrote about it previously. I had the prints professionally printed and was astounded to see what the newest digital printers are capable of, the colours reproduce perfectly and the paper used is comparable to the original watercolour paper, in fact it is almost impossible to tell the original from the reproduction. Rather than offer the prints untouched I decided to add some hand finished details. I used gold leaf on the crescent moon and gold paint and ink on the border decorations. I like to think that the addition of gold leaf and paint gives the prints a human touch and makes a connection with the artisans of the past. You can see the finished print here in my Etsy shop.