This month's Gardens Illustrated linocut - Banksias!

January is almost over and I nearly forgot to blog about my linocut for the January 2016 Gardens Illustrated magazine, so here we go . . .

I have no idea what Frank will write about until the email form David at the magazine HQ, pops up in my in-box with a red exclamation mark flagging it's urgency.

It was late November, I'd just returned from Scotland and gales were still raging across the country. So what was more apt for the first 'Frank' for 2016 than . . .

Banksias!

Luckily I'd met a Banksia - or rather several thousand - while on a road trip with Cliff 20 years ago (TWENTY!!! how did that happen?!) I recorded the adventure with a pictorial map which hangs on our wall. A glance reminds me of the straight tarmac road heading across the red dusty landscape and lined either side with huge grey-green shrubs which were covered with huge yellow and white flowers that looked like ice-cream sundaes.

Back home I'd found that these strange flowers were one of dozens of shrubs in the genus Banksia, named after Joseph Banks (that precocious, rich, adventurer and botanist).

As Frank discovers on his visit to a Californian plant nursery to buy heat/drought tolerant plants for his garden, Banksias come in many different forms . . . so I had to do some research on the web and make some drawings of the Banksias that caught Frank's eye.

A new year of work for Gardens Illustrated deserves a new sketch book - a pristine new Saunders Waterford/Cuthbert Mills paper sketchbook - an indulgence, but it makes me happy.

Frank was excited by the leaf shapes as much as the flowers, so I decided that they needed no extra elements and I'd let the Banksia leaves make the design . . . for speed I swapped to working digitally, scanning in my sketches and working in Photoshop. At the back of my mind were William de Morgan tile designs and because this was for the January magazine, a New Year candle.

I put together a 'rough' and mock up of how the illustration sits of the page layout, to send to David at GI HQ and to get the thumbs up before I cut the block and make a print.

Below is the grey-scale image I used to trace down onto the block - of course I traced it down in reverse, but this has been taped into my sketchbook the right way round. 

Here's the final proof, which was scanned for the digital image that was sent to the magazine. And on the right the final page of January's Gardens illustrated with my Banksias linocut in Franks's column.

Thank you Frank for sending me down memory lane to my big adventure in Oz twenty years ago. As I carved the block I recalled many things - the heat, the massive road-trains, the flocks of budgies . . .


This afternoon - I'm working on the illustration for the March magazine, this time Frank's writing about a road trip of his own and I'm getting itchy feet!

Meanwhile the February Gardens illustrated will be on the news stands soon . . . I'll blog about it soon, it's one of my favourites so far!

Celia
xx

Does "Tu-whit tu-who" mean "I love you" ?

We're nearing the end of January and this is my first blog post of 2016! Too late to wish you a Happy New Year, so I'll plunge straight in with a new linocut . . .

Tu-whit tu-who, a merry note

As with all my prints it starts in my head while I'm walking or, as in this case, while I'm busy working on other things. Then, when I get a moment, I'll make a sketch of it before other ideas pile on top of it like magazines and catalogues that arrive in the post.

Sometimes, on dark winter evenings, I can hear the local Tawny Owls hooting to each other in the looming dense dark Yew trees outside my studio. Ter-whitt! Hooo-hooooo! or as Shakespeare puts it in the Winter Song at the end of Love's Labour's Lost, "Tu-whit tu-who".

This is how the song is printed in my precious 1714 edition of the play. This year, 2016, is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death in 1616; which means my two tired and battered volumes of Nicholas Rowe's multi-volume edition of Shakespeare's works, were printed only 102 years later. That's like looking back at works by WWI poets today, the person who first owned these books could have known someone who saw Shakespeare perform, or bumped into him in the pub.

Here's the inked lino and a freshly pulled print; it's on Japanese Kizuki Kozo, which is a thin but very strong and satisfyingly crisp paper to work on.

As you probably know, "Tu-whit tu-who" is a conversation between two owls, most likely a male and female (but not necessarily). They are probably saying, "It's me!" "Who are you!" "Get off my tree" "You! You!"; but just maybe they're saying "I love you!"

On Friday I delivered work, including this new print, to The Robin's Nest Gallery in the village of Wargrave near Reading. If you live nearby I can recommend you visit, the gallery is airy and bright and full of lovely things.

I try to combine a delivery to a gallery with a day out, this time Cliff and I met a friend for lunch and also visited Reading Museum. While we waiting for our friend to arrive, we wandered into the gallery displaying a replica of the Bayeux Tapestry. This was surprisingly fascinating, partly because of the clear and interesting way it's displayed - with translations of the text and snippets of background information; but mostly because the ladies who did the work, embroidered their names under their section. There are little differences in styles of stitching which seem to hint at their characters.

After lunch at Wagamama and a little tour around the town with our friend, we returned to the Museum to see the exhibition I'd been looking forward to seeing, A Sense of Place. The exhibitions brings together paintings form the Museum's own collection, by some of the best British artists of the 20th Century, these include John Piper, Eric Raviliious and Christopher Nevinson along with many more. What makes the exhibition multi-layered is that there are also new poems inspired by the paintings and craft works. It's the sort of exhibition that would be lovely to dip into once a week, I had barely an hour, so skipped reading most of the poems and enjoyed looking at the paintings and some of the crafts - such as a beautiful pair of 'artist's fingerless mittens' by Suzanne Stallard inspired by the colours of Duncan Grant's 'Snow at Charleston'; or an exquisite leather purse by Vicky Baker inspired Christopher Nevinson's 'View of the Sussex Weald' (a painting I would very much love to have hanging on my wall to enjoy every day).

A Sense of Place continues until 8 May, and is well worth seeing.

This morning I've listed the 'Tu-whit tu-who, a merry note' original linocut in my online shop, as well as new cards based on the design.

Thank you if you drop in to read my blog, it's always enjoyable to read your comments.

And if you're reading this from the other side of the Atlantic, in the eastern half of the US which is now deep in snow, I hope you are safe and warm.

Celia

xx