Becoming Blue XIV: Bluebell - HUMILITY

Blue Bell, Sussex Downs, Watercolour on paper, Jessica Rosemary Shepherd

Becoming Blue XI: Epoca Blu

"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living."
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

It is the morning, and like all mornings I wake up and check on all my seedlings. I feel like the Little Prince and his flower on his lonely little planet. Every morning since October I have walked onto the barren, icy roof terrace in my bare feet to inspect the moist, dewy pots for any signs of life. It's become a habit. Thing is, I secretly know that there is life under the dark soil. A few months ago the wind and rain had exposed a thick white searching root in one of the conker pots. I quickly covered it up again, worried it would get dry. This particular conker still hasn't sent an upward shoot, but to my delight, another one has! The conkers I planted in October on my birthday are now growing.

It's been a funny few days here in Spain. Things haven't altered that much for me since the outbreak of Covid19. I am still in my hermetic studio, but I am aware that the entire country is in lockdown and you are not allowed to leave the house for any other reason than for food and pharmaceuticals. You can walk your dog around the block, but only one person is allowed to do this. Same with food shopping. The rules are strict, but everyone here is happy to abide by them. Spain has a huge sense of what it is to be in a community and they all look out for one another. For me, life hasn't really changed. The only alteration is that I am now no longer able to go on my daily walk in the countryside. 

'Isolation', Meconopsis - work in progress.
Watercolour, charcoal and gouche on paper.
56 x 76cm

It has been 63 years since Yves Klein painted 11 identical blue canvases for his ‘Proposte Monocrome, Epoca Blu' at the Gallery Apollinaire. For this exhibition, each canvas was painted with an ultramarine pigment which was suspended in a synthetic resin that would retain the brilliancy of the blue. Klein sought to challenge the boundaries between art and life. He posed questions concerning the nature of art, what it was, is and might be, and consequently challenged all borders and structures. The world is blue and blue has no borders and here we all are, hidden in the borders of a room, a house, a town, a country, now unable to wander. 

"Procrastination is productive and intelligent. 

Our urge to wander around instead of getting right to it is usually a signal that a deeper creative process is occurring, one that needs time we aren’t giving it." 

Chani Nicholls

"Heroes are usually wanderers, and wandering is a symbol of longing, of the restless urge which never finds its object, of nostalgia" Carl Jung. Blue Flower is a project about movement and wandering. Freedom of movement. An essential right for any human. At a time of Brexit and the rise of Spanish Vox and other restricting forms of politics, I chose Blue as an act of rebellion, like the age-old romantics who'd rebel against social norms and would go wandering fields writing poetry. Blue is a colour that moves and essentially this project moves too. It skips between the vast landscapes of dreams, Dreamtime and the imagination, to the frontiers of our planet. It focuses on the landscapes, above and below us; the habitats, the cultures of faraway places, right into the belly of our homes. The fact we are all now 'trapped' in our homes does not stop Blue.

‘The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he cannot stay quietly in his room.’

Blaise Pascal

The flowers for this collection are used specifically to tell a particular type of story - there are many flowers, many stories and many shades in blue. It's about life. A blue life. As I move with blue, the paintings themselves have changed stylistically. As the colour is explored the style changes in order to capture that 'thing'. The thing is essentially about longing. Longing for faraway places that we shall never arrive in. Longing for the perfect, the comfortable. Longing for love, longing for change, longing for a better world. Blue Flower is as relevant now as it has always been. 

'Blue Flame', Puya berteroniana, from Blue Mountain Botanic Garden, Australia.
Watercolour on paper, 1.5m x 1m.
Work in progress.

The flowers I have documented so far chart my own journey up to this point and have all been intentionally picked. Hyacinth for a domestic landscape, dyed Roses for something more unnatural, Forget-me-Nots for their association of not being forgotten. Some flowers were deliberately looked for in places of cultural significance, Covent Garden, Columbia Road, a street seller on a pavement in London in order to capture a moment in time. Others have been located in their landscapes, Orchids and Gentians and others have been found in botanical zoos or gardens, as not all flowers now grow in their motherland. Many now can't be found in their natural places. Displaced. A sign of the times. 

Blue Flower up until this point has been a snapshot of a world in decay and was always going to be about my pilgrimage to the utopian picturesque, as in true Romantic form. Blue Flower, a seven-year project, is reaching its turning point in 2020, just as I felt it would. Borders are closing and everyone is being put on a spiritual retreat if they like it or not. They are having to find new ways of connecting whilst coming to terms with what they need, what they truly want and who they really are. The land needs nurturing like an egg. We need to slow down for a bit. To turn away from the mechanical world outside, towards the feminine, mystical world inside. Science extrapolates but poetry interpolates. Being inside is poetry. Everything outside of us is empirical. The real blue flowers are inside of us. Let's be like quantum thinkers in our profound search for an unseen world.

This 'silence gives us an opportunity to appreciate a great deal of what we generally see without ever properly noticing, and to understand what we have felt but not yet adequately processed. We have not only been locked away; we have also been granted the privilege of being able to travel around a range of unfamiliar, sometimes daunting but essentially wondrous inner continents.' The Book of Life

Sea Holly work in progress.

Since August 2018, I have been on a journey that is beyond words. I found a deep space inside of me, a whole landscape that I have been mostly happily roaming around in, to the point that I haven't been able to roam in reality and articulate. My issue over the past two years has been that I haven't found myself inhabiting the same place as most people I know. A gap that began to grow from a crack of blue. This has been my greatest upset over the past two years. That a gulf has been manifesting between me and you for months. I've been finding it harder and harder to bridge the distance because our brains felt like they were not in the same place even though our hearts were.

'Everything is delicate'
Meconopsis. 15 x 15cm, Watercolour
SOLD

However, since Covid 19, I suddenly feel less alone because now everyone is living a life I have been living - an isolated one, a virtual life. Life in another dimension. A life where all of your friends are far away. They might be in the same town, but you now can't 'see' them. For me, some of my closest friends are in different countries, and I am lucky to see them once every two or three years. I live mostly alone in silence. I have been in this place of living since August, but I had a dress rehearsal in Tasmania, where I was isolated in a different time zone without a car due to the devastating bush fires for two months. I was forced to heal in silence, far away from everyone and generally 'get on' despite skirting the edges of a nervous breakdown. I hallucinated and I cried for weeks. I got through it. The same happened this winter in Spain. Again - I got through it.

“No one is ever satisfied where he is.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Now it's Spring and for the first time in months, I feel less alone because everyone else is now going through a similar process to the one I went through. We are all at home, some alone, facing ourselves.

'A desert of discarded antlers. A blue flower hiding in a thicket,
stumped in the complex arrangement of pieces on a chequered board of star dust. Check mate. '

Love in a mist. Work in progress. Watercolour

“Where are the people?” resumed the little prince at last. “It’s a little lonely in the desert…”

 “It is lonely when you’re among people, too,” said the snake.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Living alone for the past year (on and off) has helped me immensely in accepting what's happening right now. Painting, over the past year, has become less important and the land more so. I have been obsessed with soil and rocks since November 2019. I have to sit on it, walk on it, stick my fingers in it. Listen to it, speak to it. Touch it. The land wants trees. Well, here it does. I can hear it. This is why I am growing conkers, acorns, chestnuts, walnuts and hazelnuts on my roof. Nut trees are good, they feed birds and are less likely to be cut down by locals.

"Hold by confide among the stars 

We could be the lucky ones 

If we could only levitate 

Fly low dear 

Dance beneath the trees 

If only we had oxygen 

And we begin to breath 

And we can watch 

While the beauty takes it's toll"

I am also growing them not just for the land, but for me. I will keep a couple behind to put on my terrace as I don't know when I will be able to leave the house again. Now is the time to create an ecosystem on the roof. Deliveries are not really happening in Spain at the moment, so I am using EVERYTHING I can find. I am drilling holes in the large plastic boxes I used to move house in. Packaging trays for mushrooms, buckets for paint, some plastic pots that had brownies inside from a lunch break when I was teaching in Cairo. I don't have the budget or the delivery system to do it any other way.

Most of the seeds are coming from my food shopping. I have a lump of ginger, peppers, tomatoes and a garlic bulb that sprouted. I have seeds from my garden in London that are ten years old. I planted them last week and they are already growing. Now there's a hopeful sign if ever there was one. A seed, that has been still and dormant for ten years, suddenly growing. We too will grow after this has passed.

This darkness you're in is your eclipse, 

wait for your illumination.

Becoming Blue II: Agapanthus - LOVE

'Love, at first sight, is always spoken in the past tense. The scene is perfectly adapted to this temporal phenomenon: distinct, abrupt, framed, it is already a memory... This scene has all the magnificence of an accident: I cannot get over having had this good fortune, to meet what matches my desire'.

- Barthes, A Lover's Discourse Fragments

Up close on The Kiss: Onslow Gardens. 2018

I wake up. It's February 11th, I am in Spain and I feel flat. After a cup of tea, I stick my head into my wardrobe to see what I can wear. I have a lunch invitation so my usual 'hermit' wools will not do. The smell of an old fragrance comes out from between the folds of fabric. How I dislike delving into this heap of cotton and viscose. My hand traces the patterns of embroidered flowers, buttons and ribbons. My most prized dresses wait patiently for my return. Reds, yellows, greens and whites. Each garment holds at least one memory. I can feel my throat becoming tight, it's all too much. I am not that girl anymore. As I begin to grieve for a version of myself I grab the nearest black polo-neck, belt, and jeans and shut the door tightly, thanking myself in the process that I left most of last summer's bundle of clothes in the bottom of an English wardrobe. The famous yellow gypsy skirt being the most memory-filled weave of them all. I symbolically ripped a hole it as I hopped over the railings of Onslow Gardens on that fateful night. After the event I felt that I couldn't dispose of the yellow skirt and decided to deal with it another day, stuffing it into a bag at the bottom of my British wardrobe.

The Kiss: Onslow Gardens, J R Shepherd, Botanical watercolour painting, 1.5m x 1m, 2018. SOLD

I guess I am still broken. I suppose we all are to some extent. I miss him. It's taking every ounce of my energy to focus on what I am trying to do, to regroup. Like a car backfiring I have good days and bad days. I stop-start. It's been 12 months since I fell under love's spell and it hasn't faded. It's still as bold and blue as it was the day it encircled me. In my desperate attempt to get these emotions out I have been slowly chipping away at a large painting (above) which has mostly been painted from my imagination. These are the Agapanthus flowers my friend Natasha gave me in Vida's Plimsoll blue flat on Edgeware Road (see the previous post 'Introduction') last August.

'Lost in the warmth

Of the blue heat haze...

Kiss me again

Kiss me

Kiss me again

And again

Greedy lips

Speedwell eyes

Blue Skies...

In beauty's summer

Blue jeans

Around ankles...'

- Derek Jarman, Delphinium Days

As usual, I have played around with the flower heads and the light sources to accentuate the blue petals. I wanted to generate a dark half and a light half and, most importantly have two heads. For me it was essential to have two heads butting or kissing. Your choice - love seems to produce either effect quite sufficiently! It also had to be a big painting; a painted elegy.

'A good elegy is always a conversation between grief and celebration. The grief of the loss of the person and the celebration that you were here at all to share the planet with them'. - David Whyte

The Kiss: Onslow Gardens, J R Shepherd, Botanical painting, 2018. SOLD

'The Kiss: Onslow Gardens' describes an event that took place, a moment of passion, a moment of lust. A lapse in judgment. It is both about love and the lack of it. It is the chaos of kissing, the budding of ideas, of hope and the awkward separateness of two people who don't really know each other. Two stems - two people. One is upright and proud, that's the gentleman, the other is falling, that's me, falling in love or falling into darkness, into grief.

'Some things are meant to be

Take my hand, Take my whole life too

For I can't help falling in love with you

For I can't help falling in love with you'.

- Elvis Presley, Hugo Peretti, Luigi Creatore, and George David Weiss.

This painting is supposed to be claustrophobic, rude and conflicting. The bottom buds are seeking different paths, growing in opposite directions. There is harmony but it is hidden under the spell of the moment. In the spirit of an augmented 4th, buds emerge from the darkness of a Medusa head. The flowers are the same, and yet they are not. Like my leaves, they are trapped in a space too small for them. They are holding one another whilst at the same time crushing one another. Respect has gone out of the window. It's beautiful but also grotesque. The buds in the foreground begin to look otherworldly, alien and mutant. Nothing is quite what it seems.

'And we have this physical experience in loss of falling toward something. It’s like falling in love except it’s falling into grief. And you’re falling towards the foundation that they held for you in your life that you didn’t realize they were holding. And you fall and fall and fall. But then there comes a time when you finally actually start to touch the ground that they were holding for you. And it’s from that ground that you step off into your new life.' - David Whyte.

In English, the word "love," which is derived from Germanic forms of the Sanskrit lubh (desire), is a broad term, which often leads to problems in its true meaning. I find that such issues can be resolved if we consider the Greek terms, eros, philia, and agape in our attempt to categorise love. The term eros (Greek erasthai) is used to refer to that part of love which constitutes a passionate, intense desire for something; it is often referred to as a sexual desire, hence the modern notion of "erotic". In Plato's writings, however, eros is also held to be a common desire that we have in our search for transcendental beauty - the particular beauty of an individual which reminds us of the true beauty that exists in our world.

Close up on the Blue Agapanthus flower. J R Shepherd 2018. SOLD

In contrast eros, philia entails a fondness and appreciation of another without the passion. For the Greeks, the term philia incorporated not just friendship, but also loyalties to family, the political community, and a job/skill. Lastly, agape refers to the brotherly love for all humanity and our planet. Agape arguably draws on elements from both eros and philia in that it seeks a perfect kind of love that is at once a fondness, a transcending of the particular, and a passion without the necessity of reciprocity.

'The deeper blue becomes, the more urgently it summons man towards the infinite, the more it arouses in him a longing for purity and ultimately, for the supersensual'. - Kandinsky

Goethe believed that blue was a darkness weakened by light. Scientists believe that it is the light that got lost. For me, it is the colour of our desire. It is there to be lost, to be both far and yet near and to be both light and dark at the same time, like the sky, the sea or the bottom of a swimming pool. When I think of blue I think of Georgia O'Keefe signing her letters 'from the faraway nearby' and still wonder if she was describing a place, or a state of being.

Close up on the Blue Agapanthus painting. Watercolour on Saunders Waterford paper.. 

As humans, I find we live day by day trying to eradicate the paradox of desire from our lives either through consummation or with denial and suppression. It seems we cannot simply watch and listen to the feeling of our desires bubbling inside of us without response. To touch them without grasping.

Western society has lead us to believe that desire as a problem to be solved. We want to close the gap between us and the object of our desire. We don't like the longing and so we don't like the gap. Sadly, we have not been taught how to deal with the distance involved in desire. We don't understand that we can enjoy it in the same way we can enjoy a vista without having to parachute into it... If we could live with our longing in the same way that we take in the beauty of a landscape or the texture of a musical composition I feel we could own that experience much more fully and be more able to deal with loss. As you move, the vanishing point moves - you will never arrive in that place you saw from far away, just as you will never have that person. 'Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away' Solnit (2005).

'Blue comes to us through silence and mystery and much argument. The word we use for blueness was not in every language and arrived late. In ancient Greek the word for black may have been used for blue.' - Rebecca Solnit

Its now mid-April and my vanishing points have moved. My studio is metamorphosing into a papery version of Francis Bacon's as I continue to work on Blue. I think I might have bitten off more than I could chew with this one. It is no easy task. But then I think how long it took to find the leaves and then I realise planning is everything and good ideas take a long time to come. Picasso shut himself in a barn for 9 months and did 800 drawings before he came up with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. I am about eight months in and I am no Picasso, but despite this, things are starting to resolve. To make things complicated, in the months between I got places to study for a PhD at both Central St. Martins and the Royal College of Arts and tried moving back to the UK. I did this more out of fear than anything. A safety net in case it all goes wrong and to find a way of being pushed because I felt tired of pushing myself. I know I am not alone in this. There is a huge responsibility that comes with freedom and sometimes it is just easier or less scary to give it to someone else to sort out. To let someone or something else build the structures in your life and control you.

Agapanthus botanical painting as a work in progress. 1.5m x 1m. Watercolour on paper. 2018. 

Maybe this is a sign of maturity and my coming to terms with the nuances of melancholy and the complexity of longing. Sometimes we can only have something fully by not grasping. I didn't lose the object of my desire, it's just he is far away and with that, I wonder if we ever really lose anything at all? If we can remember something or someone and carry the picture and sounds of them in our hearts and minds, then really these things are very close, and even in times when you think you have lost or forgotten them, after decades they return to you in the form of a dream and you reminded again, that the object of your desire, the love, was not lost, it was just far away, distant and beyond sight. Such is blue. It cannot be grasped but it lingers. It is not the light that got lost, but the light we forget. The light inside.

'Blue Bottle buzzing

Lazy days

The sky blue butterfly

Sways on the cornflower

Lost in the warmth

Of the blue heat haze

Singing the blues

Quiet and slowly

Blue of my heart

Blue of my dreams

Slow blue love

Of delphinium days'

- Derek Jarman, Delphinium Days

As I edit my second chapter on blue I begin to realise that for me love and grief are two edges of the same sword and go hand in hand. You just can't have one without the other so I had to touch on it. 

'Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.' - David Whyte

The unfolding petals in 'The Kiss: Onslow Gardens' documents a very short segment of time, just a few hours on a warm summer's night - June 28th 2017 - but it took months to paint. It is a painting of lust, but also of loss. For the first stages, I couldn't even see what I was doing with all the tears pouring down my face. My face was as wet as the paper. The first washes were applied back in October 2017. It is now April 2018 and I have only just put in the finishing touches. Despite everything, the 28th June 2017 is still very fresh. It wrangles out of the usual confines of time and space and transcends like the colour blue.  As I apply the last brush strokes I reflect on how one cannot construct a life without being vulnerable and with that, I decide to be a bountiful inhabitant of loss, for it is the only way to love. 

The Medusa head of love

Bibliography

Aristotle. Poetics. Trns. S. H. Butcher. The Internet Classics Archive. Ed. Daniel C. Stevenson. Oct 2000. Feb 15, 2008 

Bloom, Harold. Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Minds. New York: Warner, 2002. 122-130. 

Hamblet, Wendy. “The Tragedy of Platonic Ethics and the Fall of Socrates.” Feb 15, 2008; http://www.cfh.ufsc.br/ethic@/ethic22ar2.pdf> 

Jarman, D., (1993), Blue

Kaufman, Walter. Tragedy and Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. 

Knox, Bernard. Notes. Antigone by Sophocles. Trns. Robert Fagles. Sophocles: The Three Theban Plays. New York: Penguin, 1984. 

Philips, C., (2007), "Socrates In Love", Norton, New York

Plato. Symposium. Ancient Philosophy. Ed. Forrest E. Baird and Walter Kaufmann. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson, 2008. Vol. 1 of Philosophic Classics. 

Segal, Charles. “Spectator and Listener.” The Greeks. Ed. Jean-Pierre Vernant. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. 184-215. 

Solnit, R., (2005), A Field Guide to Getting Lost.,Viking; New York

Sophocles: The Three Theban Plays. New York: Penguin, 1984, Oedipus the King, Trns. Robert Fagles. Sophocles: The Three Theban Plays. 

Love, Despair, and Transcendence: The Tragic and Platonic Views of the Human Condition 

Whyte, D.  (2015), "Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words", Many Rivers Press

Whyte, D.  (2009), The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self & Relationship, Riverhead 

Whyte, D.  (2001), Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as A Pilgrimage of Identity, Riverhead 

Whyte, D.  (1994), The Heart Aroused: Poetry & the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, Doubleday/Currency

The end of a chapter. The Kiss being wrapped for transport to England - April 2018

Becoming Blue I: Introduction

On a sunny September afternoon, as tired leaves rustled in the garden beyond her window pane, she opened her book 'An Inquiry into Blue' and took out a flatted, knotted mass of black and brown hair that she had collected from a bed at Kensal Green several weeks before. Then, with her other hand she opened an indigo bound copy of ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ and placed the hairs between pages 32 and 33. Once closed, she took the Antwerp blue scarf that was wrapped around her neck and tied it around the book before hiding it at the bottom of her wardrobe...

Agapanthus flower bud study, Watercolour on paper, 21 x 30 cm. (2017)

I plunge a large fishing net into the depths of a turquoise pool to fish out hundreds of yellowing leaves that fell from the trees I watched so carefully for three years. Catalpa, Mulberry, Fatsia, Conker and Judas, they were all there, floating and rotting like ghosts in a blue haze. Funny how things can be so symbolic. I sit and watch for a while as the low December sun pokes its head over a roof top, casting a halo of light through a blue sky. White squiggles dance in the blue watery rectangle, playing with the lost leaves at the bottom of the pool.

The world is blue at its edges and in its depths (Solnit)

A story is not always what it seems. Life is a wonderland full of hidden mysteries, most of which will never be solved. After a year of deep introspection, I finally feel I can begin the written element of my journey into blue. It's taken me months. From the first moment when the seed of an idea was sown back in 2015, I have spent many afternoons trying to consolidate blue, but it is a colour that cannot to be captured or ordered and what I have come to realise is to have spent my afternoons under a setting sun on Worthing beach devouring books on blue was about as useful as reading a book on yellow. You see, to understand blue one has to dive into the shade. Blue has to be experienced.

IMAGE: Howard Hodgkin 'Swimming'

Project Blue flower is so multifaceted that I don't really know where to begin when it comes to the blog or the printed Inky Leaves newspaper. In the end, after six months of contemplation I made a bridging post called 'Down the Rabbit Hole' back in May when, like Alice in her blue dress, I was tiptoeing around the edge of an illusory chasm after Leafscape. 

IMAGE: Sir John Tenniel

Blue is the scattering of light. Like the soldiers under cornflowers, it is lost. This displaced light is like a inconsolable rubix cube. The colour refuses to be ordered into chapters; it won’t be bound by rules, grammatical or otherwise. Blue is nebulous and has mushroomed at different points of my life to date. Like a fungus, it is always there, lurking between the shadow and the soul and tends to only reveal itself during times of utter ecstasy or despair. It litters the optimistic blue skies of holiday snapshots and percolates through my darkest pain. It’s the colour we turn when we are dead and the colour we often are when we are born. It is the colour that sits between the physical body and consciousness. Like for Miro, it is the colour of dreams.

People often associate the colour red for love, but I have never felt this myself. To me love is always blue. Its purity, it’s escapism and its disorder is encapsulated by blue. For me, to be in love is to be lost whilst becoming totally aware of the vulnerability of your body and your soul, and when you enter that space and dive deep, you strike that blue vein like a pot of gold.

The earth is like a blue orange (Paul Elvard)

Henry, who I was with for almost five years, used to have Miro's Azul II Lámina hanging above his bed. I always thought it was a good place to hang a painting such as this. Blue was Henry's favourite colour, he wore it all the time. When I moved in next door I remember buying blue curtains in the hope he would spend more time in my room. Needless to say it didn't work. The bitter sweetness of blue. We spent our last holiday together driving a friends Chevy around California, the interior of which was all upholstered in the deepest velvet blue.

Joan Miro, 'Azul II Lámina'

Blue is the colour of longing for the distances you never arrive in (Solnit)

When I met my first love, Alex, he gave me a Decaisnea pod. He had just picked it from a tree on Mount Edgcombe. Also known as ‘Dead Man's Fingers’ it was a fairly odd thing to give someone. I remember seeing the pod and thinking how unnatural it looked. All that blue. I tried to keep it preserved, but like the relationship it decomposed and the blue faded with time. Refusing to be captured, it seems, 'for blue there are no boundaries or solutions' (Derek Jarman).

Decaisnea fargesii pods

The last three years of my life have been dominated by shades of green, and for a while I didn't feel blue, that was until this summer. This time my total submersion into the tone would be sudden and deep. It was like I had been transported into a David Lynch film with its blue keys, blue boxes, blue roses and blue velvet - nothing made sense, and yet it did.

Work in progress, Leaf 200820171240, Acer macrophyllum, Kew Gardens. 

So there I am, slap bang in the middle of a Lynch. I am trying to prepare for an afternoon coffee in Chelsea. For some reason I didn't have my burgundy beret with me, so my friend Natasha lent me her Navy blue one. I only realise now that I was wearing a blue hat, with a blue top and of course, blue jeans. This was the day when I opened my door to the Cheshire Cat. I'd already been following the White Rabbit of my ideas, but then this Cheshire Cat came into my life under the cast of a winter eclipse. There was something very 17th Century about him. I always felt that he should have had a musket, square buckled shoes and a plumed hat.

'Lord and Lady', Watercolour on paper, two paintings on separate pieces of paper as a pair. SOLD

I saw Mr. Cheshire again a few weeks later in Chelsea after having found a plastic sparkly unicorn on a chain on the floor. I was wearing my Laura Ashley blue corduroy dress and reading 'Blue Mythologies' outside Sloane Square tube station. He was late, and I was cold. After visiting an art fair we ate dinner in the Blue Bird on Kings Road and talked about how dangerous hope is, both coming from opposite ends of the lens of course. Me the optimist thinking it as a weapon for good, he the pessimist thinking it inevitably leads to disappointment. 

Blue is paradoxical; it is self-contradictory, yet true (Carol Mavor)

Three weeks lapsed and on the day of a full moon, we met in Brighton and visited its Palace. Then, after walking the length of the pier, he ended it. Just like that, like a bolt out of the blue. We walked in silence to the train station and parted ways after I gave him a love note I'd made on blue paper. It was terribly sad.

The last leaf of Leafscape - reaching out - Leaf 90520171506. SOLD

We love to contemplate blue not because it advances us, but because it draws us after it (Goethe)

In French bleu means both the colour and a bruise. I was bruised and alongside all of this I was desperately trying to keep all the Inky Leaves saucers spinning, which was quite a task. I had problems with the second book as I was dissatisfied with the quality and had to keep asking for it to be redone. Inconsolable, I ran away up to London and slept on a friends sofa. The sofa was upholstered in the same blue velvet as the Chevy I'd driven around California in 3 years earlier. I lay there, crying as she painted the walls of her flat a dark 'Plimsoll Blue' around me. Then my other friend came over with a bunch of Agapanthus flowers and placed them in a glass jar in front of the blue wall. The scene was like a Greenaway film. I felt like my mood was changing the set design of this flat. 

Like Cessil's invisible cobalt ink, the cat and our story line quickly became intangible and indefinable. I tried to retrace things, marching through the ecstasy and the agony of it all in order to define what had actually happened. Naturally I failed and several months on I am still failing to understand its bitter sweetness. I feel confused, lost and helpless - like man who was swept away by the (blue) Danube after picking his lover a blue Mysotis flower and shouting 'Forget-me-not!' It's now December and unlike the bruises on my neck, the bruises in my heart haven't healed. These are still blue. Blue from the joy that it actually happened to the blue me grieving having lost him and myself in the process.  

Agapanthus work in progress 130 x 98 cm 
'Onslow Gardens'
Watercolour on paper

I died a little death this summer. I will never be the same person again. It happens, it's life, but this will take some time to recover from. With the blueness of nostalgia I think backwards and with its optimism I think forwards. I take the scarf from my neck and wrap it around the only thing I have that tells me he was real and not a dream and I start my first flower: the Agapanthus. 

Unicorns and cannonballs, 

palaces and piers 

Trumpets, towers and tenements 

Wide oceans full of tears 

Flags, rags ferryboats 

Scimitars and scarves 

Every precious dream and vision 

Underneath the stars, yes, you climbed on the ladder 

With the wind in your sails 

You came like a comet 

Blazing your trail too high 

Too far 

Too soon 

You saw the whole of the moon

(The Waterboys)

* All of these events are true.

Ruby Ricin

Botanical illustration of a Ricinus leaf, on the drawing board, when I last photographed it

It's been a productive time in the Inky Leaves studio and once again 'time' is doing it's own thing and not obeying the simple laws of logic. Luckily for me, time is moving very slowly, at a moment when I thought it would be zooming past. This is excellent news as not only must I be enjoying life to the max (I feel like I have crammed in a lot), but I must still be managing to keep up a good painting pace. All I have to do now is paint out three more 'medium sized' leaves before the second week of May and I am on track. This is how one does thirty six pieces in 12 months. 

Artist at work...

Up close - work in progress on the Castor Oil Plant (Ricinus communis)

This fortnight saw the birth of a ruby-coloured ricin (castor oil plant) leaf called Rina. As a juvenile leaf she has this fantastic purply-coppery colour. I love the leaves of the castor oil plant; they always look so menacing, if a little creepy. The new leaves are very sculptural and can appear almost metallic in the way they reflect the light. Whenever I see them I always think of Karl Blossfeldt (click on link for latest exhibition tour dates) and feel that he would have liked to have done something with a Ricinus leaf. Astonishingly, I first decided that I wanted to paint this species back in 2006 when I ran away from Edinburgh for a weekend in Paris. I remember seeing a clump growing in the municipal gardens of Les Jardines des Plantes and decided there and then that I would at some point paint it. Of course during those days I wasn't really a painter - I was studying for my Masters in botanical taxonomy - and it wouldn't be for another ten years when I'd finally get round to it. I am happy it took this long - it's given me the space to not only work out how I wanted to depict it, but also to develop the skills required to do so.

Studio shot for a sense of scale (Ricinus communis)

Ricinus communis leaf - work in progress

So there you have it - Ricinus. I am not sure if you have noticed yet, but I haven't been posting any pictures of the leaves finished. If you want to see them finished, you'll have to come to the show! I will update you as to when this is nearer the time, but it is likely to coincide with next years RHS London Botanical Art Show.

Moving on from deadly plants...

This week the weather has turned a bit cold and 'mis' here in Spain and we have snow forecast, although it looks more like hail at the moment. The swifts have arrived in some areas and the daffodils have just come out into bloom. Surprisingly, the bulbous plants here are much later than the ones in the UK and I can only put it down to our cold nights. So naturally this inclement weather has kept me focused - staying indoors rather than sloping off outside. I am slowly climbing the mountain of 36 pieces in a year. The plan is to also paint six pieces for 2017's RHS show this summer, which will hopefully take me to the first week of September, when, if all goes well, I will be painting 15 smaller pieces on vellum whilst touching up the other 15 larger leaves. I realise it's an insane painting programme, but it is not fun unless it is bonkers. Last night, in theme with the effort required to climb piles of plant-based work, gigantism and being slightly mad I dreamt I climbed a Seville Orange. I was smaller than the size of a pithy dimple, which I hasten to add, were like craters. It smelt fantastic as I dug my heels into the skin and clawed my way up to the top stem. I managed to complete the climb, which I am taking as a positive omen and wasn't too exhausted as the fragrant oil was invigorating.

Vine Leaf

With the sky now lobbing balls of ice at my window, I have managed to start another leaf called Victoria. It's a decaying grape vine leaf (I don't blame her, it's freezing outside). There are some fantastic colours in this one which I am very much looking forward to describing with paint. 

New piece - work in progress - decaying grape vine leaf (Vitis vinifera)

Working on the grape vine leaf 

News Flash

Talking of grape vines, I have heard on a vine made up of grapes that there will be another Mrs. Delany exhibition.  Will keep you posted as soon as I have more info but I sp0tted the news as a tweet on Angie Lewin's feed - printmaker extraordinaire.