I am not sure how long we have owned this coffee pot. It lives in the camper van and performs the morning ritual of coffee wherever the van is. It came into the house for the post holiday wash and has not returned, so yesterday it posed on a mirror for some sketching and water colour action.
I am a one cup of coffee a day woman. Unless the day, or I, am flagging. Or being social.
Yesterday I was social, two cups of coffee were enjoyed, one with cake. Which is almost certainly why there was no post-lunch slump and I felt the urge to paint a still life. I also pruned things in the yard and gave Lola an extra walk.
Caffeine is a wonderful thing! I have wanted to paint this little coffee pot for years. Inspired by a sculpture made entirely of these pots by Robert Fabelo.
Cafédral (detail) by Robert Cavelo
Cafédral is a shed sized building made entirely of old coffee pots. Since seeing Robert Caveo’s work I have had to resist rehoming coffee pots like this when I see them in charity shops. But yesterday I got such pleasure from painting our pot and his reflection I wonder if I might collect just a few for a bigger still life moment…
June is making herself very hard to love this year. Recent mornings she has turned up with a very November look on her face. The word greige and June have no reason to appear in the same sentence.
I thought I would share a local weather explanation.
Last year our yard was vibrating with heat and colour.
It is hard to think that yesterday the weather stopped any serious yardening and the only time I crossed the yard was to take washing to the tumble dryer.
It did not look this pretty.
The day was not without some colourful excitement. One of my hybrid images from my Meddled Photographs x Watercolour project has been chosen to be printed onto glass to create a unique splash back in a recently renovated kitchen.
The full description of my project is here.
I am sure there will be a splashback reveal soon. Currently there are many blue squares of wall adhesive on the freshly delivered glass.
It is the Meddled Photograph of the same location as the glum picture at the top of this blog.
Then late in the afternoon a conversation starter was posted on one of my arty Whatsapp groups.
My comment is the green one. What I love about this brief, arty exchange of ideas is that it is timeless.
Artists of all types would have had just this type of discussion throughout history.
As someone who has always had to embrace new technology. I am used to the challenges and the.convoluted thinking that these things often require. I would be really interested in what anyone who reads this thinks.
As it turns out, a greige day was quite the fertile place for creative thinking.
Creatively I have grown like a weed. I chose to step away from exhibiting at formal art exhibitions for a year and just let art and photography grow in their own way.
The kite surfers at St Michaels Mount were the first sign that something was up . Goodness knows why I had never considered that the skills, both analogue and digital that I used in Medical Imaging could be transferred to photography and art.
The epiphany occurred on Mounts Bay beach during a cold winter weekend in January 2025. I could get mediocre photographs of a great location and some kite surfers but nothing particularly Zingy. Until I tried sticking three photos together and slightly altering their angles and magnification.
18 months in and I happily stick anything that I have photographed or painted together, to create an image which pleases me. Along the way I have used screen printing tricks like deregistering and sometimes registering, different renditions of the exact same subject. Altering perspectives, angles, magnifications and colours. Anything goes really. No guarantee of success, the failure rate is high, but when the serendipity goddess is in a good mood then anything can happen.
Like all experimental creative processes there are more duds than there are successes. But there is always some learning lurking even in the duddiest of duds.
Sometimes I flip the process and paint one of my amalgamated images as an original painting.
Yesterday’s blog featured one of my hybrid images that I was always planning to paint.
There was more flipping, flipping because the image was of a small yacht haven on the Peloponnese in Greece. Just a tiny jetty that offered overnight, safe mooring just off a shingle beach. Double flipping because my digital image was created using three different photographs, superimposed, simplified and then overlayed on a hand painted watercolour background.
Then flipped colour wise because everyone knows that all images of boats in Greece should be represented in shades of blue, green and turquoise. But I wanted to represent the warmth of the evening and the moment.
Painting this image yesterday I abstracted it a little further.
I also had a go at doing a digital deregistered double image. A pencil sketch overlayed on top of the watercolour.
Just like growing weeds, I never quite know what will pop up next .
Just like weeds quite a lot of these ideas end up in the bin.
One person’s weed however can be someone else’s flower.
What is something you wish you could tell your 20-year-old self?
My advice to my 20 year old self would be significantly different from the advice I would give to my 16 year old self. To add a caveat, any advice to my younger self that would create life changing decisions would alter my here and now. My here and now is my happy place. No changes needed. People often think change is for the better but of course change can equally bring rather negative consequences.
At 16, I would advise sticking to my artsy A level choices and fighting harder for them.
At 20 I would advise that the Science choices have worked and would continue to work. However I would suggest taking a year out, take a breath, travel a little. These delightful options were not available in the 70’s.
Lipstick
At 16 I was obsessed with No 7 Plum Beautiful.
By 20 I had moved on. It took 30 years of experimentation to lead me back.
30 years wasted.
At 16 I felt art floating imperceptibly from my fingertips
At 20 that loss felt profound. Sometimes I can be a Drama Queen.
It turns out that Art, like Love, will find a way.
Tennis Club admin, rat eradication and emails were my target for the day.
Pest control took a little longer than planned and a Summer rain storm soaked me through. For reasons that I can’t quite put a finger on I decided that a rain storm was exactly the moment to paint a sea pool in a heatwave.
I am physically painting a lot less this year, and yesterday was an absolute joy. This painting is a mixture of traditional water colour and water colour pencils.
Water colour pencils are my quick/ holiday/travel medium of choice. A pencil case and a sketch book take virtually no space in a bag and water is always easy to find.
The other travel tool is my smart phone. Digital manipulation can sometimes rescue a failing painting. The Sea Pool at Conleau did not need rescuing but I did have a little half hour of tweaking.
To be honest I dont think these digitally tweaked images have a huge amount of value. They give me the slight AI ‘ick’. But looking at them gave me some ideas on how to improve my painting. They offer a different perspective. Just one digital manipulation pleases me.
A much simpler less vivid image. Not at all Conleau in a heatwave. But certainly a nod to the 1930’s history of the emergence of Conleau as a tourist destination.
Digital dabbling is a great learning experience and I can do it on my phone whenever there are a few spare minutes in a day
But nothing beats creating art using my hands and art materials. Who could possibly pass up sharpening pencils. Such a satisfying task.
Today I am whisking you all back to France in a heatwave.
The thing about heatwaves is that they are relentlessly hot. A campervan holiday in 35 degrees is an exercise in trying really hard to keep cool when stationary. Humans are one consideration but a curly haired dog is quite another. For her sake we booked into a cool Airbnb for three days.
A heatwave is not great for art or photography. The sun makes photographs really pretty dull as deep shadows and bright sunlight drown out detail
And the baking heat dries out paints far too quickly for anything useful to be achieved. I tried. All attempts are in the bin.
Oh my arty bones were very frustrated I really wanted to show some of the beautiful places we visited.
Our day at Conleau was just one of those days.
A really fascinating scene but the magic and vibrancy is lost in bright sunlight and deep shadow.
For some inexplicable reason, after being drenched by heavy summer rain I decided today was the day to paint Conleau.
I am not sure that I believe in minimalism but I do admire it. I suppose I am a theoretical minimalist living a maximalist life. Just as I am an introverted extrovert. Too much in either direction and I begin to feel uncomfortable. I like the peaceful, spiritual feel of cool, calm minimalist spaces where simplicity and shadows move together as the available light changes. I might sip a Martini or any other bitter cocktail in such a place.
But for the vast majority of my life I am not that person. I am a tea drinker or coffee drinker and I habitually settle in more maximalist spaces. But whilst drinking my tea or coffee in a maximalist space I could absolutely enjoy leafing through coffee table books extolling a minimalist lifestyle. In a way that I could never sip my bitter cocktail in a minimalist space and browse books on maximalism. Even the thought of it sends a shiver down my spine.
As a point of interest I researched into my photo archive with the search ‘ minimalist image’
Nothing truly minimalist came up. But I have probably self diagnosed myself as maximalist minimalist just be fishing out these few images.
BilbaoLondonPlymouthTate ModernHong Kong
The two colour photos at the beginning and the end of this blog also represent my mini/maxi conundrum.
Busy maximalist images of a local tidal pool with a lot of the actual detail stripped out.
Word play, the heatwave has made us swap Van Life for Vannes Life. Our two night airbnb just pops its head above the brightly coloured building.
Early morning and late evening walks in this lovely city keep a dog’s paws cooler and her owners very happy. The multi coloured building is a contemporary creative space. Surrounded by arty farty stuff that is right up our rue.
Not that all has gone to plan. Why ever would it.
The early morning walk was supposed to culminate in a visit to an Art Gallery.
To say that we have missed this exhibition because the ambient temperature of the gallery is not working is a huge disappointment. The Gallery is closed until the weekend. For those of you also in the grip of a heatwave I can only offer you this really cool image from outside the gallery
Every picture tells a story. But in this case it will take two pictures.
Plymouth is celebrating the 100th Birthday of one of the most famous artists who has lived in the city.
On Saturday we went to one of the liveliest celebrations of a 100th Birthday you could imagine. A silent disco in a museum. I’m not sure if I would have blogged about our attendance but I was having a clean washing grump this morning. Bemoaning in my head that I am sick of the dull colours that emerge from the winter weekend laundry cycle.
But hiding in the corner of the laundry picture is evidence of a night out in fancy dress.
My 1940’s tiger print fake fur coat had her moment. I went to the disco dressed as the flashing woman in the top picture of a video about the life and work of Beryl Cook.
Luckily although I flashed a lot, there is no photographic evidence.
Our fitness trackers, tracked more than 5 miles of dancing. That would not have been achieved in a heavy coat. So she took a rest on the back of a chair while more light weight leopard print garments did the hard yards of the 5 miles of dancing. A bit more flashing as I left and the night was done. Of course it was an outing with the Bobbers. 6 of us on this occasion.
Surely Spring must be on the way. And with it a brighter laundry pile. But the coat is evidence that not all winter garments are dull and practical.
The coat in 2020 just a few days before the first Covid Lockdown.
Timing is everything in blogging and life generally.
Who.knows how this blog would have gone had I written it six hours ago.
Trick question. I know exactly how it would have gone. Ranty, is the one word answer.
Life got in the way and the intended blog did not get written. Lucky for you the bobbers also got in the way.
They got my raw and furious rant caused by my second visit to the Beryl Cook Exhibition.
I apologised that they got my arty rant unexpurgated. Anne Bobber commented that they had just got an early version of the blog with more expletives.
My second visit to the exhibition was to see the supporting exhibition. Videos, books, newspaper cuttings and private family memorabilia. I was committed to watching all the videos and arrived at opening time because to do that it would be sensible to grab a seat on the solitary sofa.
My ranty pants were enraged by the misogynist questions and attitudes expressed by male television journalists, to a successful woman artist in the 70’s 80’s and early 90’s. Had I been in the comfort of my own house I would have shouted at the T.V. As it happened In a public space I saved all my grumpiness for when I met the Bobbers and later my Tennis Club friends. On a non ranty note I marvelled at the developments of T.V and broadcast engineering in the last 30 years. Subtitling specifically.
One glorious subtitle blooper that I missed but am almost tempted to sit through the whole hour long broadcast for ran like this.
Beryl and a gay biker friend are off on an adventure on/in a motorbike and sidecar to buy some seafood snacks on the Barbican. The stall has sold out of Winkles.
The subtitle straddles two sentences and should read
‘ No winkles. Really? Are you kiddingYou wouldn’t ever get that on Old Compton Street’
I realise the wit is lost because I cannot provide an image with the subtitle properly positioned as it would be in 2026.
Old Compton Street used to be the most gay street in London. A heady fug of aftershave and rampant testosterone filled the street with a spirit like no other. Everyone was welcome.
I realise now that it is the lesser known paintings that hold my interest. I am booked to go again next week. This may not be the last you have heard of Beryl.
theoldmortuary.design 