Bird Car Ladies 1-2-3

A regular question I get asked is - how can you bear to part with your paintings & toys, and the brutal answer is because I have to eat and pay bills, so I can't be precious about hanging on to work. But there are a few exceptions to this, such as quite a lot of my commmercial artwork. And the Bird Ladies.

Not many people have seen this batch of work I did a decade ago and I have been asked to sell them before. The answer is always a polite no - they are not for sale. Last year however, I made an exception and offered to make a copy for someone who was captivated by one of my early Bird Ladies, 'The Bird Car'. The topmost image is the 2001 piece and the middle image is the newest version - brighter than the previous one, and with a little flower in the ladys hair, to mark it out from the first.

I only finished it in the last week of 2010, hence my trip to Oxford for a frame. They are the same but different - it's rather difficult to replicate washes that were done ten years ago and light exposure changes the paper and pigment. Actually, there are three versions of this, the other was a birthday present for a friend, but alas, I have no scan to show. I'm not going to copy it again; three is quite enough and matches the amount of prongs in the bird car, which is nice and neat. The task of getting the painting to the client was an adventure in itself...

Egg Nest

My entry for the NFEST (Needle Felt Etsy Street Team), which was 'Birds and Nests'. Starting from the rough sketch...

...it didn't turn out exactly like that; the wool did not like being felted so tinily. Each bird took about two hours to perfect. Or near as dammit.






But after about 12 hours (total) hard labour...



And finished off with a tag.

Thank you to everyone who left a supportive comment or e-mailed me, from the post below. I never cease to be amazed at how kind people can be, or actually how many of us are in the same leaky old boat.

En route

Now I am sketching and painting properly again, I can't think why I spent so many years crying into a metaphorical pillow because I couldn't get (much) publishing work or because galleries didn't want me. So much time and effort expended for so little reward. Now I am regularly selling to the people who really matter - the people who put it on their walls - and I feel liberated. It is amazing that I am finally doing what I doggedly planned to do, way back when I was twelve, and making a solemn vow to my recently dead parents (especially my old dad). Several times along the way I got distracted and misled, but all the paths eventually led back to this one. I follow the map best when I heed my own directions.

To be delving deep into my creative innards again is a joyous experience. I find myself re-visiting old themes, many of which I haven't explored for a long time. Pre-blog. My bird ladies for instance. My beloved bird ladies. Not on my website, not in the blog, not sold, not printed. A few who read this may know what I am talking about - I showed them to one or two people. I took them to a gallery owner who told me that they were 'beautiful, but not something they could sell'. They went back in the portfolio, their wings clipped. Some of my best bird lady paintings have been languishing far from home and they are coming back at last, I cannot wait to hold them again.

To find the bird lady, look for the three pronged tail...

Bird ladies usually find themselves isolated in a room with a distant window. This time I am going to let them into the city. A city I used to paint when I was an infant of twenty years.

'En Route' for sale at Etsy

En route to a dazzling party, the Grand Duchess Amaretto de Carciobanna rolls through the city streets, pulled along on a silken scarlet rope by an anonymous flunky. Will someone remember to pick up her wheely bird? Because, you see, she could not possibly retrieve it herself, it simply would not do!

What will happen when my bird ladies meet my toys?