A bowl of ripe plums

It has been a fair while, friends.  Particularly if we aren't waving over to each other on Instagram already. 

Still.

Here's a watercolour peace offering for a hot summer's day in Hackney. Started left handed with willow twigs, finished right handed as best as could be given the wily qualities of watercolour , of shifting light and shifting goalposts.

A beach painting for grey November days

I was experimenting. With ways to work from travel photos, freehand watercolour  and taking inspiration from one of my favourite watercolour illustrators, Dorry Spikes, without well, you know. Wholesale thievery. Which I hope I didn't do completely. 

I seem to be quite glued to accurate drawing with perspective and all. Maddening, since I'm not even interested in making that kind of picture. I'd much rather not draw what I'm trained to 'see' but it's hard to lose, that traditional way working. So here, to come up with something looser, I just put in few lines for the beach and the mountain, and then started populating the page with teeny houses, beachgoers and agave plants at random and freehand over a few days. Like a jigsaw puzzle, and equally satisfying.

The painting is based on photos I took of Praia de Sao Juliao, a beach town about an hour's drive from Sintra, Portugal. I have a fantasy about spending a time in simple seaside place like this one summer.

Oh, how I would read on my shaded lounger, take early swims in the tidal pool before anyone was up, sift through the flotsam and jetsom, make friends with the cats outside the beach restaurant. Where I'd have the set lunch every day. Ah. To be in one simple place and learn its rhythms intimately, to watch the families and locals come and go. With the gentle Mediterranean sunshine all the while.

Everything Changes/Goodbye Summer

Hey, where did the summer go? Seriously. I painted this before heading to Turkey for a week of swims in the Med (which I am deeply grateful for, for sure). The holiday ended, in my case, in a stinking summer cold which meant I was indoors for 10 days watching the sunlight dancing in our London garden. 

A few more weeks of answering emails and next thing I know is I'm packing for a ten day vipassana meditation sit in Herefordshire. Reluctantly. I wanted to bail and seriously considered a last minute cancellation. 

So much time away. So many things to take care of, so much to enjoy and do as an illustrator, as a social media trainer, as a wife and friend. So much on in London.

I got on the train though. And, by the end of the ten days, I was super glad that I did.

I wish I could say it was a time of thoughts landing as softly as autumn leaves on the forest floor, that ten day sit. In the interests of full disclosure though, my mind was more like a bucking filly, clanging into every thought, kicking and rearing at every unpleasant sensation for most of the time. Nothing special about that, I guess.

So much wildness in the mind is revealed when all else is stilled, when life is lived with an inwards focus, sitting in meditation for many, many hours a day as is the programme on mediation courses in the tradition of U Ba Khin and SN Goenka. Unpleasant sensations abound, to put it mildly.

But there are breaks, respite is possible. The woods are my place to soften focus, to loosen my grip a bit. As I walk in the heightened state of sensory awareness that slowly arises on about day 3 or so, I find there is something new to see each time.

Small things: the moss among tree roots, tiny scratch marks around mouse holes in the ground, a pale spider, backlit in the early morning sun, waiting, just waiting in absolute spider trust for the next sustaining moment to unfold.

Tiny, slow changes also, things I'd usually miss completely: over the ten days, small patches of yellowing leaves turn here and there, the beginning of autumn. Apples ripening.

Time to let go of the summer, smilingly, as our meditation teacher, Goenkaji, would say.

Of course, there are also wonderful moments: long, deep, spontaneous in-breaths, the gentle blessing of Hereford rain on the roof of the meditation hall. Space between interior conversations expanding, softly. The capacity for healing opening up, compassion and joy arising as thoughts began to land more gently. 

Thoughts that gradually lose their importance and sense of permanence, no more and no less worth clinging to than the yellowing leaves floating onto the woodland floor. Everything changes, all in a flux, all in a flow (in Goenkaji's words).
 

More information on 10 day Vipassana sits in Herefordshire and worldwide is here - do feel free to contact me if you're at all curious to know more. It's the best gift you can possibly think of giving to yourself all year. Of that I am sure.

Summer Fruit

Fruit is more delicious in sunny countries. Fact. 

This was a plate from one of the beach cafes in Kas,Turkey, where I spent a week with family in July - my parents from Cape Town via Istanbul, my sister and niece from Stockholm, and us direct from Gatwick.

The two nicest beaches in Kas are tiny pebbly coves snug in a peninsula still covered in  olive groves on crumbling terraces just behind the rows of cabanas and deck chairs. I loved the fruit plates, which can be delivered to your deckchair, perhaps with a little glass of tea, Turkish style. Luxury indeed.

Getting there involves a ferry ride across a turquoise bay, so the deal is you have lunch and snacks from the cafe, and spend the the whole day on the loungers, or, if you can bag one early, a cabana strewn with cushions, on the rocks. Perfect for lying in the sun, contemplating the mountains opposite, and wondering whether to have a swim or not.

There wasn't all that much time to hang about though, as my little niece had other ideas. Such as being peddled about in a banana boat and making rabbit faces on the rocks. 

Funny how those busy things turn out to be the best bits of the holiday, and the days doing nothing much poolside kinda fade in memory. Ah well. 

August in London, I am unfaithful to you. Give me August on the Med any day. Forty degrees and counting? I can live with that.

nasturtiums snaking through the garden

I'm so happy with all the surprise seedlings that came up in our garden this year. Nasturtiums, feverfew, lemon balm and poppies all germinated from the lovely compost we got from St Mary's Secret Garden.

There's definitely something to be said for buying compost from an organic garden tended with love - if wildness and weeds are your thing. 

Plenty inspiring to draw, for one thing. I couldn't not draw these guys, I so love the leaf shape and the snaky thing they do.

There were huge drifts of nasturtiums in the garden of my childhood in Cape Town, and I loved hunting for the special ones - the dark reds or wildly flame patterned oranges - to add to the bunches my mum would pick and arrange in a tangle in a glass vase.  

Funny that we never thought to save the seeds, but I guess to us they were just weeds growing on the edge of our sprawling garden, not so much ornamental flowers in specific colours. 

Marker pen on paper plus digital drawing.

Evenings in the garden, painting...

Super excited to be teaching a series of workshops in St Mary's Secret Garden over in my 'hood in Haggerston, East London. I spent a day putting up posters and talking to folks out and about, turned out to be a surprisingly fun thing to do. The sun is out, which majorly helps. 

I hope my poster adds a bit of flowery softness to the riot of very cool poster designs out there, which are in a league of their own over here in hipster central. Apart from making people want to sign on up, of course!

So if you live nearby or know anyone else who might be keen, spread the word. Registration and more details are over here on the eventbrite page.

fledgling sweet peas

Soon, if those stealthy slugs don't win and our cat the badass doesn't dig all of them up, there will be sweet peas winding their way up twigs in our teeny garden. Even a few straggly sweet pea flowers  smell so very fab, so much like proper summer. For now, I get to draw the shoots while they are still tame and safe. 

Marker pen and pen and ink.

midsummer wildflowers

I picked these in Hackney Marsh on Monday, almost in the shadow of the barrier around the Olympics/Radio 1 concert venue which is all fenced up and ready for weekend. Urban pastoral perhaps, but I love the wildness of the marshes, so close to where we live in Hackney, East London. Long may they stay that way. I had to paint quickly - these guys wilt, or the petals drop off, in no time at all. Happy midsummer!

summer holiday wildflowers

Painted one rainy morning in Blekinge, Southern Sweden, in a teeny wooden housie with a red wooden table and chairs, listening to a Beethoven piano concerto on an old skool crackling radio. Oak trees, wildflower meadows and murder slugs just outside the door, the placid Baltic and my sis's summer house a two minute walk away.

early summer