nicola bayley

Month of Softies: May Flowers

Posted by hil

The theme for Month of Softies this month was ‘May Flowers’. My first thought was of daffodils, as I remember loving how they came up all over the place in lawns in the chilly spring in York and Cambridge; and I thought I might try to make Talitha, the brave daffodil princess from the book ‘The Mouldy’ by William Mayne, and illustrated by Nicola Bayley:

talitha

Then I decided to consider Australian May flowers. There isn’t much flowering here in May, except some irises which usually flower in July, but this year are muddled by our late winter and drought. But there are a few winter-flowering eucalypt trees, so I started planning a red gumnut flower fairy. I thought the stamens could make a kind of drop skirt, or hat fringe, but in the end decided that I liked the flower just as a flower.

Red flowering gum-2

Its quite big; including the leaves it measures just over 40cm (16in). For the stamens I used lycra, an idea that I had previously found worked well for making small octopus tentacles! I like the soft colours, too. There are few more pictures:

 

A puppet production of ‘The Mousehole Cat’

Posted by hil

By chance I discovered that the British puppetry company Puppetcraft have done a puppet show of The Mousehole Cat, one of the books by Nicola Bayley that I mentioned in my previous post. These are their carved wooden puppets of the legendary Tom Bawcock and his cat,

Mousehole

who ‘saved the villagers of Mousehole from starvation by putting to sea in a fearsome gale on the day before Christmas eve and catching seven sorts of fish, enough for everyone to make and enjoy a life-saving, local delicacy – starry gazey pie’. The pictures and reviews on their site, make it look like a great production, and they have a recipe for starry gazey pie, too. Apparently Tom Bawcock’s Eve is still celebrated in Mousehole on December 23rd each year.

Calendars, Georgia O’Keefe, and Nicola Bayley

Posted by hil

This year I ordered a Georgia O’Keefe 2005 Calendar online, having been a slowcoach and letting January slip by without getting a new calendar for the year. It arrived last Friday, and it’s beautiful:

Iris1_1

I do love her paintings, particularly her later more abstract landscapes.I used to like getting a UNICEF wall calendar each year, the kind that has drawings done by children from all over the world, but they were all gone. So was everything except dog or cat breed calendars, and even for half-price, and if I were obsessed with siamese cats, I don’t want to look at everyday siamese cat photographs all year. In fact I’ve never really understood why so many calendars have so little visual variety, except that I suspect they provide an easy avenue for Christmas shoppers, who can think ‘Oh, Auntie Mary loves cats, this will do for her’.Calendars that feature artistic interpretations of a single topic stand a better chance of being interesting, as long as you particularly like the style in which they are done, or there is some variation of style in the 12 illustrations. For example, in 2003 I had a calendar I loved, a cat calendar by Nicola Bayley. Its selection includes drawings from Bayley’s books The Necessary Cat: A Celebration of Cats in Picture and Word, Fun with Mrs Thumb, Katje, the Windmill Cat, and The Mousehole Cat, and although there are cats in all of them, and they all show Bayley’s exquisite attention to detail and the decorative, they tell so many different stories.

Bayley2

Nicola Bayley’s drawings have been a favourite of mine since my children were small; we had two of her books: The Mouldy, and The Patchwork Cat (written by William Mayne). When I was the illustrator for the Republic of Pemberley in the 90’s, the cat drawing that I did for the Portrait of our Community board was inspired by those in The Patchwork Cat.