Cosmic Seedling inked & finished for now

Cosmic Seedling Mo 20
graphite, watercolour and ink
H 29.7cm x W 21.2cm
it’s finished for now, in 2 hours I am going to have cataract surgery on my left eye
it will be interesting to see how the colours look with renovated vision
the right eye will be done in a few months
seems appropriate that my name came up on the public wait list for surgery in this year of 2020 vision
and to put this in perspective Tim Minchin wrote this song

cosmic seedling coloured in… it needs ink…

Cosmic Seedling Mo 20
graphite and watercolour
Cosmic Seedling Mo 20
graphite drawing inverted
Cosmic Seedling Mo 20
graphite
I like this version best, they all print out fine will post the printouts off to my friend Pete tomorrow for his book and see what he thinks!
PS it needs ink…
looking and seeing where the edges need to be brought forward & pushed back
this will work!

to ink or not to ink that is the question…

working on this illustration for my friend & plant guru extraordinaire Peter Webb‘s forthcoming book
“How plants are Born; a story about relationships”
levels adjusted to sharpen the detail
inverted
thinking of adding some ink to emphasize the edges
and perhaps a bit of hand colouring next but it may well be best just left as is…
thank goodness for scanners!

dreaming of Blue Tibetan Poppies

 

My friend Pete Webb plant guru extraordinaire sent this magical photo and wrote these poetic words feeding my dream of growing the beautiful but notoriously temperamental Blue Tibetan Poppies when we move to the Blue Mountains…
“Meconopsis I saw in the mountains of Tibet. I asked the spirits to lead me to them in my walks in the mountains and they are not a deception and all of the enchantment you may already feel in your body. Each one a little different from the other. The same blue, yet having said that, you as an artist know that blue is never the same; some always escapes to the sky.
In Tibet it is so incredible as there are basically no trees and you feel the sky touch the earth. Where Meconopsis grow, at least the last ones I saw, you/we are actually sandwiched between sky and earth as there is less oxygen and you have to go slow or spin out with a terrible thumping headache.
But yes, find a happy lineage to get seed from and put the seed in the refrigerator. Tell them some cold weather stories when you sow them and then sneak out to see them when they are in flower. They are fugitives like blue.
Thanks for being you
Love Pete
PS. The first one I saw; the last ones I can’t find the photos at the moment but I will. Just to wet your whistle. They are more robust at times. Here with some Artemisias and a Larkspur”

a bag full of memories

this bag full of memories for my friend Julie is almost finished, every knot holds a story
the indigo dyed hand woven linen & moons are by Ulrike Bogdan
I started working on this bag on April 24th and have worked on it for a few hours every day, it has gone through several ugly stages where I had to reconsider what I was trying to do
Jude Hill’s good words after the first ugly phase have helped so much
“ha, the ugly phase is just an in-between we can’t quite understand yet.”
you may have noticed in the first photo I am rereading “The Education of a Gardener” by Russell Page first published in 1962
one of the most beautiful and inspiring books about gardening ever written
talking of gardens and well thought out design
Owl Rock went for a walk with us to the wetlands to observe the way the water moves around it
my friend Peter Webb plant guru extraordinaire is writing a book and has asked if I would like to do a few illustrations! When I first met Pete in the 70’s he was the seed collector for the Melbourne Botanic Gardens. I asked him to write a book way back then so I could illustrate it and now I can, it’s a dream come true!
Sydney Park Wetlands has matured beautifully in the time we have lived here in Newtown
love how these old piers add mystery and a sense of spirit to the space
a friendly blue tongue lizard
13 moons arrived in the mail by Glennis Dolce Shibori Girl
these will keep me happily stitching for a good long while
the gardening work is keeping us busy, the walks to the wetlands are helping us stay a bit grounded and the social isolation measures are lifting a bit, still I put some x’s on the floor in the dining room when our friend Richard visited on Saturday for the first time since March, he noticed that they weren’t exactly 1.5 metres so I will measure them up properly for next weekend!

Peter Webb plant guru extraordinaire

Peter Webb is the most connected, intuitive, gentle gardener and artist I know, we first met in the 70’s in Melbourne when he was working as the seed collector for the Botanic Gardens, he showed me how plants communicate and wisely advised to start collecting seeds way back then. The beautiful stained glass windows he designed and made for a friend’s house in the Dandenongs inspired me to start working with glass even though the thought of cutting myself was so scary it took a few years to steel my nerves. Peter has lived in Brazil since the early 80’s collecting seeds and reconnecting people with the land and plants with such deep heart & his partner Bel Cesar.
He gave me these beautiful words half a lifetime ago
“Spirit likes to see us dance on the shifting sands of change”
here’s a link to a public lecture he gave in Senegal earlier this year
Peter Webb RAW Academié Germination
(this lecture is spoken in English with a French translator for the audience, if you want to skip the introduction in French, Peter begins his talk at 7:20 minutes)
love how he says in closing that the only hope for our world is art, not just in the galleries but on the street, in our lives. How we need to be creative, to trust our sensitivities to help make sense of our world, to understand each other and create a way to heal ourselves and our beautiful broken world.

namaste

A treasured memory with Peter was helping out on his wild block of land in the Otways of Victoria in about 1978. Earlier in the year he had a local bulldozer driver push in a road with an area cleared & leveled for the tiny wooden house he built by hand. A bunch of us young hippies camped there one weekend to help sow an acre of meadow garden to revegetate the building site. We woke at dawn to meditate with the rising sun, then broadcast buckets of mixed flower and herb seeds harrowing them in by harnessing ourselves to long pieces of wood with nails for tines. We finished the last of the harrowing just on sunset with the Full Moon rising as a gentle rain came down to water in all the seeds, one of the most magical experiences of my life.