Last Post Till 2010 - Happy Christmas Everyone

This is my last blog of 2009 so I will be back in the New Year. Have a fabulous Christmas and New Year everyone. (I will be popping in for visits though)

I have recently been introduced to a fascinating new leisure activity called Geocaching. It is basically hiding and seeking treasure. A little box is filled with "treasure" such as coins, spoons, badges, tiny dolls or anything else you have to hand. It is then buried or placed somewhere like a tree stump and the details are recorded at the Geocache website for others to locate. You need a GPS unit to find the location within 50 feet or so and then follow the clues left by the hider. Once you have found the treasure you record your name on the paper in the box, remove an item and replace it with one of your own and re-bury or hide for the next searcher to find. You then log on the website that you have found the item. Sounds simple - not always. We spent our second time hunting in local woodland, ferreting around under holly bushes and scraping over fallen leaves. We found three out of five caches though and got plenty of fresh air and exercise. The caches are always placed on public land and have different degrees of difficulty and any age group can join in . There are thousands of caches all over the country (and all over the world in fact). You can also elect to bury your own for others to find. I love it. You can find the website here if you want to take a look.

Autumn Bird is a digitally coloured drawing.

This is quite an old pen and ink study of a woodland copse near my home.

This is Party Girl in ink and watercolour.

The two seasonal lovelies below are by Florida artist Robin Maria Pedrero. I love the style of pastel shades and incomplete colouring that she has used here. Gorgeous work. You can find Robin here on her website and here on her Etsy shop. She also blogs here.

Partridge In A Pear Tree

Fancy Partridge In A Pear Tree

I found some gorgeous rag rugs when I was looking for santa gifts the other day. The site is called the Star Rug Company and you can find it here. They have some beautiful primitive type designs. I couldn't resist the sheep with a bird on its back...who can?

Lazy Sheep

and a couple of lovely seasonal rugs below

Santa and Reindeer Rug

Mr Snowman

I said I would post a photo of all the Christmas cards when they were completed and here it is. There are 111 cards here and they took a looooong time to do. I hope the recipients like them.

I took this a couple of days on our geocaching adventures. These are the sort of surroundings where a lot of caches are hidden. Great fun, healthy exercise and lots of tree photo opportunities.

I love this picture of a tree skeleton that I took a couple of years ago. It really showed white like old bones in the sunlight. It is almost sculptural in its beauty.

A final leaf caught on a branch.

I found some lovely work by ceramic artist Sue Tirrell the other day. Sue is a ceramic sculptor and potter working in Montana, USA who also teaches workshops. She has a very wide range of her work on her website here. Her inspirations are western art, contemporary and folk art. I love her almost linocut type images on her platters and pots. Very folky and graphic. You can also find her work here at Mudfire and here at Art Fusion.

Bird and Branch Platter

Goose Platter

Red Rooster Pitcher

Rabbit Platter

The three lovely etchings below are by UK artist and printmaker Laurie Rudling who works from her studio in Norwich. She admits to being an artist of landscape and the built environment. She produces etchings and collographs and has an lovely collection on her website here. I have seen some of her work in a local gallery and it is very subtle and beautiful.

Midwinter Calm

Rooks

Winter I

I found this wonderful book the other day about Textiles of the World. It is a large book and is jam packed with gorgeous colour photography and drawings. I have posted a few pages from the book but they don't do it justice. It covers all sorts of different patterns, fabrics, methods of production, tie dying, batik, embroidery, applique, molas. The list is endless. So much colourful inspiration I am overwhelmed. It is published by Thames and Hudson and is written by Catherine Legrand. A really monumental work. It is the sort of book you can dip into anytime when you have a few minutes. I have added this to my very extensive Amazon Wish List.

Molas

Indian Textiles

Guatemalan Textiles

Woven Textile Bags

Hester Cox is a UK artist/printmaker who produced the beautiful prints below. She lives in the lovely North Yorkshire area of Masham where she holds printmaking workshops. She is heavily influenced by the English landscape, myths and symbolism. I particularly like her work on the subject of hares - always close to my heart. She has named her artwork by the old names given to the hare in a fifteenth century hunting poem which has been translated by Seamus Heaney. You can find it here. It makes fascinating reading. I produced a hare drawing years ago with a lot of these names around the outside of the circle containing the hares. My favourites are: The Dew-Flirt, The Furze-Cat and The Purblind. You can find Hester's website here with lots of examples of her work.

Swift As A Hare

Protected

Rookery

The Lurker

The Messenger

Heather Ritchie

Still making Christmas cards. Time is fairly whizzing along now. We are in the middle of November already. I am sure November only started last week...I could be wrong but that is what it feels like. We have had lots of rain and gales lately and I am having to clear out the wet birdfood and dry the table every couple of days. After all what self respecting bird would want porridge?

I enjoyed drawing the deer in last week's post so I thought I would do a few more. To simplify things I have used the same image as one of the deer last week. I tried lots of variations of different colours and shades but I thought this one worked the best.

I also thought I would do a white background to see which I preferred. I like them both.

Matilda and Ruby

My featured artist this week is a very lovely lady and friend called Heather Ritchie. We first met years ago when staying at her B&B in Reeth, North Yorks. We had stayed the year before and Heather was away but her husband knew we were interested in arts and crafts and let us have a peek into her fascinating studio. We were inspired by all the wonderfully coloured rugs she had created just from strips of wool fabric. You can view more of her rugs here.

Heather is a very well known and respected rug maker and teacher and travels all over the world holding workshops and displaying and selling her rugs. She even made a lovely rug inspired by one of my paintings. The photos below cannot show the tiny details within the very large rugs and the wonderful shades of wool she uses which she dyes herself. She uses her local landscapes of Yorkshire and her daily life and memories to create the rugs. My brother's partner Lesley is in the process of writing a book about Heather's life in rugs which is to be published next year. Can't wait for that.

She has also started a not-for-profit organisation called Rug Aid which is dedicated to teaching blind people in The Gambia to create their own rag rugs and sell them to provide living funds. On the 21 November the organisation is holding a Rug Rave in which groups or single people can participate to either make their own rugs or raise money in other ways for the organisation. You can read about that on the website too.

Heather's Studio in Reeth

Guiding Light rug

Bearing Gifts rug showing Heather carrying her sheep

The Ha'penny Ferry Rug

Rug of Fleet, Heather's Dog

Christmas Eve Rug

These two lovely delicate etchings below are by printmaker Flora McLachlan. The images are very magical and fairytale-like and totally mysterious. I love her work. You can see more of it a quite a few places on the Internet including Art of Illustration, (you will have to go to the bottom of the page and enter Flora's name - sorry, I cannot link to the right page for some reason, but there are three pages to look at, here at Sanders of Oxford, and here at Artweeks Gallery.

The Flowering

The Wood Pool

So much lovely autumn scenery around at the moment. Our weather has been very changeable lately. We have had lots of mists, a few frosts and now we are being battered by gale force winds and rain which is all coming from the south. I expect there will be far fewer leaves on the trees after this weekend.

If you like your ceramics quirky with wildlife on them you cannot get better than Anna Lambert. Anna is an English ceramacist living in Yorkshire who has work in many galleries and craft shops. She has a huge display of her work here at the Junction Workshop. The cockerel below is actually a tureen and has feathers for a ladle. Intriguing.

Bowl With Field Birds

Oat Jar With Herring Gull

Cockerel Tureen

Have you ever noticed what long eyelashes cows and horses have. Seems a little unfair really when they are not the least bothered about what they look like. You will need to click on the pictures to see them in more detail.

Anne Anderson is a Northern Irish artist and illustrator who now works mostly in printmaking. You can find more examples of Anne's beautiful work here at Artzyard Gallery, here at Seacourt Print workshop and here you will find a site called No Alibis which is producing a limited edition book called "The Book of Lost Things" which she is illustrating.The three lovely images below are her work.

Love Birds Collograph

Prevailing Wind

Scrabo Through The Window

I am always on the lookout for interesting and attractive cards. Christmas cards always appeal to me if they feature partridges in pear trees. These were buy one, get one free, so I got a couple of each design.

I came across a poetry book in a charity shop the other day and it is one I have wanted for a while. It is A Shropshire Lad by AE Housman. This particular copy is very special because it is illustrated by one of my favourite wood engravers - Agnes Miller Parker. Parker was Scottish and quite famous for her book illustrations. Her work is so beautifully elegant and rhythmic with well defined textures.

This is a well-known but very beautiful poem of Housman's. If you click on the image you can see it large enough to read. Housman was an English classical scholar who died in 1936.