I’m very pleased to have my “Dancing at Sunset” image in the lovely Earth Pathways Diary 2015! I’ve just received my complimentary copy :)
This has proved to be a popular image; it also features in a small article about me in the Spring edition of Ingenue magazine along with a few other favourites including The Long Man of Wilmington and Havergate Hare: 
I’m happy that some of my images are in a recent edition of The Mother magazine too:
This is becoming another year of trees for me – and for others too. I came across a brief video about women and trees made by Megan Hollingsworth. Megan is the creator of Extinction Witness. She is a poet, writer, dancer, mother and compassion activist. She feels passionately about stopping the destruction of large forest trees and has set out to create a seven minute film that explores this destruction and how it relates to her healing journey following childhood incest.
“VIRGIN is a 7-minute film that tells the stories of grandfather tree, a giant sequoia cut for show in 1853, and a woman healing from early childhood incest in 2013. The film uses poetry in the form of spoken word, dance, imagery, and song to weave these stories through to the roots of violence toward all that shines with grace.”
To help fund the production of the film VIRGIN and find out more go here.
I have been working on my own mini video that involves trees, woods and movement. Coming soon!
Fado, which means “fate”, has obscure origins – in back street cafes, bars and the alleys of the poorer parts of Lisbon perhaps. Some say it began with lonely voyages when sailors would sing of their homesickness and loves left behind. Whatever it’s origins, there is a strong association with the sea, and with that loss, longing and nostagia.
Below are two illustrations inspired by Fado. Initially I was going to draw in blue pen but decided that I wanted a darker, richer illustration with more depth, so I chose mixed media using black and blues, ink and watercolour pencil with collage. Woman of the Song was created a while ago and in greens; she was a woman draped in greenery similar to my Sleeping in the Forest illustration. I wasn’t happy with it then, but felt better adding words and a blue overlay of ink to create a woman in mourning. Not all fadistas are women of course, but mine will join my other women portraits and pictures. Sometime I’ll work harder at depicting men, which I don’t do very often :)
My recent visit to Portugal has left me with many impressions. We stayed at Pego Ferreiro in two cabins, the Boar Hide at first followed by The River Lodge. 
The Boar Hide is shrouded in trees and overlooks a glade where wild boar come to forage. We spent some evenings watching the scene silvered by the light of a waxing moon.
But no boar came. By chance, we spotted a family of boar across a vale making their way through boulders and broom scrub while we were out wandering one morning.
Most of my days were spent dawdling by or in the river, watching butterflies and enjoying the peace and beauty of nature. 
But we also went for walks, tended the fire – The smells of woodsmoke and yellow bloom linger in my memory – cut wood, filtered water, showered in sun-warmed water and read; heard nightingales, cicadas, frogs in the depositos and the river that never slept.
The River Lodge is a tented “cabin” perched on a platform on rocks overlooking the River Sever below. The river suffused my days and dreams. The moon embedded overhead, shone like a pearl and spilt into the waters below; vapour trails of planes became waves across the shores of the night sky. Mayflies, butterflies, frogs and snakes came by day and at dusk, crepuscular toads crept too inquisitively close to the fire.
One day, we found the bones of an animal and wondered whether they belonged to a boar. I sent photos to the experts to find out. They’re bones of a horse apparently… I think of some poor, stray animal lost in the hills and vales without a rider…
From Pego Ferreiro we went to Coimbra and Porto. I found myself atuned to urban nature in the cities, the wildflowers growing in gutters, the screeching swifts scything the air and the scimitor wings of a kite over the rooftops.
We paused in cool, shadowy cloisters festooned with moss and algae and the odd green man.
I loved the fading, crumbling shabbiness mixed with the grandeur of the past. Blue tiles and murals were everywhere – like this one of Jesus on a kite on the facade of Carmo Church in Porto. Why blue? The cobalt blue of porcelain… I am drawn to blue. The Portugese call them Azulejos, from the abrabic word Zellige but so similar to azul, the word for blue.
Fado leaked into my conciousness; it strained from the speakers of a souvenir shop selling fake tiles and a couple played and sang outside a restaurant down some narrow street where children played and fruit boxes spilled over the pink, ceramic cobbles and I caught my passing reflection in boutique windows. There was a Fado Centre with plush seats where Fadistas performed each evening; a strange, bronze statue of a woman with the body of a guitar stood beside one of Coimbra’s old, city walls and closeby our favourite square where a lame siamese cat slipped the affections of passersby. I feel drawn to Fado, the sentiment, the nostagia, the longing or as the Portugese describe it, “saudade” – a word with no real translation. I can see how some of my drawings hint at the same pathos – like Embracing the Waves from my Turtle Dreaming story – the longing, the sea, the loss…
If a gull would come
Bring me Lisboa sky
In the drawing it would make
In that sky where the look
is a wing that can’t fly
Weakens and falls to the sea
What a perfect heart
In my chest would beat
My love in your hand
In those hands
Where my heart fitted perfectly
…….
Words taken from a Fado song with no title.
My little booklet, “Goddesses of River, Sea and Moon” is now available to buy on Folksy here. It covers the mythology of 24 goddesses from around the world, each with a detailed pen and ink illustration. And now I’m working on a colour version!
I stumbled on this inspiring film, Falling, directed and performed by Ayelen Liberona. It explores the natural world combining forest, water and dance in a strange and interesting way :)
I am, once again, in the forest. An aqua forest… of dreams… caught up in an entanglement of roots, alert to the breath and whisper of rock, of clod, of underground river.
As in the poem, Lost, by David Wagnor, I must listen… stand still… let the forest find me.
Lost
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.— David Wagoner
New Year and change. Letting the silt of the old year settle; lingering in shifting currents. I took a wander through a nearby wood, the sun, bright, cold and clear through tangled hands of branches, taut and white like a drum in the sky. A forest seeded in my mind…
Before Christmas, I listened to a play by Kneehigh Theatre on Radio 4 called “The Wild Bride”. The story was based on the fairy tale, The Handless Maiden and an overview of the tale can be read on the theatre website here.
In the tale a poor forester accidently sells his daughter to the Devil. When she goes feral and becomes a wild thing in the forest, I began to listen a bit more intently;
“Her dreams became deep rooted and full of forest”.
Wild or feral people, animals and characters intrigue me right now:
– The Thing in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast… “something human that stood dappled with leaf-shaped shadows, a child, with its thick hair hacked off close to its head and the face freckled like a bird’s egg. The body, slender, indeed thin, appeared, when the child began to move, to be without weight.”
– the wild child in David Malouf‘s An Imaginary Life… “He has not yet captured his individual soul out of the universe about him. His self is outside him, its energy distributed among the beasts and birds whose life he shares, among leaves, water, grasses, clouds, thunder – whose existence he can be at home in because they hold, each of them, some particle of his spirit.”
Perhaps they represent a freer, more primitive self, a closeness to the wild spirit and nature we once had millenia back. Perhaps they simply remind us of the untamed child of our own past, I may have been somehow closer to nature then.
I took a biro, a large sheet of brown paper and inspired by Eva Jospin, doodled a forest. Here is my first Forest on Brown Paper and a photoshop-inverted one because I love blue so much. Wild child sketches follow.
