The Grand Tour Part Three: ICELAND!

Part One: USA

Part Two: Dartmoor

As usual, this is a best-bits version of the trip, where “best-bits” = anything that stayed still long enough to be sketched. You should be able to see a larger version of the pictures by clicking on them, which in most cases will take you through to their Flickr page.

And so: Iceland.

The Light Grey Art Labs residency was wonderful: small, active (very physically active!), interested, entertaining. And Iceland was… I couldn’t process it at first.

I spent my day before the residency looking around the Culture House and worrying about whether I would be able to work out how to process the lava fields I’d seen that morning on the way from the airport.

Because Iceland is, above all, an exceptionally new country. It is horrifyingly young, geologically and in terms of its civilisation. Journey to the Centre of the Earth makes sense here. We all got the theme for Jurassic Park stuck in our heads. Parts seemed like a recently terraformed planet, the rocks are raw and rough and new, steam pours out of the ground.

They didn’t get people until 800AD (give or take a few hermits), and didn’t use wheeled vehicles before the late 19th century.

We looked at sulfurous pits of boiling mud and climbed down lava tubes studded with ice and alive with spectral mists.

There were geysers, and everywhere people made little piles of stones.

Brown stones on clifftops, white stones in niches and arranged in little standing spirals below basalt cliffs.

(This evidence of people marking, decorating, understanding, playing was one of my favourite things).

The lakes steamed. We scrambled over crevasses and into ravines.

We marvelled at the pleated fans of basalt columns, drew volcanic plains and details of moss. Climbed. Watched. Took photos. Thought.

It was wonderful travelling with other artists. Learning from each other over wine in our cabin on Blueberry Hill.

We all approached work and landscape differently, but it was grand to be with people who understood spending half an hour recording the texture of a rock.

Or marvelling at light, or pointing out the rare welcome smoothness of a glacial stone after the raw sharpness of all the others.

We fell in love with moss.

 

It wasn’t like a fairytale.

Fairytales feel older than Iceland does.

It has fairytales, of course, but we had to learn to look at the land differently. And you start to understand where fairytales come from.

Growing up in Euro-centric Australia, you know there’s ancient and continuous human history but don’t really see it. We’re not taught to see it. We see European history, barely over 2 centuries of it, and then we go to Europe and envy them their castles and forts and standing stones.

Then to go to Iceland, and see their European history is longer than ours, but not by that much, relatively.

And before that? There’s no weight of human story.

I hadn’t realised that I was aware of that, until I came home.

But Iceland was exceptionally beautiful, full of curious microcosms and great raw new-birthed slabs and extrusions of uneroded mountain.

Ash-soft plains.

New-cut gorges.

Horizon-capping glaciers.

Sheep and puffins.

Then I was back in Reykjavik for one more day: museums and movies.

Then on to Oslo.

How to: Make a spare ribbon bookmark for your journal

This is for the type of notebook with a spine you can look down when the book is open (hardcover or case bound).

1. Cut the cardboard to go down the spine: Cut a strip of light card. It should be about half the height of the book, and just wide enough to slip down the spine when the book is open. 1cm worked for this Moleskine journal. If in doubt, cut it a little bit too wide, then trim it down until it fits.
2. Cut the bookmark ribbon: Use a ribbon that is narrower than the thickness of the closed book. Cut a piece that is at least 6cm longer than the book (A bit over 2 inches). I like to keep the ribbon long, then trim it to length when I’m finished (cut it at an angle, to stop fraying). You can also use more than one ribbon, if you want lots of bookmarks.
3. Attach the ribbon to the card: Attach your ribbon(s) to the top of the strip of card. Overlap the ends, rather than matching them up (see the photos above) – basically, the ribbon should come off the card like a whip off a handle. Staple ribbon and card together, then wrap the join with masking or duct tape for durability.
4. Attach bookmark to book: Open the book flat, then slide the strip of card all the way into the hollow spine, leaving the ribbon hanging out. When the book is closed, it should hold the card snugly in place.
5. Reusing the bookmark: The bookmark should pull out easily when you want to add it to a new journal.

(Edited for clarity)

(Edited again to add: This also works with multiple ribbons. My current version has four.)

The Grand Tour Part Two: Dartmoor

Part One: USA

Part Three: Iceland!

As usual, this is a best-bits version of the trip, where “best-bits” = anything that stayed still long enough to be sketched. You should be able to see a larger version of the pictures by clicking on them, which in most cases will take you through to their Flickr page.

I was on a round-the-world ticket so I guess that is why I had to sleep in Helsinki airport between NYC and Heathrow.

Once landed, I picked up my hire car and drove directly to Dartmoor – unexpectedly passing Stonehenge in the evening sunlight. I spent the whole week in one town and it was of course wonderful, because it’s the sort of town where even the local scandals feel like the start of a Midsomer Murders episode, and it is full of many friends who are busy writing and painting and making things.

I was there a few days earlier than originally planned, but Terri soon found me hanging over this gate, drawing sheep.

I spent my first few nights at Greenbank B&B, a 10 minute walk out of town, and I highly recommend it. They had poultry and a bad-tempered parrot and dogs and a great big Aga stove and lent me Cold Comfort Farm.

Some notes on Cold Comfort Farm.

I went back to visit several times after moving on.

And this was the road along the back fence.

When drawing English plants, Liberty prints suddenly make a lot more sense.

 

Sheep-shearing at Greenbank.

And one night, on sunset, I walked up the top of Maldon Hill barefoot in the cold golden light, which was chilly but felt important, especially as I was thinking about Picnic at Hanging Rock for academic reasons at the time.

Here is Terri’s beloved Tilly, being mystical in the woods.

 

For Ruth’s birthday, we went to a ’70s space disco in a Devon field.

After Greenbank, I moved in with the lovely Elizabeth-Jane, harpist and dealer in sugar-mice.

Her house was full of music and books, and one evening we went down to the woods where Alex was living and owls hooted overhead.

Also, I finally visited Chagfarm!

At the farm I drew goats and pigs (for reference), and one evening I drove out over the moors and drew the Dartmoor sheep and ponies.

Showing my sitters their portraits.

You have to drive carefully over the moor – the sheep and ponies are unruffled by traffic.

I did leave Chagford once to go to Moretonhampstead and see the Widdershins exhibition with Virginia (whose hand and art are shown here).

One of the many things I love is that you can just go… walking out over the fields and the moor: up behind the studios with Terri and Tilly, over the common with Alan and Virginia after tea, wandering over to Todd’s for maps, traipsing out by moonlight with Elizabeth-Jane in search of standing stones which look deceptively like sheep.

One last sketch of goats and parking inspectors, then off to Heathrow again. The last song to play on the radio as I reached the airport was, suitably, “Jerusalem.”

Then, off to Reykjavik.

Next: Iceland!

The Grand Tour Part One: The USA

Part Two: Dartmoor

Part Three: Iceland

As usual, this is a best-bits version of the trip, where “best-bits” = anything that stayed still long enough to be sketched. You should be able to see a larger version of the pictures by clicking on them, which in most cases will take you through to their Flickr page.

So: Once upon a time it was almost winter in Brisbane, as you can tell by… the shawl on the left hand page, I guess. Then I flew north. I am reliably informed that was the only cold week Brisbane had this winter.

At the airport I drew various hi-vis dramas out on the tarmac. This is one of my favourite things to draw.

On the aeroplane, I drew Cinderella-Die Hard mashups but that is for another post.

In LA, I stayed with Katharine (aka The Fictator: a lot of you don’t know her but you should) and in a surprise to absolutely no-one we talked about books and stories and old movies. She was the best person to stay with in LA because she actively loves its geology, geography, history and likes driving. She took me to very odd museums, such as the cumulatively bewildering Museum of Jurassic Technology which feels like it was created by the protagonists of Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum and had Borges in the bookstore.

We also went to the Last Bookstore.

California is full of palm trees. Someone should have warned me. I got Josh Ritter’s California stuck in my head.

 

NEW YORK! I like New York. I like the New York in which my friends live. Ellen and Delia sent me to the theatre (Something Rotten and Fun Home, the latter with Eliza and Karen), took me to the theatre (Shuffle Along) and to Klezmer concerts. I accidentally wandered into a theatre reading.

I ate pastry with editors and lunches with art directors and found my pictures at the Society of Illustrators! (Thanks Irene, Miriam and Christine!
Genevieve took me to the Museum of the Moving Image and (almost as importantly) a grilled cheese cafe. We both promptly downloaded Ginger Rogers and the Mystery of the Scarlet Cloak.

 

Then a final evening of wine and chocolate among the New York rooftops before I caught the train to Massachusetts to stay with Kelly and Gavin.

We had a lot of pool parties in Massachusetts. And writing, of course! It was a pretty productive week: workshopping novels and reading manuscripts and finishing illustrations off for Small Beer Press. I also met Cassie’s Scottish Fold, Maggie, a beautiful creature who regarded me with deep suspicion. And of course the writing barn which is even prettier than this article makes out.

 

This were some of my notes from a workshop with Holly.

Then: Readercon! It was my first Readercon, and I had a grand time, catching up with and meeting many very excellent people and lying around talking about theatre and Sayers, Broadway and Dunnett. If I try to list everyone I will (a) sound like I’m namedropping and (b) forget people.

I moderated two panels, was on a third and gave a reading from my Masters novella-in-progress.

And the next day, I left for England.

Next: Dartmoor

Dancing, and ducks: Sketchbook update

I frequently post pictures of my sketchbooks-in-progress on Facebook, Twitter etc, but hadn’t realised how long it has been since I uploaded the scanned pages! The sketchbooks themselves were taking longer to complete, as well, since if I wasn’t in the office I was working on commissions. But I’m catching up now!

Here’s a taste, with some dancers from late 2014.

(Clicking on the photos of the full pages will take you to the Flickr page, which should let you see a larger version).

Ducks are always rewarding.

American Sketchbook 2014 Part 4 – New York again

Note: If you’d like to see more detail, just click on an image. You should go through to its Flickr page where you can look at a larger version of it.

The previous parts of the report are at:

• Part 1 – New York, New York
• Part 2 – Boston and Salem
• Part 3 – Western Massachusetts and World Fantasy Convention

And from there, back to New York. I caught a lift with Andrea back to Secaucus Junction, a train to Penn Station quite late in the evening and found a hotel – the Bellclaire, which was quite pleasant.

The next day, I set out for the Museum of Natural History.

It makes for wonderful people watching. Everyone gets so excited about dinosaurs, the children flock to Lonesome George, and people get lost in the anthropological collections.

I got lost in Central Park and rode the carousel (of course) before going to the Society of Illustrators’ Sketch Night.

I am not used to drawing people standing still anymore, and digressed into making notes on the composition of the Leo and Diane Dillon exhibition.

Then it all wound up too quickly. I spent the next few nights visiting Ellen and Delia, with whom I went to see the musical of The Fortress of Solitude, visited Michael Kaluta’s studio (and then got distracted discussing early aviation and obscure films), and went to see several delightful editors at the Tor/Forge offices in the Flatiron building, where I was loaded up with many extraordinarily beautiful books (which have just arrived by post).

And then after viewing Ellen and Delia’s art collection it was, alas, time to sketch people in high-vis at airports again.

There are still some assorted notes and scribbles to put up, but that is the end of the trip.

American Sketchbook 2014 Part 3 – Western Massachusetts and World Fantasy Convention

Note: If you’d like to see more detail, just click on an image. You should go through to its Flickr page where you can look at a larger version of it.

The previous parts of the report are at:

• Part 1 – New York, New York
• Part 2 – Boston and Salem

On to beautiful Northampton, full of authors and illustrators. It is my backup if the plan to become fabulously wealthy and move to Dartmoor falls through.

I arrived in Northampton in time to be swept off to another reading at Mystery on Main in Brattleboro, then off in the other direction for a Halloween  stayed with Small Beer Press, whose house is full of books and art, and we visited the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art.

 

 

Here is the mask, and me in it (in a borrowed dress).

Mo Willems was signing that day. Below is also some guest art by Ursula, who is also the cover artist for  Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #31 (which I am in!).

I also caught up with some local illustrators and artists for a sketching session, and watched several versions of Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad, and tried to climb out of my chair backwards. I was also introduced to The Vampire Diaries.

It was a lovely few days – writing with Kelly and Holly in cafes, being attacked by a sabertooth tiger, visiting the R. Michelson Galleries, which were setting up for an exhibition of Caldecott winners. I saw my first real original Trina Schart Hyman illustrations, and they were from Saint George and the Dragon, too. There were others there, and I saw originals in houses of other people too, but that is my favourite. She is also one of the few illustrators whose originals were roughly the same size of the published work.

 

I went there a couple times, to commune.

Then, on by train to Washington DC and Arlington, for the World Fantasy Convention. I had a brilliant time, met lots of old friends and new ones, and everything in the art show sold(!!). Below, on the left, is the art show setup (Angela Slatter helped me). On the right are sketches from the collections of the Library of Congress, of which we had a tour after Charles Vess gave a talk there. That is, they gave Charles a tour and a few of us tagged along.

Proof I was at the art show, passing myself off as John Picacio.

Sketches from the mass signing event.

Music in stray corners late in the evening. We shared our hotel with the Rolling Thunder convention, who were convivial neighbours. And I slipped out of the convention after art show checkout, but before the banquet, to visit the Andrew Wyeth exhibition “Looking Out, Looking In” at the National Gallery with Irene, Greg and Shena.

I was also on a panel on “Fantasy artists who take up the pen” with Ruth Sanderson, Charles Vess and Greg Manchess, but I do not have any sketches of that.

The Zipsers, who ran the art show, organised a tour of the fabulous Kelly Collection of golden age American illustration: Wyeths and Pyles, Teppers and Leyendeckers, Webbers and Rockwells. Utterly magical – I want to go back and take more notes on how they painted, and particularly on how they told stories, and also the stories which are told about them. Artists are such good story material.

This also meant I saw three generations of Wyeths (NC, Andrew and Jamie) in a week.

Next in the series is Part Four: New York again

———————

This project is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, part of the Department of Science, Information Technology, Innovation and the Arts.

What I Did On My Holidays: Part the Fourth – York, Scotland, London

Note: If you click on a picture, that should take you through to its Flickr page, where you will have an option to view a larger version.

Part One is here: Brisbane Airport and Oslo.

Part Two is here: Dartmoor.

Part Three is here: World Fantasy and Brighton.

Here is a picture of my grace and elegance demonstrated every time I went outside:

In York, I crashed Lisa Hannett’s hotel room, and we wandered the town centre, the Shambles and snickleways, which look like something out of Harry Potter or Disney, only real. We also went to the National Railway Museum which was wonderful. I love the romance of all forms of transportation (my honours thesis was on the role of the railway in British children’s novels) while retaining a very tenuous grip on any technical knowledge.

There are also some sketches from the train to York.

We went on a ghost tour, rambled round the Minster, climbed to the top of the tower, looked for the gargoyles from Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and I sketched an archaeologist.

When Lisa journeyed on, I spent another day walking the walls and visiting Clifford’s Tower.

I also had lunch at a church café in a 16th century parish hall, went to choral evensong again, climbed many tilted staircases in secondhand bookstores (acquiring in the end only a tiny red-bound version of the Rubaiyat) and sketched stone masons at the Minster. The next day I caught the train to Scotland, to visit Elizabeth Wein and her family. That is their cat.

It was an exceedingly pleasant visit, featuring (among many things) icy mornings, piles of books, Lion King conversations, WWII ATA and airforce memorabilia, a constant undertone of volcano-construction and a toy accordion. She took me bellringer-watching again (I did not getting any more used to those tiny twisted staircases).

And again, on memorial day. She showed me the Birnam Oak (Macbeth-Birnam, that is), and Scone Palace with its thick-iced fountain in the maze and slightly shabby winter peacocks.

I spent one day in Edinburgh, sketching at the Camera Obscura museum and Edinburgh castle, where I met a guide who had – as a very young man – interviewed an Australian (R M Williams) who caught a taxi from London to Scotland to obtain some poetry manuscripts.

That night, I took the train to London, where I stayed (due to a colourful review) at the Pavilion Fashion Rock’n’Roll Hotel, in the War and Peace room. As the reviews suggest, it is not a hotel to be chosen for luxury or comfort, but for price and relentless (and hilarious) charm it is not to be surpassed. I loved it. How can the creakiest, hardest bed I ever slept in counteract the wonder of this miniature panorama of utter thematic consistency? I’m not sure, but the bathroom bin might even have been a shell casing.

I spent most of my first morning drawing ducks and Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens.

I sprinted through the V&A, due to it being sunny outside, and spent the afternoon dashing in and out of bookstores near Charing Cross Road before going to see the musical of Mathilda with a friend from Brisbane.

The next day I planned to see more of London but changed my mind and platforms at Paddington and went to Oxford instead. I loved Oxford. The museum and café patrons are all erudite and enthusiastic, like characters out of Sayers or Walsh (depending on their age).

The next day I started with three books worth of tourism in one blow – walking to Baker Street, travelling to the end of the Lewisham line and walking back to Greenwich, thereby netting the first line of The Magician’s Nephew: When Sherlock Holmes was living in Baker Street and the Bastables were digging for treasure in Lewisham Road….

I almost vanished forever in a junk shop, visited the fan museum, then went to the Royal Observatory where I drew people standing on the prime meridian and got teary-eyed over chronometers thanks Kendall’s poem “Five Visions of Captain Cook”.

Below is a glimpse of my room at the Pavilion, from my vantage point in the canopied bed (you can see one foot). The bed was not comfortable, but the decor more than compensated. I think the bathroom bin may have been a shell casing.

I went for coffee with Stella at Egmont Publishing, which was lovely and exciting – especially the tour of the publisher and their library! – then went to Portobello Road for the sake of Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and bought a marching soldier, a lead tiger and a box of tiny riderless horses.

Then to the airport and so, by degrees, home again.

What I Did On My Holidays: Part the Third – World Fantasy and Brighton

Note: If you click on a picture, that should take you through to its Flickr page, where you will have an option to view a larger version.

Part One is here: Brisbane Airport and Oslo.

Part Two is here: Dartmoor.

After a last farewell to Dartmoor, a walk along the Cobb at Lyme Regis, an altercation with a lorry near the New Forest (huzzah for steady-nerved passengers and comprehensive insurance), and the GPS in a final effort to establish its supremacy taking us to Arundel Castle instead of the Metropole, Ellen, Delia and I arrived in Brighton for the World Fantasy Convention 2013.

That is Brian Aldiss with the tea.

I don’t sketch at conventions as much as I used to, now that I know more people (one reason being Artist at Large at the Brisbane Writers Festival was so much fun was that I was officially meant to be drawing over talking). So I had a marvellous time at WFC, but did not draw many pictures. Most of my drawing was scribbling ideas during panels, e.g. this during the “Broads with Swords” discussion:

I did sit at the signing tables during the mass signing in order to draw everyone else – I learned last year that was a good vantage point. And one person did come up and ask me to sign a book I have a story in (ahem), so that was thrilling!

Here are two panels  of people you probably haven’t heard of: A YA discussion with Delia Sherman, Susan Cooper, Garth Nix, Neil Gaiman, Will Hill and Holly Black, and Nifty Shades of Fae with Tanith Lee, Joanne Harris, James Barclay, Angela Slatter, Lisa Hannett, Grahame Joyce and James Barclay. There are also a few Irene Gallo cameos in the pages, because I usually draw the people with cameras.

Unfortunately, I was taken violently ill on Saturday evening and had to leave the art reception early to be miserable in my room. The hotel reception sent up Twinings Peppermint Tea as a sovereign remedy. Ellen also plied me with medicinal infusions the next day.

As a consequence, I only have a tiny picture of my art at the show. I will post some better images of the pictures later!

Absence of pictures aside, I had a wonderful convention – talked to a lot of people, mostly, which is the point. It is difficult to narrow down particular highlights, as I keep remembering things and people to mention – charming ladies’ literary dinners (after the ladies in question unpacked our car in a team while I sat trembling in the driver’s seat), operatic serenades over dinner with the Australian contingent, lunches where no-one simply shared common gripes or tried to curry favour but simply waved their hands and discussed shared enthusiasms (stories, Dianna Wynne Jones and Dorothy Sayers). And of course I wasn’t drawing during any of those conversations – I will try to draw you all next time!

Following the convention, Aimee (Aimee L, not Aimee-my-housemate) and I went touring Brighton. I drew Aimee photographing the giant seagulls. We also ate giant meringues. I bought this marvellous panorama history of Aviation (I want the Nobrow Press Leporello series to be longer and also all of them) and we visited the Royal Pavilion, where we both fervently wished for a coffee book on the subject of wallpaper restoration.

The most touching moment was seeing the paintings of the music room when it was used as a hospital for Indian soldiers in WWI. It had the most beautiful ceiling, which Aimee is photographing here. We ate horrible hotdogs on the pier and collected Shelley to go to Thor II, and all the English people in the audience laughed at the scenes in Greenwich.

The next morning, I caught the train to York, en route to Perth and London…

What I Did on My Holidays: Part the Second – Dartmoor

Note: If you click on a picture, that should take you through to its Flickr page, where you will have an option to view a larger version.

Part One is here: Brisbane Airport and Oslo.

Then I flew to Heathrow, hired a car and drove across England to the middle of Dartmoor. This was not as simple as it sounds. Reverse was in an unfamiliar location, I’d never used a GPS before, the lanes when I reached them were as wide as the car, I kept forgetting which side the indicators were on and for a while I didn’t think I’d ever escape the gravitational pull of Heathrow.

But I made it to Dartmoor, unscathed. After a day I was scampering happily around the lanes, and did not have an altercation with a lorry until after Dartmoor was behind – but I am getting ahead of myself.

That week was enchanted. Art and music, poetry and puppetry, commedia dell’arte and rosehips, cream teas and rambling.

Paths lined with blackberries, evenings with lady writers.

Bells and pubs and bushy-eyebrowed lurchers.

Driving over moors and meeting black dogs.

Dashing outdoors with my pockets full of pens whenever the sun shone.

Bell ringing and Jacobean manor house hotels.

Musical evenings, with dogs and hearth pipes, violins and accordions.

The haunting beauty of Wistman’s wood, like the garden at the heart of an emerald.

Moor ponies and honour boxes.

Endless kindness and hospitality, conversations, walks. The swift familiarity of a tiny town, the constant astonishment of finding oneself in any of a dozen fairytale landscapes. Quiet hours in the cottage with Ellen and Delia, writing and reading, brisk walks across town to visit everyone. Walls of art, Terri’s poem-lined walls, lives lived as art, indistinguishable from their retellings, sunlit studios, studios reached by a ladder through a trapdoor. Puppets and harps, masks and puppetry, music, songs and bells. Painted worlds bleeding from the spaces of one house to the next. People and objects from movies which have shaped my life – from my Narnia, the goblin worlds. Trees and faces which I knew from illustrations in my favourite books – Middle Earth in a stand of oaks, the mists and tors of The Hound of the Baskervilles,  Virginia Lee‘s strong sweet fairytales, Rima Staines‘ crabbed and earthy myths. Houses through which the civil war was fought. Birch and alder gardens haunted by sculptures and geese. Words and books, stairs steep and twisted as a screw. Stiles.

I do not know how long would be enough, whether that week was a world which can be returned to. I hope it is.

Too soon, it was time to leave for Brighton.