Guest Artists

I find it amusing that the last post I wrote, about how scared I am of marketing, was followed by nearly three weeks of dead silence.

I didn’t mean to run away, but that’s sort of how it turned out. First of all, I went on holiday to Darkest Kerry, where wireless service ranged from patchy to mythical. If I had been in the whole of my health, I might have braved the elements (there was precipitation, oh yes, there was), found an Internet cafe, and made contact. But as it was, I didn’t.

Because, second of all, I haven’t been in the whole of my health, nor anywhere close, for several months. I’ve been suffering from a range of nasty symptoms which – now that I’ve done the sensible thing and had my blood tested – appear to be the result of a vitamin B12 deficiency. So I’m having injections, and after one or two more my customary oomph is forecast to return.

Looking forward to that.

Anyway. I haven’t been doing much creative work, so for this post I’ve drafted in my two resident guest artists, the Oyster and the Feaster. We had a glorious painting session the other day. The boys cranked out about a million paintings each, and I grabbed some photos of my favourites as they lay drying.

Being me (a circumstance over which, I confess, I have little control), I’m mostly buzzing about how great these would look translated into textile form. (I mean, they’re great as they stand, obviously. It’s just that my fingers are itching to stitch them.) I don’t know how I’d do it – how detailed to get – how big to go. But if I got it right, they would be stunning.

The picture above is a spaceship by the Oyster. He was particularly happy with the yellow dot, and how you can kind of see the ship moving across the sky.

For the picture below, the Feaster asked me to pour paint directly onto the paper so he could mix it with his fingers, and then had lots of fun making brush-prints. (This was before his series of handprints, which were also great.)

I made a butterfly with the Feaster, so the Oyster decided to follow suit. He was very particular about the colours he wanted – he was experimenting with using only the primaries, and he needed the right shade of green for the upper wings.

Then, when I was cleaning up after they finished, I just had to stop and record these (excuse the horrible quality; these are the best shots I got), because they delighted me entirely:

The Feaster had been working on a black table, and he’d made a fantastic mess. So whenever I peeled a painting off the tabletop to put on the drying rack, it left these beautiful branching patterns.

He doodled a bit with his fingers, too – I don’t know if he intended to make spaceships, but they totally are, aren’t they? I mean, if that doesn’t scream “ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion”, I would very much like to know what does.