And by the by, I did the paper cut for their handmade, advanced copy CD stamps. Lucky me!

I am particularly excited about my foray into drawing buildings and have been collecting images of London architecture on my pinterest page. There’s something very soothing and addictive about drawing architecture — similar to doing hand-drawn typography.

Here are a few images of my February shadow boxes, all available for sale at my Etsy store.

It’s a good little read, inspiring and light. It reminds me of the great blog post How To Steal Like an Artist written last year by Austin Kleon that attracted so much attention. I don’t agree with all of Macleod’s statements but that does not matter, I find his boldness refreshing.

One of the pieces of advice in Ignore Everybody that really struck me was about putting the hours in. He says that he is asked a lot about whether he gets worried about others ripping off his business card cartoon idea, seeing as his chosen format and style are so simple:

“Stan­dard Ans­wer: Only if they can draw more of them than me, bet­ter than me.

What gives the work its edge is the sim­ple fact that I’ve spent years dra­wing them. I’ve drawn thou­sands. Tens of thou­sands of man hours.

So if some­body wants to rip my idea off, go ahead. If some­body wants to over­take me in the busi­ness card doodle wars, go ahead. You’ve got many long years in front of you. And unlike me, you won’t be doing it for the joy of it.”

(You can read this excerpt online here.)

An artist friend of mine felt bad last year because she sold a piece of work for a good price that it had only taken her an hour or so to produce. It might not have taken long but I know her and I have seen the whole story. I know that the one hour she took to do that piece had a vast journey behind it — hours and hours of trial and error, inspiration, skill building and careful nurturing of her artistic eye and expression.

The journey is important.

…but it isn’t everything

I went to the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin with my friend the other week and we stood, befuddled, looking at a piece of fabric tacked to the wall. It was unremarkable in every way.

The only way to access this as art was to read the explanation. In other words, to try to find value in the journey that the artist had taken. It turns out that he’d done a lot of laundry to get the exact texture and hue that he had in mind. Good to know.

I’m not the biggest fan of conceptual pieces but I have seen many that I have found invigorating and fascinating. Occasionally, this kind of art displays the genius of a fresh comment. In this instance however, even the dense and wordy explanation, even the amount of washing this artist had done did not add any value for me.

Call me old fashioned but I merit the end product itself. Be it beautiful, provocative, ugly, useful, useless, decorative, simple, complex or otherwise, let it speak for itself and be marked by the journey.

(Meadow shadowbox, 12″x12″, Dutch book and brown paper)

Cider With Rosie is a childhood memoir whose resonance goes beyond its beautiful, lyrical writing. It evokes life in a rural British village sitting unsuspectingly on the cusp of great change, brought about by cars, media and of course, World War II and its concomitant societal alterations. As such, it has become somewhat of a swan song for a way of life.

Lee’s essays are brilliant pieces of writing, punctuated by heart soaring truths couched in straightforward but keenly selected observations. However, in the more revealing form of straight prose, it is easy to see that at times, he was somewhat obdurate in the face of societal change. He became a father late and in his tender and truthful letter to his daughter, The Firstborn, there are flashes of suspicion of new fangled ideas.

Oh we’re often pretty rubbish with New Fangled Things. The internet will rot your brain you know and before that it was video games, television and Elvis’ pelvis. Lamenting change is entirely natural and often valid. Until, that is, it becomes unhelpful and irrelevant. The problem is that unless it is in your power to reverse change, endlessly grieving its arrival contributes nothing.

Whilst I was happily stocking up on paperbacks I questioned my pursuit of a little library to call my own. For someone who lives between nations, filling a bookshelf is highly impractical. A Kindle would really make more sense.

When it comes to words, even the Kindle is the littlest element in a cultural shift. Nowadays, everything is different because of internet reading. We read short things, quick things; the less scrolling the better. Everything talks to each other on the internet in a much more loud and immediate way. Titles and first paragraphs are more important [click to read the whole article] than cover illustrations and backcover blurb. It’s all hooks and hyperlinks.

I read an article in the Guardian this week about Amanda Hocking who has sold over a million books self-publishing on the internet (the Arctic Monkeys of the literary world). Viral recommendation has become a major gatekeeper in publishing as well as music. The routes are different, the way is different, words will inevitably be used and formed differently and it’s good, bad, beautiful, ugly and wonderfully alive.

Yet still, I find myself picking through paperbacks in Halfprice Books and wanting to own a hard copy of every book I ever love. Funnily enough, the reason is partly Laurie Lee. I read Cider With Rosie for comfort, almost in circles and its physical presence is part of that. I remember the pages. I return to sections of other books for their brilliance, for the perfect words they offer for certain moments or truths. Or for their sensations. And what’s more, after each few years of living, books have different things to say to you. I don’t just read my books, I converse with them. Then there’s the completer-finisher’s satisfaction of being able to see one’s progress through a tome. And the covers! Who can resist this distinct brand of retro-glory? I know that many people feel the same about books, they are so loved that I don’t think that the form will die anytime soon.

I’m allowing myself, therefore, to indulge my paperback collecting but I don’t want to become a stalwart about their superiority as a way of reading. My children are the inheritors of this new world and in more ways than just books. I will be doing them a disservice if I don’t prepare them for it, snobbishly making them play with sticks in the garden like it’s 1982 and boasting to other parents that my corduroy-clad darlings think that a Wii is something you do in the toilet. I plan to build a house that homes the different generations, the both/and scenario of the cherished furled page and all the wiki, wiki, wah, wahs of the world wide web we’re spinning in.

I’ll be the cool mum who shouts out “L.O.L!” at the school play.

I have, however, been spending a lot of my snatched moments reading. I’m reading a book about Medieval female mystics (eye-opening!) and in November I noisily struggled through Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. It’s dazzling and darkly clever but I didn’t like it– the cleverness is heavy and there is very little warmth in the book. All of the characters are mean, flawed-without-grace and all of their foibles are more grotesque than humorous. It’s misanthropic and complicated and mystical without being transcendent.

My other simple-times activity has been making some new postcards for my little, growing postcard collection:

And other than that I have been hanging with my small ones in the afternoons and watching a lot of Parenthood in the evenings whilst my youngest fills his boots, ready for the night.

I really like Parenthood for the following reasons: 1. I come from a large extended family and sometimes I really miss being around that dynamic and so I like watching the big everyone-at-dinner-teasing-each-other scenes 2. I like the fact that the storylines take unexpected downturns. Not in a depressing way but in a true-to-life way. 3. I don’t know if it’s the scriptwriting or that the actors are great at ad-libbing but the dialogue is naturalistic, especially all the tiny verbal quips that happen in real life but are rarely included in scripted lines.