“October’s late dawn” is the image for October in my 2017 calendar and both the A3 and A2 prints are available at a reduced price until the end of the month in The Mistletoe Tree Shop
This months events include:
5th October: Publication day for The Snow Angel by Lauren St John. It has been receiving some wonderful reviews and has been Book of the Week in both the Observer and The Times.
7 October: The North Cornwall Lit Fest reading The Star Tree by me and Little Evie in the Wild Wood by Jackie Morris
12 October: Demonstrating clay board painting and talking about my work at Dillington House for a Somerset Literacy Network conference.
18th October: Battersea AAF with Lighthouse Gallery Penzance.
Then Jackie Morris is coming to stay whilst she launches the spell binding “Lost Words” book – a collaboration of immense beauty with Robert Macfarlane.
Around all this I have to finish my solo show ‘The Twelve Days of Nadelik’ for November at The Lighthouse.
At the end of the month there is going to be some secret plotting and hopefully some good scheming.
My advance copy of Lauren St John‘s wonderful story ‘The Snow Angel’ has arrived!
It is a really lovely book to hold in your hands, solid and satisfyingly chunky. The colour on the cover is just right, the paper matt and pleasing showing all the texture of the paint with very subtle foiling to compliment the copper leaf. Underneath, the hard cover is a vivid orange that sings wonderfully against the blues and violets of the jacket. Inside, the paper is a very soft white and the type face is rounded and readable. At the head of each chapter the little snow fox gallops along with sprinklings of stars and symbols sweeping through the text and my black and white clay board illustrations have been given a softened edge so that they sit quietly on the page, immersed in the story.
To top it all I must confess to having a weakness for ribbon book marks, to me they give a book a Moleskine, bible like seriousness and The Snow Angel has a vivid orange one matching the hard cover.
It has been a real joy to work on this book – Head of Zeus and Lauren were keen for me to paint the jacket and interiors as interpretatively as I would one of my own paintings and it was really good to be given that kind of freedom. Different elements like the shape and warmth of Mount Kenya and the appearance of the bat eared fox on the back were refined with input from Lauren and Jessie Price until the whole thing worked – and I really think it does.
As for the story, I won’t give anything away apart from the fact that I cried when I finished it and believe that everyone should read it. Although the heroines journey is a tough one filled with dark and light there is a potent sense of connection with the vastness of Nature and the power of humanity’s hope, endurance and most of all, love to overcome adversity.
‘The Snow Angel’ is due out on October 5th and I will be selling signed copies in The Mistletoe Tree Shop. Prints of the jacket cover are available now.
There is a new print in The Mistletoe Tree Shop:
‘Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh’ is based on a postcard of the mosaics at Ravenna in Italy I was given when I was at Primary School. I have loved it ever since and always wanted to make an image about it, so finally, 50 years later ..
There is a new print in The Mistletoe Tree Shop: