Four favourite paintings

This is a Thing (Meme? maybe?) doing the rounds on Bluesky at the moment: share your four favourite paintings of all time so folk can get to know you.

It wasn’t easy to limit myself to four (oh boy, was it not easy) because I love art and have so many favourites. But in the end I came up with these, and realised they’re almost the four seasons in painting form. I also realised that I must really, really like late nineteenth/early twentieth century art, and anything that plays around with light/atmosphere.

So here, in sort of spring-summer-autum-winter order, they are:

Vetheuil, by Claude Monet

Shaw, John Byam Liston; Boer War (1900-1901), Last Summer Things Were Greener; Birmingham Museums Trust; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/boer-war-19001901-last-summer-things-were-greener-33936

In the Golden Mists of Autumn, by John Atkinson Grimshaw

Boulevard Montmartre, by Camille Pisarro

I’ve been lucky enough to see the originals of two of these in real life, both at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. The Boulevard Montmartre featured in a Pisarro exhibition which was so incredible it reduced me to tears; while Byam Shaw’s The Boer War is (usually) on display as part of their vast Pre-Raphaelite collection. It’s even more stunning in ‘the flesh’ and is actually my favourite painting of all time, and the gallery is well worth a visit if you have some time to kill in central Birmingham.

Two go for a blustery walk

Yesterday morning we had an errand to run in Morecambe, so to make the most of the trip we parked up on the promenade and set off for a walk.

It’s a wonderfully scenic road that stretches for miles along the coast of Morecambe Bay with distant views of the Lakeland mountains and other hills as well as the sea. However, the minute we got out of the car we found that it was much windier there than it had been at home, even though it’s only about 30 miles away. Back at home there was barely a breeze. Here it was blowing the proverbial hoolie, so much so we could barely stand upright and got royally blasted in the face by all the sand blowing about.

We tacked as far as the nearest coffee shop and staggered in for a brew, then fortified, hooded and raincoated we marched up the non-seaward side of the street past a range of fascinating independent shops.

Recently Morecambe has been badly hit by recession, poverty and the decline in the traditional seaside holiday. But thanks partly to sponsorship from the Eden Project, which is hoping to develop a big new tourist attraction in the town, there suddenly seemed to be more cafes, bars and shops than the last time we came.

Eventually we got tired of the constant battle to walk (and with the constant barrage of sand in the face) so we turned round and shot back to the car in a wind-assisted record time. It wasn’t exactly pleasant, but the air was certainly fresh and we quite enjoyed it in a masochistic sort of way!

Along the way we spotted a whole wall of these amazing street-art style posters and I took quite a few photos. I’d have liked to snap some of the white horses on the sea as well but there was so much sand blowing about I didn’t want to risk getting the camera lens scratched. So the posters will have to do!

Bugs!

We spent Saturday morning at GB Antiques in Lancaster (one of our favourite haunts), ostensibly to look at washstands. What we actually came home with (because it’s quite literally impossible to visit that place and not buy something) was two framed posters of bugs and beetles…

Insects aren’t usually top of my wish list, but these are posterised versions of Victorian illustrated plates, at least one of them French, and they’re surprisingly beautiful.

What’s the most unusual thing you’ve ever bought from an antiques store/junk shop?

The Triffids are here!

We managed another quick trip out at the weekend, this time to Blackwell, an Arts and Crafts house on the outskirts of Bowness. It’s very beautiful, and a favourite location to chill for a couple of hours if we’re reading high on the stressometer.

The weather wasn’t particularly kind with low cloud over the mountains and a shrill, chill breeze blowing across the countryside, but there were daffodils dancing in the garden and the interior of the house was as lovely as ever. And as an added bonus there was an exhibition in a couple of the upstairs rooms by local artist Amy Williams. Called Unearthed, it consisted of giant paper versions of the flowers featured in the furniture and fixtures of the house (stained glass, murals, carvings etc). The result was slightly surreal but also very beautiful, as you can see from the above photo. The picture doesn’t really show the scale – these things are well over six feet tall and oddly menacing, in a cheerful and cartoonish way!

Afterwards we settled down in the cafe with tea and some scrummy local cake. A really nice interlude from work!

Two visit Frogmorton Towers

This is a tease, really, because Frogmorton Towers is the fictional setting for my book December Roses so we couldn’t possibly have visited it. But we did the next best thing, which was to go to the garden which was the main inspiration for the book – Biddulph Grange in Staffordshire.

The gardens at Biddulph Grange were designed by James Bateman in Victorian times as a place to show off his collection of ‘exotic’ plants gathered from around the globe. Where they differ from other similar gardens is that he included whole areas that represented countries or geographical areas, all held together by a maze of paths – and a distinctly mischievous, even twisted, sense of humour.

The garden isn’t huge, but the paths form such a labyrinth that it makes it seem much larger than it really is. Nothing is quite what it seems; nothing leads quite where you expect it to. And dotted around are a series of features that seem to have no other purpose than to make visitors to the garden jump.

For instance, there’s a quaint black and white Cheshire cottage off the Wellingtonia Avenue, which you enter only to find you’re on the first floor. There’s no obvious way down to the lower floor… until you discover the Egyptian court, walk through a dark tunnel under a yew pyramid, turn a corner past a scary statue of the Ape of Thoth, and emerge into the ground floor of the cottage perched above.

The star of the garden is the area known as China, hidden away cleverly behind high stone ‘cliffs’ and walls (some of which represent the Great Wall of China). The main entrance is via a charming brick folly at the end of the Dahlia Walk, but only after a sharp right turn and a climb up through a ‘stumpery’ – a Victorian concept that involved re-planting dead tree stumps the wrong way up and surrounding them with ferns and other leafy stuff. And the red-painted pagoda-style pavilion in the middle of China isn’t a summerhouse, as you might at first think, but part corridor, part bridge, to take you out through yet another tunnel to the rockery garden beyond.

Quite simply, the garden is enchanting, with a magical, mysterious atmosphere that I fell in love with decades ago and that has stayed with me ever since. When I first saw it the National Trust were quite literally digging it out of metres of mud and acres of brambles as it had been neglected for years. Now, they’ve mostly completed that work and the result is a twisting, fascinating journey into the unexpected with new delights (a golden buffalo, the weird stone frog I keep banging on about) at every turn.

We visited on a mild day that began cloudy and then cleared into brilliant sunshine, which was ideal for photography in different conditions at different times of the day. I went a bit mad and took over 50 photos: here are a few of the best. As with Frogmorton Towers, the garden is now owned by the National Trust and open to visitors on a regular basis. If you like gardening, or garden history, or walking round unusual places, or just want to see where December Roses was set, then I can thoroughly recommend a visit. I hope you fall in love with it every bit as much as I did!

The Chinese pagoda

One of the ‘love bells’ in December Roses

The frog!

Read around the Rainbow: Weird Research

When this topic was first suggested, I wasn’t sure I could write about it. Most of my books are contemporary, with backdrops that I’m reasonably familiar with (archaeology, old buildings) and plots that revolve around wholly fictional ideas (vampires, talking ghosts). But then I realised that even I need research. The books may have contemporary settings but they also include fragments of history, and occupations I’m less familiar with – and of course I need to fact-check everything. So perhaps I do more research than I thought.

Because my books are a weird mix of history, mystery and romance the research is obviously quite a hotch-potch too. In Echoes of Blood, for instance, I checked up on several of Liverpool’s well-known buildings including St Luke’s church which was bombed during World War 2, and the Palm House and various other features in Sefton Park. I then spent a couple of happy hours reading up on the famous Ninth Legion of Rome, which apparently disappeared in mysterious circumstances. It should have been longer, really, but I soon discovered that there’s surprisingly little evidence (hence the mystery). That was frustrating, but it also gave me free rein to invent an appropriate backstory for the arrogant, enigmatic character of Vincent.

In December Roses, which is set in a once-grand and beautiful garden, there was lots of research on plants and flowers, and on historic garden design. However, main character Nat is a soldier who’s been injured in a bombing in Belfast and suffers not only broken bones but also PTSD as a result. That meant a lot of reading around the subject of army rehabilitation, from the ranks and uniforms of army medical staff to the symptoms of PTSD and how they represent. I tweaked some of it to fit the needs of the story (in real life no soldier would spend as long in rehab as Nat) but at least I understood what I was tweaking and why.

Ghosts Galore brought its own learning challenges, especially in the realms of TV production. I’ve been involved in a minuscule way (I was filmed for an episode of Antiques Roadshow once, and accidentally gatecrashed a TV recording at Blackwell House). But for much of the detail in the book I spoke to my friend Angela King (author of Blood of Kings), who has much more experience. She provided the information on some of the techniques (eg the continuity photographs) as well as the structure of smaller production companies, and I’m deeply grateful for her input. And I spent a lot of time digging into the subject of priest-holes, which have always fascinated me. The ones at Greystones Hall are loosely based on real-life hiding places at old houses I’ve visited over the years, especially Harvington Hall in Worcestershire which is riddled with them.

However, I think the weirdest research I’ve ever done was for December Roses again, and involved the wonderfully grotesque frog pictured above (pic courtesy of the Beautiful Britain website). I discovered that it was designed by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, the man responsible for the famous dinosaurs in Crystal Palace Park, and was created for the Chinese garden at Biddulph Grange in Staffordshire, which helped to inspire the setting for the book. It’s delightfully ugly and I’ve always had a soft spot for it, so much so that it has a cameo role in the book.

They were approaching it from a different direction and the first thing he saw was a massive stone frog. It was a bit hard to miss, since it was squatting on a wall leering down at him, and for one startled moment he wondered if they’d been putting LSD in his tea. But no, it was real enough, if utterly grotesque. ‛One of your ancestors?’ he called.

That made the flying legs stop. ‛Oi.’ Richie’s voice was a pretend growl, as he stopped, came back, and used one long musician’s finger to prod Nat in the midriff. ‛That’s the family crest. Three frogs and three crowns. Don’t ask me why—something to do with the Frogmorton name, I suppose. But there are frogs all over the inside of the house if you know where to look.’

If you like the sound of any of these books then head for my website where you can find out more.

And while you’re at it, check out the posts from the other webring members on the weird research they’ve done:

A L Lester :: Addison Albright :: Nell Iris :: Ofelia Grand :: Ellie Thomas :: Amy Spector :: Holly Day :: K L Noone

Fun with Printing

I enjoyed Saturday’s geli plate printing workshop so much that I ordered myself a geli plate and roller, and bought myself four tubes of paint – the best our tiny local branch of WHSmith had to offer. I then rootled around in various drawers and our recycling crate for anything I could use to make interesting effects and textures, and yesterday afternoon I borrowed the kitchen worktop and turned it into a mini art studio.

And yet again I’ve been blown away by the results. Fair enough I’m still experimenting with colour combinations and the different effects, but the prints are easily good enough to frame or use as greetings cards, so I’m really pleased.

Although I’m still giggling at this particular print. Chucking three elastic bands onto the plate at random has produced a pattern that looks worryingly like handcuffs. I hope nobody reads anything untoward into that!

Two find some bonkers birds

We had a walk along the promenade at Morecambe for a change on Monday. Chosen because it’s level with benches (again, still struggling with post-Covid tiredness) and because the weather wasn’t good enough for anywhere more scenic.

That’s not to say Morecambe isn’t scenic – the views out across Morecambe Bay are stunning, and the town’s powers-that-be have littered the promenade and surrounding streets with sea or coast-related sculptures and artwork. Much of it is really lovely – like my favourite life-like cormorants near the old lifeboat station – but some pieces are utterly bonkers. There are some fat seagulls near the Eric Morecambe statue which always make me smile, and this time we also discovered these cartoon puffins sat on top of some of the bollards in the Festival Market car park. There were similar (but even weirder) seagulls and cormorants in the nearby Morrisons car park. Quite a sight if you’ve just staggered out with a crate of booze!

This time we finally got inside the Old Pier Bookshop which we’ve been meaning to visit for years. I picked up a YA vampire book which looks intriguing, and we explored some of the vast, twisty network of passages inside, all of them lined floor to ceiling with books, some interconnecting, some not. One friend has described it as a TARDIS, and it certainly keeps going… and going… and going… until you lose all sense of direction and wonder if you’ll ever get back out again.

Luckily we emerged, to find the sun was shining – just as we were about to set off for home. Typical. But we enjoyed the stroll, and a mistily scenic drive back up the A6 afterwards.

Easy peasy printing

For a complete change yesterday I went to an art workshop at the Brewery Arts Centre in Kendal. I’d seen it advertised a few weeks ago and booked a ticket just because it sounded fun, even though I’d never heard of the particular technique before.

It’s called geli, or gelli, plate printing, and involves a thick gelatinous sheet that you can roll paint onto, then use various shapes and textures to create interesting effects. Then you lay a sheet of paper on top, press down, peel the paper off again and hey presto, you have your very own unique artwork. And that’s it. There’s no printing press, no massive preparation, and the materials (apart from the paint) can be pretty much anything you like, from garden leaves to recycled junk and even bits of fabric and cardboard.

I’d expected to come home with one or two, but at the end of an intense and entertaining three hours with tutor and local artist Jess Levine, I had a whole sheaf of prints. Some of them are really attractive and I’ve already found frames for several and dotted them around the house. And because I got on with it so well, I’ve ordered a geli plate of my own. I’m hoping to use it not just for prints, but for greetings cards, gift tags and perhaps even simple wooden jewellery. Apparently, almost anything is possible!

And yes, the picture above really is my work – about the third print I made, before the room got too hot and the paint started to dry out. I’m oddly proud of it.

Canals, basins, docks – and a fish on a bicycle

Last week we spent a few days in London, on our first holiday in over two years. We were only there for two and a half days but managed to cram in masses of exploring, and seemed to gravitate towards watery places without really trying.

First on the list, and not particularly watery, was the Museum of the Home in Hoxton, newly re-open after major refurbishment. This was formerly known as the Geffrye Museum, but has been distancing itself from that name as the man who established the alms houses the museum is based in had strong links to the slave trade. New name, new entrance direct from the train station, but the museum is much the same as it was – a fascinating look at the development of the English middle-class home down the centuries.

After a good mooch round we caught trains and tubes back to Kings Cross and explored the area at the back of the station, which used to be a no-go wasteland but is now covered in office blocks, shops, cafes, and landscaped gardens including water features and trees. Behind that is an area we’d never visited before – Coal Drops Yard, a former wharf on the Regents Canal handling coal for the barges. It’s been heavily redeveloped/gentrified with yet more shops, restaurants and arty venues and looks amazing, but the prices were rather astronomical.

On the second day we headed for Canary Wharf (main photo) to see the Docklands Museum. This is based in some of the original sugar warehouses of the West India Docks, built in 1802. The museum focuses on the history of the London docks and the East End in general, with big displays on trade, life as a dock worker, the docks during World War II, and the history (often financially uncertain) of the area’s redevelopment after the war.

After that we discovered the East India Docks basin, a pleasant open space around a large basin with lock gates onto the River Thames. From here there are terrific views up, down and across the river to the Millennium Dome (O2 Arena).

Finally we walked through to Trinity Buoy Wharf, a little further along the banks of the Thames. I first saw this on The Great British Sewing Bee and knew it had links to both Trinity House (the organisation that runs lighthouses in Britain) and the famous scientist Michael Faraday. Sure enough, we found the wharf and its buildings, which include a small experimental lighthouse where different lighting systems were tried out. Nowadays it’s another arts/culture hub with lots of studios and arty businesses, and there are weird industrial heritage/street art sculptures everywhere you look – including this wonderful fish on a bicycle!

There’s also what may be the world’s smallest museum, based quite literally in a garden shed which houses books, artefacts and equipment used by Michael Faraday in his scientific experiments. The surrounding area is being heavily redeveloped into apartment blocks, so we were glad we saw it before the atmosphere changes forever.