Just to let you know...

... that I have shut my Etsy shop and am concentrating instead on selling my work at UK venues including Folksy - you'll see a button for that shop on the right hand side of this blog.

Market trading

The two posts below have been copied from the blog I began with the idea of promoting Roman Road arts and crafts market. Sadly last Saturday proved to be such a fiasco with vans parked where our stalls should have been and so on and so forth that I and another trader decided to call it a day and cease trading there.

It's a little sad that this enterprise is now over before it really got going but I made some good contacts and got on very well with some new friends and that is always satisfying. I also got some valuable feedback on my artwork but frankly working outside in the freezing cold soon lost its appeal. I've decided that in future I'll only trade under cover or at a one off event when the weather is better and hey now I have Saturdays free which means we can enjoy weekends away again.

Saturday 3 January

So, the weather was -3 degrees celcius when I left the house and it managed to rise to the dizzy heights of 2 degrees by the time I got home six hours later so the weather forecasters weren't wrong and they weren't exactly right either.

There were great hopes yesterday that there would be more people around Roman Road as the monthly Farmers' Market was also on. It was definitely busier than the Saturday before Christmas had been when the market had been as quiet as a graveyard but only two food stallholders turned up and they looked fairly cold and dispirited. That matched the number of craft stalls we had going which was also two. We decided we would stick it out until 3pm and I made my only sale of the day as I was packing up to go home.

That was my fifth Saturday trading at the market and, apart from the biting cold, I enjoyed the day chatting to Ruth next door and swapping tales and because I did make one sale I intend to be back there next Saturday so long as it doesn't pour with rain.

Forecast for Saturday 3 January '09

This is a photo from my mobile phone camera of my very first stall.

The last few days have either been very cold, or slightly less cold, or windy but I haven't cared one way or the other because mostly I have been inside a nice warm house. But now I am checking the weather forecast for Saturday. This has become a preoccupation of mine since I became a stallholder at Roman Road arts and crafts market back at the end of November.

I've had two weeks away from the market because of the Christmas and New Year holiday and I'm getting prepared to spend the day out in the open on Saturday. Since the forecast is 3 degrees celcius and cloudy I will be wearing thermals underneath and over trousers on top along with hat, gloves and my amazing new Christmas scarf.

This will be my fifth Saturday as a market trader and I'm hoping there will be more potential customers around than there was on the Saturday before Christmas when the market was as quiet as a grave yard. I am an artist and I sell greetings cards based on my paintings and sketches plus some of my original drawings.

Roman Road market has been around for donkeys years but the arts and crafts market only started back in September and a few of the traders have loyally turned up week in and week out since the beginning. Sadly two of our traders decided to throw in the towel just before Christmas and we will miss them around the place. So I am hoping that it won't rain all day or be very windy because either of those eventualities will be driving me back home before too long.

The tale of the damaged vinegar pot

This image is the latest in my series of random domestic scenes. For this sketch I used a Chinese brush and the same black Quink ink you might use in a fountain pen. While I was working on it I was recalling how it arrived in our house.

I am married to an academic and from time to time we have visitors to stay who hail from different parts of the world and are passing through London for some reason: they might be going to a conference for example. Very occasionally we've had the odd visitor who has arrived at our house and clearly can't remember how to leave. This can make me feel as though we have for a short time adopted them and this can either lead to rational negotiations with said visitor to work out a plan for leaving as in: "When is your flight home?" or "Wouldn't you prefer more privacy in a cheap hotel?" or I simply end up losing my temper and feel terrible for the rest of the day. We also enjoy having graduate students around because they are generally a lot of fun. They usually live in London and are only too happy to leave at the end of an evening so don't need to be elbowed out of the door by us.

The vinegar pot arrived by the usual academic route. It was carried to our house by my husband's colleague who lived nearby and asked, since he and his wife were off to far flung places to take up new work, if we would look after it. The vinegar is made from a culture of bacteria swarming around the bottom of the pot and every so often you fling red or white wine into it and it magically turns into wine vinegar over the succeeding days or weeks. We understand that this particular culture has been passed down the colleague's French wife's family and goes back as far as the French Revolution which would make it more than 200 years old. And we have ended up as its custodians. Mon dieu!

I do hope that the terracotta pot is not a treasured family heirloom because since we have had it we have broken the lid, mended it and broken it again. (You can see the remains of the lid in the bottom right hand corner.) We have improvised a new lid with a small ceramic dish. When we took possession of the pot it sported a tap that was held in place with a cork bung. In time the cork perished so parcel tape was wrapped around the pot many times to cover up the hole where the tap had been. This has resulted in a permanently leaking pot so it stands in a dish that we used to use for salad and it's likely to remain like this until we get round to buying a replacement tap with a plastic bung.

Since we have been looking after the pot for several years now it is always possible that this visitor will be a permanent fixture in our kitchen and who knows we may yet leave it in the care of our younger relatives and perhaps it will survive for another 200 years. What a fine vintage vinegar it will be then.

More random dosmetic scenery

A detail of a drawing in pen and ink of garlic, lime, ginger and curry leaves in the kitchen waiting to be used - 16 December '08

As you can tell from the date of my last post it's weeks since I've written anything but, to tell the truth, I just haven't been inspired to write. But that has changed since last week when I went to visit my friend Hilary for a couple of days. Hilary lives in Swindon in the west country. If you mention Swindon to most people they will probably have heard of the place and they might say it's got something to do with railways. So here is a potted history of said town.

Swindon began life as a Saxon village and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). For centuries it was a quiet market town and in time a quarry was established, a canal was dug and in 1840 the Great Western Railway arrived. This transformed the town from a sleepy backwater into the largest town in Wiltshire because it was chosen as a place to build railway engines and as a maintenance works. The town continued to be an industrial centre until the railway works closed in 1986 and now it's a sprawling town without a reputation.

You might think then that Swindon has nothing to offer culturally but you'd be wrong. We had a stimulating visit to the town's art gallery which owns a large collection of the best examples of British 20th century art outside London. We also dropped into a temporary exhibition run by a local art group who were showing their work in a disused post office and the quality of their work was higher and more interesting than most local art groups that I have seen and this all cheered me up no end.

The following day Hilary had decided that we would take a trip to Cirencester, a town about 17 miles away from Swindon and, according to the local tourist board, it had been a Roman town of some note and is now the capital of the Cotswolds. 'Yeah and so what' were my thoughts as I had only been there once before and thought it was a bit of a dump. I was about to have my prejudices challenged once again.

Hilary was keen to see an exhibition called Modern British Art and it was on at the Wetpaint gallery. There were works by Anita Klein, John Piper and Sir Peter Blake. There was even a piece of work by Damien Hurst which had so many numbers on the price label that my mind went into a spin trying to read it. There were some lovely ceramics and if I had had £45 to spare I would have bought a small ceramic dish for my husband; I was that impressed. This gallery is on the edge of the town near the only car park to have any free spaces in it. It is in a tiny building with interesting niches in the walls and it turns out that it had been a chapel in the past. The town had an abbey before the dissolution in 1538 and a faint air of an enclosed order still hangs around the place.

Finally we visited the New Brewery Arts Centre in the middle of the town. This refurbished site has artists studios where you can go and gawp while the artists practice their craft. There is also a gallery and a shop, which appeared to be more interesting at a distance than it was up close, plus a very popular café where we recovered from the labour of looking at art. The whole trip was very stimulating and encouraged me to get on with my own project of drawing 'random domestic scenes' around the house. The latest example is shown above.

Big day in the US, ordinary day in London

Part of a series of drawings of random domestic scenes

As I write this the good people of the United States are queuing to vote for their new president and I'm following events on BBC24 which is analysing every blessed thing just to fill up the time. I've watched, again, Barak Obama vote (for himself) and seen Sarah Palin's denim clad legs in the voting booth while she voted for herself: it seems that John McCain managed to dodge the cameras as he arrived to vote (I'm assuming for himself). I'm hoping that Barak Obama will win because I have found George Bush's presidency extremely disturbing over the last eight years and I hope for all our sakes that Obama will be a more enlightened president than the outgoing one. And of course it will also be historic to have the first black president of the US.

So what have I done today since I didn't have any good reason for getting up at 6am? Well, I stayed in bed for a start and got up at a civilised hour. I've been working at home for the last couple of weeks and that's included doing a series of pen and ink drawings of random domestic scenes around the house plus building a website. I'm not very experienced at website design yet so I get stuck trying to understand html and css and stuff fairly frequently. That happened yesterday so in the afternoon I took myself off to Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green, that great refuge from the rain and yes, it was raining again. My reason for going was that I fancied a walk so wasn't all that bothered by what I might see when I got there. On arrival I was rather tickled to spy in the foyer a modest exhibition of black and white photographs of Edwardian Outdoor Games by Andrew Pitcairn-Knowles.

Evidently the V&A own Pitcairn-Knowles glass negatives and I presume they were just stored away gathering dust in the archives so someone must have decided to haul some negatives out and make prints from them. They've been done on an ink jet printer: we have one of those at home. What I liked most about this small display, besides the charming images, was that Pitcairn-Knowles employed the latest in photographic technology in 1900 and here we are 100 years later reproducing those same images using technology which is common to us today. I also liked the way that a large national museum like the V&A thinks it is worth producing a small exhibition which will be of interest to a small number of people-it makes such a change to the big blockbuster exhibitions crammed with visitors. So that got a big commendation from me.

This afternoon I again got stuck with the website while trying to style up a form and gave up in disgust. So needing to get out of the house I mooched off to Hackney Public Library and popped into the very small museum they have there. (I would have put a link to the museum's website but it is really boring.) Apparently the Saxons were responsible for establishing Hackney way back in the dim and distant past but I was more interested in a temporary exhibition on the right hand side as you go in called Living under one roof-Windrush and beyond. It is part of Black History Month which oddly enough lasts for nearly two months! The exhibition takes its name from the ship called the Windrush that arrived at Tilbury docks on 22 June 1948 bringing with her many young men and some young women from the Caribbean who arrived in search of jobs and a better life. This was an important landmark in the history of modern Britain.

On arrival the new migrants encountered racism, conflict and discrimination in a cold, damp country that was still impoverished after WWII: not surprisingly they often felt homesick. They were frequently excluded from the social and economic life around them so in time they adjusted the institutions they brought with them, for example sitting rooms were often used for church services, and at the same time they began to participate in institutions to which they did have access like trade unions and bit by bit over the decades modern Britain emerged. The lives of some of the people who finally pitched up in Hackney, who are by now very elderly, are described in room sets. There is the kitchen, the sitting room and the bedroom and many of the items of furniture and family photos have been provided by the men and women whose lives are being described. I was born in west London in 1956 where many black people settled and I loved looking at these rooms today because they took me back to my childhood. The bent kettle looked familiar as did the gas cooker and the copy of Woman's Realm on the coffe table. The family photos and kid's school satchel lying on the floor in the bedroom, the bedspread and the rug on the floor. I know all these things, I've used all of them in my time. So today I feel I have learnt a bit more about the Windrush generation and I'm grateful to them for establishing the multicultural London I so enjoy living in 60 years later.