Violet, purple, lavender and memories

A gentle colour, violet (or purple) makes me think of my grand-mother, a delightfully gentle and contented lady whom I loved dearly. She was born in 1880 and was traditionally and firmly Victorian in her approach to clothes and most aspects of life. Widowed in her early sixties, she wore purple often when I knew her, along with black and grey. She always used the lovely lavender-smelling 4711 eau de Cologne, a perfume first produced at the beginning of the 20th century but now very much out of fashion.

So purple, violet and lavender are for me colours that are heavy with meaning.

Most of the flowers in my garden are now past and I've been busy with family visitors, preventing quiet forays out with my camera, so I've sought refuge in the archives this time. I seem to have had no problems at all finding photos so perhaps sub-consciously I take lots of photos of violet or purple or lavender.

Here is a sample of my findings ...

Heady thistles photographed in an Essex garden.

A friend's collection of water-worn stones.

A richly patterned and stitched textile photographed in the chapel at Lydiard House near Swindon in Wiltshire.

Wonderful marble facings to the walls of St Mark's Basilica in Venice.

A  fine filigree of rusting metal seen at a water mill in Northern Italy - a cheat this time as it was colour-adjusted in Photoshop. When I had played with it, it reminded me of the lace my grand mother used to wear so often in the neck of a dress so it seemed right to post it here.

And last of all, a fortunate trick of the light turned to violet this panel of corrugated iron with its peeling paint.





















And now, because we've reached the end of the rainbow, an extraordinary picture taken on a canal in Burano, Italy, shown here because it includes the whole amazing spectrum of colour in one photo.

If you're a new visitor to my blog, further details of this colour fun are to be found on Julie's blog and some previous colour posts here, here  or here... explore!

Contour Mosaic

More playing with contours, holes and thoughts of waterwheels and lines in the landscape, this time cut up to give small squares ...

and reassembled into a mosaic ...

... for future thought and consideration ...

Cotswold Contours

In between much-enjoyed grand children visits, I've been playing again with the contours and the lines and shapes of the Cotswold Hills as I see them through half-closed eyes. Relating the one to the other seems to be giving much inspiration and fascination right now and to be generating exercises in mark-making with pen and ink and repeated holes in paper. It seems almost outside my control ...

First of all, with a variety of pens, including new italic felt tips ...

... and then holes in cartridge paper using various needles ...

... and pens and holes together ...

... and maximising the contrast and tweaking the colour in Photoshop ...

More play to be had here, I'm sure ...

Hill weaving

Another weaving sample inspired by the sweep of the Cotswold Hills north of Stroud and their map contour lines.

More work needed on choice of weft yarn and the colour range but I quite like the white on white texture changes ...

A monoprint and Photoshop

I'm playing again with ideas about weaving, the undulating Cotswold Hills, red cloth, contour lines and stitch, and - this time - colour.

I always like to work around pieces and often produce trials, frequently on paper, that eventually seem complete red-herrings, but I never know what's going to happen or what's going to stimulate or influence a final piece. I like to keep my mind open.

So yesterday, I took a monoprint I'd done previously and have been looking at for some time and manipulated it in Adobe Photoshop, cropping, posterising, applying the mosaic function and generally playing with the colour.

Maybe this is one of those diversions, or maybe not - time will tell, I guess.





Meanwhile, here are the results ...

... cropped and flipped through 90º, colour manipulated and mosaic tiles applied to simulate a woven surface ...

... and a version flipped again, cropped further, colour changed and with stitch lines added  ...

The Louvre-Lens Northern France

I've just returned from a lovely weekend in Northern France with a Scottish-French twinning group (our links to this group are complicated!). This is always such a fun experience - lots of socialising and conversation, and of course, because we were in France, great food and wine.


This time, our French friends took us to the newly opened Louvre Museum in Lens, Nord Pas-de-Calais. A brilliant afternoon was spent browsing beautiful objects in a lovely space - one of my favourite occupations when on holiday so I felt very lucky.



The new building was designed by the Japanese firm of architects, SANAA and built on the site of an old coal mine in the city. It's glass fronted and magnificent, especially as here with thunder clouds around it.

Louvre-Lens houses a selection of objects and works of art from the Louvre in Paris, some there permanently and some on temporary loan. It was built as part of the French government's policy of bringing galleries and art works out into the more rural and often depressed parts of France. It reminded me of the famous galleries increasingly found away from London here in the UK - Tate St Ives, Liverpool and Margate, and now, I hear, the V & A in Dundee - can't wait to see that one on one of our visits to eastern Scotland.

In this museum, the artefacts are organised chronologically from the very earliest which dated from about 3500 BCE right through to the end of the Nineteenth century. This enhanced the contrast between the ancient and the more modern and focused my thoughts on the extraordinary skills of ancient civilisations and the beautiful objects which the people made so long ago with such simple tools.

The gallery is open in design and flooded with a wonderful muted light. There was plenty of space to enjoy the exhibits, both close up and from a distance. On the day we visited it was full of visitors (many of them children) but it didn't seem crowded at all.

I've included below photos of the objects I most enjoyed - all as it happens from very early times.

There was a wonderful figure of a woman possibly made in Afghanistan between 2300 and 1700 BCE ... I just loved her controlled demeamour  ... and those feet ...

... and then there was a delightful vase in the shape of a hump-backed bull, thought to have been made between 1400 and 1100 BCE by a nomadic tribesman, probably from Iran, and so extraordinarily modern looking (Henry Moore perhaps?) ...

...but I think my favourite object of all was a small tablet of cuneiform writing scribed originally into damp clay. This was made around 2000 years BCE with text in Sumerian. It was a letter from a mother to her son. I found it very moving as I have a much-loved adult son - so perhaps this was my favourite not so much because of its actual appearance but because of the personal nature of its message and the possible contact with loving family life in another era. Wouldn't you just love to know what she said to him all those years ago?

Whilst this museum is obviously no match for the Louvre in Paris, should you ever find yourself in this interesting and un-touristy part of France, it is well worth a visit, if only for the most praise-worthy efforts of the French authorities to improve the reach of its museums and to revitalise a very run down area. The only criticism I have of the exhibition is that it contained nothing at all from the twenty-first or even twentieth centuries. The contrast possible between very modern artefacts and the ancient objects shown here would have been even more interesting ...