Category: Mystery items

Not necessarily mysterious – it just sounds more interesting than ‘miscellaneous’.

Annabolina

June 27, 2026

I have a piece about Anne Boleyn in Pond Life, a Carshalton fanzine, available from logofiasco records. This is linked with the current Carshalton Festival featuring CAOS, in which an impressive number of local artists open up to visitors.

In the zine I’m afraid they got my name slightly wrong, and they changed the title of the piece. But they made up for that by giving it this very nice illustration by Ruth Joyce.

Meet the Ancestors

June 16, 2026

I have finally got around to sorting through some of the photos we inherited from my mother and constructing a family tree. This is an interesting process.

Here we have my eight great-grandparents. These people, therefore, represent the set of genes from which mine are a random selection. Two of them lived long enough for me to have known them when I was a child – Fred Hankins, my father’s father’s father, and Susan Plumb, my mother’s mother’s mother.

I wish I knew more about these people, but there are already too many bits of information to mention here. I’ll just say that Annie Magnus looks like a robust lady, and my word she must have been. Starting when she was seventeen, she gave birth in 1899, 1900, 1903, 1905, 1907, 1909 (my grandfather), 1910, 1911, 1913, 1915 and 1918.

Shed Painting

March 20, 2026

I did a painting for the garden shed. This is acrylics on a hardboard panel that was once half the back of a wardrobe (I glued wooden battens to the back for rigidity). The gold frame is done with a gilding paste, and I gave the whole thing a couple of coats of yacht varnish to protect it from the rain.

The figure of Flora is based on one of Mucha’s ladies, but it completely lacks the sharp precision and firm outlines that you find in his stuff.

Kintsugi Tile

March 16, 2026

One of the roof tiles I painted butterflies on fell off our fence the other day and broke. I thought this was an opportunity to try kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing ceramics with visible gold joints. Sort of OK for a first attempt, I think. However, it probably can’t go back outside which leaves me with a decision about whether I should paint a replacement, and if so whether it should be the same butterfly (a Painted Lady) or a different one?

Special Christmas Tree

December 15, 2025

Our potted miniature maple is beautiful when in leaf, but during the winter it’s a bit bare. So I have made it into a Christmas tree inspired by Charlie Brown’s threadbare one. I used green strinsel, a kind of tinsel made from recycled string.

Merry Christmas!

December 10, 2025

I am not really posting any cards this year, but here is my little Christmas painting instead – it is an adaptation of one by Lin Fengmian, but obviously I lack his skill with the brush.

Container Candles

November 29, 2025

I made a multi-coloured set of container candles in glass goblets, each with a different fruity scent*. These need a quicker-melting wax than pillar candles. No skill at all is required, but they are quite practical (they never dribble) and look especially good when the wax is molten.

*From the left: passionfruit, grape, strawberry, mango, banana and watermelon

Candles

November 7, 2025

I made sparkly candles. It must be about sixty years since I last used glitter. It still gets everywhere.