Stargazing and Flight

Creating the starry skies for my Greek witch (previous post about her here) made me think about Eilmer - a monk who lived in England over a thousand years ago, and who loved to gaze at the stars.

Quick history lesson - feel free to skip this section if you're 'only' interested in sculpture / miniatures / filmmaking! ....
Eilmer was special. Living in Malmesbury abbey in the 11th century - at a rough time when Viking raids happened around him, the inquisitive and visionary Eilmer did two things that others had not before. Studying the skies with a scientific eye, he was the one to note that if you lived long enough you could see a comet come round again.*
He was also one of the first to fly. Perhaps inspired by the Greek stories of Daedalus and his escape from the Labyrinth using wings fashioned from wax and feathers (which we know Eilmer read), Eilmer created his own wings using willow and parchment. He climbed to the top of the Saxon bell tower and jumped, gliding 200 meters before crashing and crippling both his legs. He lived to old age, recalling his flight adventure "and explaining the failure of his great enterprise with wry humour. It was his own fault, he would say. He forgot to fit a tail to his hinder parts."*
......

I painted the starry skies for my astronomer witch on particle board using first chalkboard paint (nice and matte) and then flicking acrylics using a toothbrush. Not my current toothbrush. That paint never comes out.

Watch the process of creating the witch here at my new little video at my Tall Tales Productions YouTube Channel.

Also, since you've been requesting it, I will be making prints and posters of this scene available at my webshop here very soon. Please feel free to email me directly if you want to reserve one.

The Greek witch with her starry night skies

Finally, in my Southern California adventures, I finished up the Greek witch and then flew off to San Francisco in my friend's plane. Flying in a little Cirrus is exhilarating - partly because it's so damn unsafe and I often wonder how close I am to death on take off and landing (despite the pilot being an exceptional one), and also because I can sit right up with the controls and marvel at the flying machine that it is. I wonder what Eilmer would think if he was sitting there with me.

Here are some iPhone snaps of my mini break in San Francisco and the flight over!

* Words about Eilmer the monk taken directly from Robert Lacey's absolutely brilliant book 'Great Tales From English History'. If you only ever read one history book in your lifetime - let it be this one. If you have no interest in history - this will change your mind.

Celebrating Samhain

What has All Hallows Eve become? Today people go door to door with their children in costume and are given sweets. How this pagan festival has changed since its pre-Christian roots, we think. Well perhaps not so much.
Halloween is a festival which was once called 'Samhain' (pronounced 'sow - in'  - sow as in cow). Until the 9th century AD, this was a time when we Celts celebrated the end of harvest season and coming of winter with bonfires, parties and the carving of turnips and mangelwurzels (root vegetable usually fed to animals) into jack o' lanterns. People would dress up in costume and go door to door reciting seasonal poetry or singing songs in exchange for food. See, it's not all that different, is it?!
The aspect I like about Samhain is the mythology surrounding it. People believed that Samhain (which was from sunset on 31st Oct to sunset 1st Nov) was a liminal time - when the boundaries of our world and that of the spirit world merged and the spirits of the dead could re-enter ours. Whilst bonfires were lit to keep evil spirits away, and the smoke wafted over the festival goers to cleanse them, place settings were created at the banquets for the spirits of their ancestors. Turnips were carved into ghoulish faces and people dressed in spooky ways in order to deceive evil spirits and remain safe from them during Samhain.

Something I notice which is very different about Halloween in America versus the UK, is that here people dress as anything they like (superheros, princesses, slutty versions of anything they like... basically anything goes), whereas in the UK Halloween is still a time to dress as something spooky. Back in England I always always dressed as a witch / vampire / the un-dead and so forth. Of course here I go with the flow and dress as whatever I want. This year I was Barbarella, as I got SO busy with work for two upcoming exhibitions that I didn't have time to finish my Queen Boudicca costume. Appalling, I know. Below, for fun, I've put photos of all 4 Halloweens I have spent in LA. The Absinthe Fairy, Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, and then this year, Barbarella.

I celebrated Halloween over three evenings this year. One of the events was held at the amazing Magic Castle here in Hollywood. Wow, what a cool place. If you ever visit LA then try to plan a visit there, but plan ahead as it's members only and can be hard to get into. If you can get in for Halloween then all the better as they go all-out on the decor. Below are photos of the Magic Castle as it is most of the year. They don't allow photography so I couldn't show you the fabulous Halloween show they put on.

As for something creative? I have been working towards these exhibitions and will share info and photos on that very soon. Also, I'm pleased to see I'm on another magazine cover this month. My ninth in 3 years, so let's see if I can go for 10 before the year is out!

No Such thing as a Free Lunch

Last Friday was Independence Day in the US. What does that mean to this British girl living on US soil? I had the arduous task of obtaining a Greencard to be here, and so this day of frolics and fireworks doesn't hold any particular appeal. Nonetheless I made new friends and enjoyed the BBQ.

Still, the friendly banter fired in my direction by drunken Yanks, such as "yeah, we kicked your ass on this day" and "how does it feel not to be free - I have total freedom!" evoked a moment of contemplation. What would this country be like if it was still part of the British Empire, or at least, the Commonwealth? This is meant to be a blog about art, film and Tall Tales, so I wont attempt to answer that question here. However, as I upload photos of some miniature food I was commissioned to make for a magazine's Independence Day feature, I wonder how many Americans know that a huge gripe of the colonists was in being overly taxed by Britain... The taxes Americans pay today are lower than many developed countries, but do they know they receive a lot less for their money? Healthcare, much higher college tuition fees, less paid parental leave... it's a lot more out of pocket. (Helpful article here).
As for complete freedom, granted the US had the freedom to establish some popular new religions, and that's just marvellous, but this is still a country that continually reduces civil liberties (National Defense Authorization Act - which allows for the indefinite detention of citizens, Patriots Act - allows government to engage in discretionary surveillance etc etc) and let's face it, you're not free to drink in public here!
Furthermore, do Americans know that Britain enacted the Slave Trade Act in 1807 and then the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833 that fully abolished slavery in the British Empire? The US abolished slavery later in 1865.

Independence Day festivities give me reason to ponder about what America would have looked like had we kept the colonies. This map of the continent shows the parts belonging to Britain, Mexico (they would have retained Texas, Arizona and other parts of the Southwest) and Comancheria (the land belonging to the Comanche people, which included New Mexico, southeastern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, western Oklahoma and northwest Texas).

That being said, I challenge you to find anyone more in love with Los Angeles than myself. It may not be as totally 'free' as its people claim, but America is one heck of a place, unlike anywhere else, with some of the best and most innovative, incredible people I've ever met and I love the way of life out here. Still attached to Britain, I am not sure it could be nearly as wonderful.

Anyway! Here are some all-American (aka German) foods for the holiday and here's the original posting about that project last year.

Window of Opportunity

It was months ago that I finished creating the miniature 1:12 scale cottage. When I can get the time I'll finish the terrain beneath it (wire mesh and plaster). More about that in a few days.

So here are some photos I took along the way last year. The roof was finished with Celluclay (I'll upload a video demo of that to Vimeo soon), I painted and textured the thatch, put in lattice windows and added moss and aging on the thatch and up the walls.

This is of course a whimsical fairy tale interpretation of a little English / Welsh cottage and is not historically accurate. It has the things you'd expect - it's cruck-framed, has thatch, oak timbers, wattle and daub walls... but then it also has things that would have been utterly inaccurate for the time, such as a stone base, chimney and glazed windows. If you want to know why those things would have been impossible then read my little history lesson about late mediaeval / early Tudor cottages below.

------
Building in the Middle Ages
A thatched cruck-framed cottage built in the late mediaeval era (1400s / early 1500s) would have been constructed with an oak-frame and the walls made up of wattle and daub, then white washed with a lime plaster. (Wattle and daub was the way to build houses even into early Tudor times as stone, brick and even wood was expensive. Wattle is the mesh you made first with tightly woven sticks such as hazel. Daub was the 'cement' mixture you applied in damp workable balls known as 'cats' over the top. Daub was made of a mixture of clay, dung and sand mixed with straw, hair and flax to bind it.) My family home in Oxfordshire was built in this way in the 1500s. So far my cottage is accurate - apart from the stone I added to it.

A chimney would never have been seen on a tiny modest cottage. Chimneys were invented in the 1100s but were only for the extremely rich. Before this time the rich had braziers which were iron 'baskets' to hold fire and they stood in the center of rooms / great halls below a hole in the roof to allow smoke to escape. So, chimneys were not the norm even in modestly well-off houses until half-way through the reign of Elizabeth I when the affordable production of fireproof chimney materials meant you didn't have to use scarce stone. Chimneys became possible for the very well-off and allowed people to build a second and third storey to their houses. A chimney was a prime status symbol. My tiny cottage would have had an open hearth in the centre of it's one room and a hole in the thatch for the smoke to escape.

Fast forward another 40 years towards the end of Elizabeth I's reign and you'd start to see glazed windows - the new and very expensive way to show off to the neighbours. The poor - certainly anyone who lived in a packed-earth floor dwelling like my cottage would still have had small windows (holes in the wall more accurately) with greased paper / cloth or animal hides to allow in a little light whilst keeping out draughts. There's no way it had glazing!

But my whimsical cottage is coming from Tall Tales after-all...
------

Lecture over. Take a look at some work in progress photos below. I'm busy on a commission these days but will make sure I update this blog again in a day or two with the making of the front door and other things...

Past links about this project:-

Cottage update 3

Cottage update 2

Cottage update 1