Happy New Year everyone. I hope you all had a good festive season. Our plans seemed to change every day for Covid-related reasons, but this year, we did manage to see everyone, just not quite at the same time. But it was a vast improvement on last Christmas and we were grateful. That’s the way it was for lots of people, I’m sure. Time to move on now, start afresh, and think about the coming year, albeit in a rather cautious manner.
I’m not making too many plans at this point. We are, once again, waiting on a builder to start our extension, and we didn’t even make it to New Year for him to say that he wouldn’t be ready for his proposed start date in January. It is not an easy time for the building trade, I know that, so I am just trying to stay calm, focus on other things and not let it overshadow the good things we have going on. Over the holidays, I found time to do some oil painting after a long break. I was drawn to fresh, bright colours: orange, pink, mint green – and the spring promise of bulbs and new growth.
Hyacinths and paper whites are flowering as the Christmas decorations come down. It’s always serendipitous timing.
I saw some beautiful chunky coffee cups in Anthropologie when I was Christmas shopping, and I wanted to recreate them in a picture, so I used a mix of oil paints and collage to make this small square painting. I ended up painting on to the easel. If interested in purchasing, drop me a line at fionacumberpatch0@gmail.com. The colours in the photo above are true: it is a very fresh, bright painting and I’ll be exploring this colour palette a lot more over the coming months.
I have another version of tulips and coffee cups ready now. This is a larger painting at 40cmx50cm. It is oil and collage on canvas. The irregularities you can see in the surface are intentional. They are created with the gesso primer I apply to the canvas before painting. The price of this painting is £55 plus p&p.
Next are hyacinths in the old Edwardian kitchen pots that I have been collecting for years.
These postcard sized canvases are £25 each. The pots are lettered with Sultanas and Treacle.
I was interviewing someone about hellebores this week, and it reminded me how much I love these understated winter stars with their velvet petals, so I incorporated some in another bright picture. There are more paintings on the way, and I still have tea towels and plant prints for sale. See previous posts for details of those.
Now I am back to health, I am sorting out my magazine and website deadlines and busy writing again. My novel is currently with a reader panel of a romantic fiction imprint, so we’ll see if anything happens with that. If the readers don’t like it, that’s the end of the road for that particular publisher. But I have had a vague idea for another book, so I want to find some time to do some research on that and see what happens.
Let’s hope that this year is better than 2021 for all sorts of reasons.
I know that I am more than ready for a fresh start.
