Anita Brookner
A good painting day today; Enid Blyton is looking much stronger after a broken start where I wondered why I bother but then managed to turn it around and began to be really excited by the results. The spade work I had put in previously with Anita Brookner paid off and I developed her quite quickly. Finally had great fun with Carol Ann Duffy and I think she will like the result. A fruit fly landed on her but I managed to squidge it then flick it off on to newspaper. Am really pleased with the results and hope to photograph a new sketch book shortly and these literary illustrations so that I can show them on my blog. It was so hot today that I had to move out of the conservatory and into the dining room where the solid roof meant it was cooler and the paint wasn’t drying so quickly. Should spur me on to tidy my studio. Am using acrylics and they are working really well. Good to be painting again and developing what feels like an important body of work. Virginia Woolf is next on the cards so watch this space. Am currently rereading Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner; must be for the third time. Really enjoying it and would love to take off and stay in a hotel on my own one day (well, I think I would but I’d actually be jolly lonely). But I do enjoy starting up a conversation with total strangers and seeing where the conversation goes. I love her use of prose and the descriptions are wonderful. Have just finished reading a book of short stories by Graham Greene.
drawing from life 