Dog Watch*

*Dog watch, in  marine or  naval terminology, is a watch, a period of work duty or a work shift, between 1600 and 2000 (4pm and 8pm). This period is split into two, with the 'first' dog watch from 1600 to 1800 (4pm to 6pm) and the 'last' dog watch from 1800 to 2000 (6pm to 8pm) (there is no 'second' dog watch). Each of these watches is half the length of a standard watch.  [Wikipedia]

Staying  with old friends in  Cornwall  at the weekend, we were greeted by this charming little sentinel on our return from a walk.  When I suggested to the wife that I might email her husband with this photograph, she said "Why?  He sees it every day."  It made Finny's lone vigil all the more poignant, I thought.

Here she is on my husband's lap feeling much more at home.  

Images © Rosie West 2013

BACK from the Blue

If you thought I had committed blog suicide, so did I, yikes - having posted nothing since August. So I am just back from the brink with  a desperate offering of random leaves from my sketch book until I get some more inspiration.  Hello to all my old chums whose blogs I've neglected to read as well. Why?  I dunno. Sorry!

 Flamenco after El Jaleo by John Singer Sargent

 Pakistan

 Peep Toes

RW

Sunsuit

Toy horses

Bridle

All images ©  Rosie West 2012

What I'd like for Christmas ..

A plaster cast from the Parthenon Frieze

to go with the hand I bought in a specialist Paris art shop 

and the foot from the Sir John Soane Museum

All images © Rosie West

Nature Morte

Please look away now if you don't like ex-animals (below).  I painted them  at The Prince's Drawing School  in Shoreditch under the tutelage of Henry Gibbons Guy who  gave them a poignant Chardin style setting in the changing light of our fourth-floor studio.  

The artists' prey was contributed by the wonderful Delia, one of our fellow students, who brought it from Norfolk via her London deep freeze.  Where a squirrel or a rabbit needed  post mortem first aid, as it were, she would gently bathe it and then blow dry the fur with her hairdryer.  As a gesture towards students who might be squeamish, it was a fine one.Nobody could say that our models didn't look pristine and peaceful.

All images © Rosie West

Tallyho! The Adventures of Little Miss Jodhpurs

My virtual world of horsewomanship ..

All images © Rosie West

In Berkeley Square...

A nightingale sang...

And in Moscow.  I always wondered how a nightingale really sang.  Wait for its sublime little voice to
develop..

The English Country Blogger

When I'm affecting my urban cool mode, I tell rural types that I only like to see the countryside through double glazing because I know it teases. Except that they look at me witheringly and uncomprehendingly. By then it's too late to say that we once bought a coastguard house on top of a cliff in Dorset, without electricity or running water ten years later. That big blotch in the picture represents the row of seven grimly but solidly built dwellings that look so out of place on the footpath that we frequently met the gaze of walkers down the other end of a pair of binoculars, leaning against our wall.  The painter Augustus John once stayed there but so did some IRA bombers on the run, before our time.  For many years there was an old rowing boat parked outside, confiscated from smugglers pour encourager les autres. The story goes that they were made to carry it up there (where the coastguards made it unseaworthy) - no mean feat up 500 ft of precipitous smugglers' path. Thomas Hardy's short story The Distracted Preacher is a rollicking tale of the Revenue men versus the smugglers who took this very route.

I have just returned from staying nearby for a couple of days and much regret that we didn't get to walk up there.  The first day it was shrouded in mist; the second day I fell to painting it instead. And then I  fancied myself attempting The Diary of An English Country Lady with a sketch of some bois trouvé.  I found it in on a lush secret path from the beach, the trees dripping and glistening after the rain.  I was taken by the radioactive green of the lichen and the alien fungus growing out of it.  I wish I could pretend I wasn't in the East End of London as I write this or that I won't be back to compulsively drawing shoes now. (I am such a poseur.)

Absent Without Leave

I seem to have lost my mojo so I can only resort to throwing up a little painting or two.

If I tell you that I'm disappearing for a while then I might come back sooner than I thought?

Images © Rosie West

Drawing Room

Established in 1855,  Cornelissens near the British Museum is possibly the most attractive art supplier in London.  Its original wooden cabinets are full of delicious things like steel nibs, gold leaf, graphite powder and all kinds of arcane preparations.


I went there to get  Sennelier Le Maxi drawing blocks because I love their unusual square format and crisp creamy paper.  With 250 sheets at your disposal there's no need to worry about messing up the blank page.  The last time I got artist's block,  my old friend John Dougill at my studio suggested that I get a hundred sheets of paper cut to the same size and work my way through them in a diligent way but at the same time not caring too much about the result.  By about page 30 you really get into the flow!

image from rexart.com

So here I went..

Images taken from my hand and from Anatomy for the Artist by Sarah Simblet pub. Dorling Kindersley

Carousel

Continuing my fantasy horsey theme, I go from War to Merry-go-Round.   Anything to relieve the look of Christmas ..

Whoops, this beauty comes from the film White Christmas

And I played around with the image on photoshop

© Rosie West

I love this restaurant and the diamond window panes, but I can't remember where I found it.  

Greedy collector Jean-Paul Flavand from Paris seems to have cornered the market here!
From: Obsessions by Stephen Calloway, pubd. Mitchell Beazley 2004