Organic shapes with Cheryl Brooks

Posted on March 19, 2015 by Judy

Elderflower buds - lino cr Cheryl Brooks

Elderflower buds lino print © Cheryl Brooks

Organic silhouettes and echoes printed on circles enclosed within squares form the heart of artist Cheryl Brooks’ work. “I lived in Barcelona for eight years and grew very interested in the geometry of Islamic tile patterns – they can’t depict anything natural, so it’s all about the shapes, and they must look perfect, but can never actually be perfect. That was the beginning of the idea for me.”

Drawing these ideas into her own work, Cheryl began to meld it with an obsession with the geometry seen in plant life, and then expanding it.

Geometric Sero - Green & Peach cr Cheryl Brooks

Geometric Sero © Cheryl Brooks

“While in Barcelona I had a dog who was not my dog,” she smiles, “and I would walk in the park with this dog who was not my dog. I began taking lots of close-up photos of the flowers I saw there, examining their intricate forms.”

Back in England, Cheryl continued to explore, developing a series of pieces playing with the visuals of cow parsley, elderflowers and other botanical shapes. “I love taking something small and making it bigger,” she says. “No matter how small the original blossoms are, the natural geometry is still there.”

Long before she realised she wanted to be an artist, Cheryl recognised the joy making things gave her. “I love working with my hands – cutting, pasting and printing,” she says.

The desire to make and create initially led to Cheryl training to be an interior designer, gaining both a BA and MA in the discipline before taking a job designing spaces for pubs and nightclubs. “I eventually left that because it was so stressful and on such a large scale,” she says, “but I still wanted to be in that industry, so I worked with an architect in Cheltenham, still as an interior designer, but on much smaller projects.”

At this time Cheryl began taking a life drawing class, and then left Cheltenham to go travelling. “An Australian friend I had met while travelling asked, what do you really want to do? And I said, be an artist. Then she asked, are you good enough? And that got me thinking.”

With questions like that, who needs a life coach? The result was another BA followed by an MA, both in Fine Art. “So now I was MA squared,” Cheryl grins.

The most important thing she felt she learnt on these courses was how to transfer her ideas into art. “I had all these thoughts in my head and wanted a way to express them, to find my own way to make sense of the world and share this.”

Part of Cheryl’s MA was spent in Barcelona, a city she fell in love with so deeply she returned in about 2004 to make a go of being a full time artist there. “It was really hard,” she admits. “I did have a gallery who sold my work, but still… You have to get used to being very poor, and after a while that’s all you can think about. It gets in the way of the work, of the creating.”

To counteract this, Cheryl trained as an English language teacher, which freed her up to focus fully on creating whenever she had the time. After eight years in Barcelona, though, it felt like time to return to England, this time to Bournemouth with its profusion of foreign students in need of a good language teacher.

Teaching, for Cheryl, is about sharing her knowledge and encouraging others to join in – an ethos that also informs the collaborative art project she launched, titled Image Flowers https://imageflowers.wordpress.com. “We have a series of core images that people can look at and think, that reminds me of… and then produce a work in response to it, or simply submit a photo,” she explains. “The idea it that the initial image is the centre of the flower and each of the responses is a petal. It’s about opening up dialogue. Anyone can get involved.”

Being involved, a part of something bigger, has worked well for Cheryl. While settling into her new Bournemouth life in 2013, Cheryl joined Poole Printmakers. “They’ve been going for over 20 years. It’s a cooperative where you can go and use the presses, meet other printers, do courses. It’s very inspiring!”

Having a space to go and be creative in was especially important to Cheryl at that point. “I was renting a room in a shared house, so had nowhere to work,” she remembers. “These days I have a studio in my own house, where I tend to hand roll the prints, but if I want to use a press I go to the cooperative and make as many as I need.”

The break away from painting to printing made a huge difference to Cheryl’s perception of her work. “Printing takes me away from concentrating too much on the concept and allows me to focus on the image,” she explains. “It allows me to create something more immediate, and by making multiples rather than a single image that takes a long, long time, it means each piece is not so precious.”

Cheryl’s materials emphasise this, as many of her striking round pieces are created using the polystyrene circles you find in the packaging of shop-bought pizzas. “I love the round shape,” she comments. “The polystyrene is very receptive to the oil-based printing inks I like to use. The surface is quite soft so you can create a lot of expressive marks simply by pressing lightly.”

It sounds really satisfying! Cheryl also creates linocuts, which is a lot more challenging but results in a very different effect. “A pizza base plate has a very limited life, while a lino plate will print again and again,” she points out. “The lino is harder which means they’re much more precise. A pizza base will always squidge a little, which produces a very different look.”

This technique for creating prints has in itself formed the idea for another online project, this time in the form of an arts hub called Pizza Base 15 http://pizzabase15.wordpress.com. “It’s a virtual arts centre, with workshops, a café with cake recipes, exhibitions and more,” she explains.

More recently, Cheryl has been taking a course in surface printing on textiles. “I’d like to take it away from fine art and back towards craft,” she says. “I want to explore the possibilities of making things you can actually use and wear rather than just hanging them on a wall – learn about pattern repeats, the dyes and inks you need to use, and try printing with pizza bases onto fabric.”

Cheryl particularly relishes the juxtaposition of circles within squares, a pairing seen in many of her framed works.

“It’s the infinite within the rational,” she says, “The organic world is full of spirals and spheres, but there are no squares in nature. It’s a manmade shape. I love putting the two together.”

Find Cheryl at pizzabase15.wordpress.com, imageflowers.wordpress.com and cherylbrooks.weebly.com.

Are you an artist or do you know an artist who would like to be showcased on SkyLightRain.com? Get in touch at judydarley (at) iCloud.com. I’m also happy to receive reviews of books, exhibitions, theatre and film. To submit or suggest a review, please send an email to judydarley (at) iCloud.com.

Film review – Still Alice

Posted on March 17, 2015 by Judy

There are a lot of films out there about Alzheimer’s disease. Since my father was diagnosed with the disease I’ve been advised not to see several. The trailer for Still Alice, in which Julianne Moore’s character explains to her daughter (played by Kristen Stewart) how having the disease feels, intrigued me. But I wasn’t sure I had the nerve to watch it.

Having a parent, or any loved one, with Alzheimer’s, is like watching a gradual, unstoppable erosion. Sometimes it’s difficult to see what’s been lost, and other times it’s hard to remember what was once there. This film is an excellent reminder to live in the moment – because that’s all you can do.

I occasionally find postcards or emails from Dad that I’ve saved and recall suddenly his wit, his intelligence, his humour and emotional grace. He’s still here, and still full of passion for life, but he’s old in a way I never thought possible. He can’t always understand what’s said to him, and is often confused.

I think of the enormous conversations we used to have, the flights of fancy and the moral conundrums we’d explore, and realise how much I miss him. I think that’s important. I can give the him that remains all the love in the world, but I need to mourn the man already lost to us. And that’s hard, I think, for most people to understand.

Still Alice explains it far, far better than I can. My sister (who happens to be called Alice) suggested we go together, which deepened the experience and also opened up our shared but generally uncommented on experience of what’s happening to Dad, and, in reflection, to us.

We sat in the dark cinema and watched the on-screen Alice, only a decade or so older than us, begin to disintegrate. We saw her fear, and the dread of her husband and children. We watched her find moments of comfort and humour against lovely scenery, and we cried (quietly so as not to disturb other viewers around us) as she travelled the journey our father is still in the early stages of.

Regardless of whether you have any personal connection to the film, it’s a heart-rending, sensitively portrayed story well worth watching. Human beings are frail, but we’re also resilient, and Julianne Moore, in her Oscar-winning performance, gave the character a sense of realism that made me feel I knew her, and understood on some small level what she was going through.

There are many moving scenes in the film, including some instances I recognised from my father’s behaviour, such as when she and her husband (played brilliantly by Alec Baldwin) go for ice cream and she echoes his order rather than ask for what she really wants. My dad does that, not always, but occasionally. It makes me realise how important it is that I try to remember what he likes, for the times when he doesn’t.

The standout scene for me, however (the one that made me sob onto my sister’s shoulder) was the one when she gives a talk at a meeting of the Alzheimer’s Association and, using a highlighter pen to follow her words, talks eloquently about her condition. She’s not suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, she corrects us, she’s struggling with it. It’s a delicate distinction, but a crucial one, and a reminder of the exhaustion that comes with each unfamiliar day.

Still Alice was a beautiful experience to share my sister. I’m glad to have seen such a powerful film, filled with stunning acting and cinematography, but more than that I’m glad we watched it together, because at the heart of it, this is a film about family, and about love.

Director Wash Westmoreland
Screenplay Wash Westmoreland, Richard Glatzer
Starring Julianne Moore, Alec Baldwin, Kristen Stewart

Still Alice is available to watch at Watershed, who kindly supplied the images for this post, and cinemas across the UK

Apply for a creative residency in Paris

Posted on March 9, 2015 by Judy

Georgia Fee, 50 Kisses, Paris, 2001

Fancy spending a couple of months in Paris honing your creativity? The Georgia Fee Artist/Writer Residency hosted by ArtSlant is open for applications. The next term will take place from July 1st – August 31st 2015 and includes a monthly stipend of $1,000 USD to to be used for studio space, materials, and other costs, plus airfare to and from the residency site in the Montparnasse neighbourhood of Paris.

The Georgia Fee Artist/Writer Residency in Paris aims to support and invest in emerging artists and writers, to provide an opportunity for them to advance their work and explore and engage with the cultural landscape of Paris, to encourage experimentation, and to increase exposure of their work to an international audience. Continue reading →

Listening to Bees – a short story

Posted on March 6, 2015 by Judy

My tale ‘Listening to Bees’ is the bedtime story in the beautiful March issue of The Simple Things magazine. Isn’t that a gorgeous cover? It makes me think of things budding and bursting into bloom, filling the air with fragrance.

I’m really happy to have ‘Listening to Bees’ published in the mag, not least because the talented Hannah Warren has illustrated the tale.

The story is about a woman trying to reunite an elderly brother his rather eccentric sister, with a scene in Bristol’s Botanic Garden.

In other writing news, my flash fiction Gloss has been published by Visual Verse. You can read it here: http://visualverse.org/submissions/gloss-2/

And on March 19th I’ll be reading one of my short stories at Bristol literary regular, Novel Nights, taking place at The Lansdown. Hope to see you there!

Book review – The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Posted on March 3, 2015 by Judy

They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, and while it isn’t why I decided to read Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, there’s no denying the shiver of pleasure I felt whenever I glimpsed it. Featuring the silhouette of a skinny boy swimming in a fathomless ocean, it led me to expect a protagonist with the bravado and wildness of JM Barrie’s Peter Pan.

Far from it. Gaiman’s hero is an ordinary man remembering being an ordinary boy, and that, without doubt, is part of the beauty of this tale. When a lodger his parents take in dies, the boy, who remains nameless throughout, meets the three Hempstock women for the first time – Old Mrs Hempstock, Ginnie and Lettie, marvellous, resourceful Lettie who seems to be eleven years old, but answers only with a smile when asked “How long have you been eleven for?”

Gaiman weaves magic into the story with deft matter-of-factness. The boy takes it in his stride, with a child’s acceptance that the world is, of course, filled with things he doesn’t understand. He reads voraciously, mainly his mother’s old novels crammed with children foiling spies and criminals, and relishes simple details such as sleeping with the windows open so he can listen to the wind and pretend he is at sea.

When the lodger commits suicide something is stirred into wakefulness and needs to be bound to its place. Lettie takes the task on, and brings the boy with her into a place with a sky “the dull orange of a warning light.” It’s a journey which leads a mass of horrors that Gaiman refers to subtly enough to require us to do some of the imagining, the neatest way possible to ensure we take on the boy’s terror as our own.

A bold thread to the tale reminds us that being scared is something that comes with age, with knowledge, so that only the very young are truly unafraid. “I was no longer a small boy,” says our protagonist, ruefully. “I was seven. I had been fearless, but now I was such a frightened child.”

There’s a skill to perfectly balancing dread, suspense and beauty in a fairytale. Gaiman manages it with enviable ease, often offering comfort in the form of food from the Hempstocks – paper-thin pancakes blobbed with plum jam, honeycomb “with an aftertaste of wild flowers”, drizzled with cream from a jug. It’s at once utterly, earthily bucolic, and curiously reminiscent of the meals eaten by fairies in the stories I read as a child.

The horror comes in the form of the unnamed creature who hangs in the sky like “some kind of tent,” with a ripped place “where the face should have been.” Cleverly though, that’s far from the worst of it, as Gaiman gives her human form, then lets her get the boy’s father to do terrible things.

“You made my daddy hurt me,” the boy says, and she laughs, then declares that she never made any of them “made any of them do anything.”

It’s a chilling revelation, this idea that however much she may have encouraged, or even cajoled, the deeds committed came from some dark place deep inside the boy’s father, not from the monster’s will.

And then there’s the ocean, at the end of the lane, that resembles a duck pond yet contains all the depths of the universe, and, it seems, all its possibilities too.

A beautiful book – grotesque and magical – that every adult should read, if only to remember the brave, frightened children they once were.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman is published by Headline and is available to buy from Amazon.

To submit or suggest a book review, please send an email to Judy(at)socketcreative.com.

Free – a short story by Dominic Bond

Posted on February 27, 2015 by Judy

The following story was submitted in response to the writing prompt Bird and Girl, which featured and etching by Laura Robertson, shown above.

Free by Dominic Bond

When the music starts, she new it was time to rise. Pulling back the curtains, she saw a low line of blue mist rising gently above the soft green landscape beneath. The top of the sun emerged above this, deep orange emanating from its edges. The first smoke bellowed from the roof tops surrounding the tower, a ritual each day never lost.

The bird continued to chirrup. She looked it in the eye, the bird going quiet. She watched it briefly before the door began to open. A guard came in with a bowel of fruit and some water.

“You okay?” the guard asked her.
“Yes, I am” she replied.
“It will soon be over. What do you want to do with this bird?”
“I want it to watch.”
“What?” the guard asked, looking her up and down.
“I want it to watch, then it can be set free.”
“Whatever, I’ll be back shortly”. He left quickly.

She sat down on the bed, taking some papers out from under her bed. In there were some paintings she had done. It was the same horizon, in different colours, changing as the seasons had changed. Then there were some letters she had prepared for different people. She put them in a bag, hoping they would end up with their intended recipient.

Soon the sun was out fully. She looked out at the landscape she had loved her whole life, saying goodbye to those things she would not see again. Their was a folly in the distance that had been such a good friend to her, the lake where she had watched her body grow, her horses enjoying the rising sun.

She took a glance out of the window. The platform was in place and a crowd was forming. She went over to a mirror, combing her hair. Then the door opened.

“Now, ma’am, it’s time” the guard informed her.

“Really? Okay, let’s go”.

She picked up the cage, the bird jumping around, unsure what was happening, and followed the guard down the stairs. They came to a large door, which opens, the sunlight burning on her eyes. Adjusting to the light, she saw the crowd, cheering and throwing their hats in the air. They went on to the platform. She saw the priest, and offered him the cage.

“Please,” she asked him, “when this is done, let her go, I want her to enjoy the same freedom about to befall me.”

“If you want freedom, you better hope that God will show you mercy” the priest told her.

“He knows. Please, let the bird free.”

“As you wish, ma’am.”

She leant down, putting her head on the block. The executioner took his place. The crowd went silent. Then the wings of a bird interrupted the silence, dancing through the sunlight.

About the author

Dominic Bond lives in Sutton in Surrey and likes to write about the world he sees before him. He says: “To me, there are few pleasures like a moment of inspiration.” Dominic has had poems appear on the Poetry Super Highway and Word Bohemia, and has had flash fiction published by the Pygmy Giant.

Book review – The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono

Posted on February 24, 2015 by Judy

This beautiful little book turned up in my Christmas stocking this year. As slim as it is, with wood engravings by Harry Brockway and an illuminating afterword by the author’s daughter, it really is a book to be savoured.

The story tells of a chance encounter the narrator has in a desolate, mostly treeless, landscape with a solitary shepherd. He watches the gentle man sort a pile of acorns. “As he did so he discarded those that were too small or had a tiny split; he examined them minutely.”

He then took his chosen acorns, dipped them in water and set out into the wilderness.

And so begins a slow, unfurling tale of a man who plants trees in their hundreds over the span of a lifetime. As the narrator gazes on in wonder, the man covers acres of arid land with seedlings that become saplings that gradually become a forest, altering the landscape, the climate and the temperament of the people who reside there.

Yes, a fable, and one to warm the heart, but, as the author’s daughter Aline reveals in her afterword, one that also gained life of its own. Apparently, readers of this story all over the world have believed it to the extent that wooded areas in countries from Finland to New Zealand have been attributed to a lone shepherd with a quiet, but steadfast, ambition. Continue reading →

A story, a poem and a literary event at Foyles

Posted on February 20, 2015 by Judy

My very short story ‘Towelling Robe‘ has been published by The Pygmy Giant, a brilliant online home for UK flash fiction and very short non-fiction. You can read it here.

And my poem ‘Strays’ (sort of pictured left – you’ll understand when you read it) has been picked up by Literary Bohemian and will appear on the site soon. Such lovely company my words are keeping these days!

Plus tomorrow I’ll have the pleasure of taking part in ‘A Hint of Crime’, a literary event at Foyles Bookshop, Bristol. I’ll be reading my tale Flyleaf, which appropriately enough begins in a bookshop. Other readers include Suzanna Stanbury, AA Abbott, Tim Kindberg and bestselling crime writer Sarah Hilary. Ooh, and it’s free, so do come along (4-6pm) if you’re in the area!

Midweek writing prompt – bird and girl

Posted on February 18, 2015 by Judy

This week’s prompt is inspired by this rather dreamy etching from artist Laura Robertson.

Such a gorgeous image. To me it seems reminiscent to ancient fairytales in which a brother or sister is turned into a bird or beast, leaving our heroine to find a way to save them, and in the process herself.

“I read a quote in a book many years ago – ‘only a bird in a gilded cage,’” says Laura of the piece. “It set off my imagination with images of a sad lonely bird in a cage and a sympathetic lady looking at it.”

What’s happening in this scene? Can you spin it into a melancholy fairytale with an uplifting resolution? Or is your impulse to write something far jollier, or far darker?

If you write something prompted by this, please let me know by sending an email to Judy(at)socket creative.com. With your permission, I’d love to share it on SkyLightRain.com.

This week I’m reading…

Posted on February 17, 2015 by Judy

Three truly beautiful books – The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer, The Children’s Book by AS Byatt and Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at The End of the Lane. And I am in bookworm heaven. Here’s why.

These three books, while utterly exquisite reads in their own right, meld together in extraordinarily flavoursome ways. Think of the fresh deliciousness of ice-cold tonic, then imagine adding in a generous splash of gin followed by a fat wedge of lime. See what I mean?

For starters, they each have a glorious cover in shades of blue, just the thing to lift me out of February’s traditional gloom. The glints of gold and light enhance the blue, and the fact AS Byatt’s tome features a gorgeous yet monstrous dragonfly woman makes me immediately want to know more.

Secondly, they each weave fairytales into their narratives – or at last otherworldly elements, some imagined, and some apparently real, at least in the world of their narratives.

Thirdly, each tale centres on a strong, introverted protagonist with a rich inner life – whether they’re the narrator themselves or simply one of the many characters, but each offering a sharp-sighted gaze on the events unfolding.

And finally, for now at least, each of these skilfully written novels intersperses passages of sheer, startling beauty with moments of fear and dread, bringing together poetry and horror fit to take your breath away. Wonderful.