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Picturing a World

Jopling, Blue and White

Blog post alert: Charley Parker's Eye Candy for Today: Louise Jopling domestic scene brought Louise Jane (née Goode) Jopling to my attention. She was an older contemporary of Jeanette's who studied art in Paris and became a suffragist. Just get this poem she wrote in my magical year of 1908!

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Witch dovecote

Blog post alert: Here on All Souls' Day, a glance back at witches via Barbara Wells Sarudy's Hallowe'en post, About Those Female Witches - 1607 Jesuits Suspect Lutheran sect of Witchcraft. I first learned about dovecotes in relation to gardening history and became fond of them, while crones, witches, bats, dogs, and owls are longtime favorites. Inquisitional Jesuits? Not so much. I don't know how I'll use this (if at all) or what it may inspire, but I'm tickled to have run across it.

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Three doors

From time to time, a picture goes into my file of story prompts. I ran across this photograph of a corner in Peveril Castle the other day, and flash! a fiction! If I were better at art software, I could probably combine it with this photograph of Peveril Castle for a Tiny Illustrated Story. Read More 

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Ghost stories

Blog post alert: Kathleen Jennings has a long, amusing, and excellent post on Some elements of ghost stories. Instead of piggy-backing too much on Jennings, however, I chose a picture form John Muth's Zen Ghosts (which includes a Japanese ghost story) because I love both the story and the art.

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Florence Ada Fuller

Here in the Berkshires, as the days shorten, we face cold rain and a first frost, which certainly means a book beside the fire appeals! Florence Ada Fuller was an Australian artist, a slightly younger contemporary of the real Jeanette Smith. Like my fictional Jeanette Palmer, she studied at the Académie Julian with William-Adolphe Bouguereau. I didn't know of her until I ran across a post at My Daily Art Display. It's always a pleasure to discover a new artist, and Fuller is a reminder that Australia is a whole continent to explore. Where to start? How about Australian Impressionism?

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Tiny story formats

This engraved illustration to a page in Edward Young's Night Thoughts by William Blake from his own watercolor design demonstrates pictorial drama, while the thirty-line text shows approximately how long a one-page tiny story could be. Blake reacted to the poem. We, on the other hand, could ignore it and react to the imagery as inspiration for a story. As I said in my last post Kathleen Jennings has a good post on formats for tiny illustrated stories.

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Women's work in 19th C France

Blog post alert: The diagram shown here appears in a blog post 7 Suitable Career Options for 19th Century Women in France. Admittedly, there can have been only so many nuns, midwives and teachers in France during the entire century. But when you take into account that farm and factory workers, servants, and merchants must have made up a large portion of the female population, you realize the cliché of women 's being restricted to the domestic sphere applied only to the relatively small middle and upper classes. Iva Polansky, author of the Victorian Blog, gets it.

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Wild Folk: Tales from the Stones

Magic alert: The most magical thing I've seen in a long time—the promotional trailer for Wild Folk Tales from the Stones by Jackie Morris and Tamsin Abbott. Whole worlds of inspiration about friendship, age, place, workspace, art, and myth in this five-minute video, plus word of a must-have book.

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Dunluce Castle in the rain

 

Fantasy writers' prompt: This photo at Geograph is accompanied by a caption: "Dunluce is one of the most picturesque and romantic of Irish Castles. With evidence of settlement from the first millennium, the present castle ruins date mainly from the 16th and 17th centuries. (When it is not raining!)"
 
Okaaay—so what happens when it does rain?
 
An editor might move the parenthesis to follow the first sentence. Fantasy writers? Get to work on time slips and morphing ruins!

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Blue kimono haiku

My earlier post on Marie Danforth Page mentioned this self-portrait. Looking at it again, I was struck by Page's slightly amused, slightly challenging gaze out of the corner of her left eye. The side glance is explained in part by the painter's need to look in a mirror over her shoulder for a three three-quarter's pose, but it set me thinking about how she might be interpreted as a character in a story. First result: three Imagist haikus (with apologies to William Carlos Williams).

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