Tag: 1920 India and Kenya

Musical Interlude

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Sunday and I am having a day off drawing in order to catch up with some research and to make a post for My Darling Popsy. I have been reading about the Africa my grandfather would have been experiencing in the 1926 and trying to tie up the information about the locations together with the photographs. I realise now he was there at the time of the infamous Happy Valley crowd so the research is interesting. The quality of the 1920’s negatives is in some cases quite amazing and in others very poor. However with the help of Photoshop I am managing to coax images out of most of them. I can’t help but wonder what happened to the people in them, especially the children. Here is a lovely photo of a little girl with, I think, a musical instrument, (a harp?) but with no reference to her in the letters yet..

Leaf of the Day: Easter Calamondin Orange

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It’s Easter already and I hear from my father in the UK they are expecting snow. Dan the avuncular weather man here has promised us a fair weekend.
I am going to Sarasota this week to do some watercolour painting and to visit the Marie Selby Gardens there, so may not be posting any drawing here for a few days.

I have some reading matter to take with me…one is William Bartram’s “Travels and Other Writings”. I quote from the fly leaf;
‘Artist, writer, botanist, gardener, naturalist, intrepid wilderness explorer, and self styled philosophical pilgrim’.
Son of the renowned botanist, John Bartram, William travelled extensively in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida from 1773 to 1776 and wrote about all that he saw and heard, presenting a ” moving detailed vision of man living in harmony with nature”.
I shall be pondering this as we make the monotonous 2 hour drive to Sarasota tomorrow on highways lined with identical concrete malls and fast food outlets.. but I am looking forward to seeing the comical pelicans again in Sarasota Bay.

My other book is Jung’s “Memories Dreams and Reflections” My interest is more to do with my research into Africa in the 1920’s for my other blog My Darling Popsy than analytical psychology. He records in this book the journey to Africa during which he crystallised many of his most important ideas on psychology. My grandfather, being on the same ship to Mombassa and then, I have discovered, working in the areas that Jung travelled to, will have seen many of the same things. It will be very intereting and I may learn something about my psyche as well!
I hope to be able to add a couple of “Popsy” posts this week.

This is the tiny Calamondin orange. I added a seasonal egg and a blueberry really to show how tiny they are. They are very tart but if you eat the whole thing the sweetness of rind compensates for the bitterness of the flesh. It’s almost true..but I think that Pedro’s recipe to use the juice mixed with soy sauce as a marinade is probably a better idea.

This will be my last coloured pencil drawing for March…I say with some relief…
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Calamondin Orange

Back to Posting and New Projects

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I am now back from two weeks in UK, an week´s excellent art course in Sarasota, a weekend in Fort Myers and have just finished and posted my first submission for the course I am working towards. I am getting back to the blog and I have quite a few drawings to post from the last 3 weeks and will be posting them retrospectively. Some are already there but I still have some catching up to do.

I have two new projects on the go as well!…. one I have already spoken about here in the post for Feb 7th which is to get the Lincolnshire Country Food book republished and the next is to develop a website/blog which will be all about my grandparents during the few years they spent in India and Kenya in the 1920’s. I never knew my grandfather but he and my grandmother wrote wonderful letters back to Mum when she was a little girl staying with relatives in Montrose in Scotland. I am sure the web is awash with letters and photographs from India and Kenya in the 1920´s but these are a bit different because my grandfather was an engineer working for John Fowler of Leeds and took steam ploughs out to help develop the local agriculture. I have many old and faded negatives to print up and sort out, as well as the letters to transcribe, so I will be busy. I am hoping that someone will find them on the web and either fill in some missing gaps of the family history … or decide that they are a wonderful subject for a film and buy the film rights… hmmm.. I see flying pigs ..but you never know.

Just a note for my faithful readers. If you are a subscriber you will sometimes get the uncorrected, unedited version as I have to publish before I can really see how the layout has worked… (and my spelling is very bad anyway).. I do normally get things fixed in time ..but let me know if I have anything completely wrong.