Spring colours

How lovely to see such fresh bright colours again. Spring has arrived! It's an absolute joy to wake up in the morning, look out the window and see the blossom on the trees and the buds opening at last in the warmth of the spring sunshine. I've been inspired to give the Lovely Room in Notting Hill a total spring clean. That includes the sash windows too, which means a bit of dare devil maneuvering on my part as I'm on the 2nd floor, but it's worth it to be able to see out again. I've planted new flowers in my window boxes and gone for some gorgeous pinks and oranges, inspired a little by India and also Marc Jacobs new spring collection!! After such a dreary and grey winter, I feel the need for some vibrant and electric colour...

I was given some lovely mini easter eggs and they fit nicely into the colour scheme as well. I'd better take my time eating them as they look so pretty in my room...

I just can't resist buying plants and flowers at the moment and as I don't have any outside space I fill my flat with more and more colour. It's an obsession. I like to think I'm as keen on gardening as the next person it's just that I do mine in window boxes and on every available surface in the flat. I'm very lucky as this flat has loads of light pouring in all through the day and plants love it here. One day I'll move somewhere with a garden, just not yet... I really still feel this flat is my home. Each spring I'm filled with renewed love for it and want to stay and give it a new lease of life.

Notting Hill is buzzing with activity at the moment and London is a great place to be. I've been cycling through the parks and enjoying the sense of winter melting away as we move into the new season. It's great!!! I'm excited about my new job in the cafe and life feels good. I'm not in any hurry to move anywhere else soon. I was very close to leaving London over the winter but I no longer feel that way now. I feel I've worked hard to create several new beginnings for myself and I want to see how they all pan out... I used to think it was impossible to plan anything in life. It always seemed too precarious to me. I think it was Woody Allan who said "If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans" which makes absolute sense to me. However, I've learned over the years that you can try and make plans but you just have to be very flexible. It's being able to keep an open mind and having a fluid plan that enables you to ride over the bumps along the way. Maybe having learned to surf as a child helps me to keep going as well..
 

To quote Woody Allan again: "To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love. But then, one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy, one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.” This sounds so crazy but it's true. I'm feeling a bit braver on that front as well and I feel that something positive is on the horizon. We shall see.... roll on the spring!

Celebrating the beauty of older women

My friend Harriet Walter has published an inspiring book that celebrates the beauty of older women. I worked with Harriet in the early stages of the book and I used my research skills to help her when she was looking for images. She commissioned some beautiful portraits by a variety of photographers and the end result is a really lovely book. Harriet's idea for the book was to allow photographs to show the gains in depth, personality and individuality that older women have traded for the flawless glow of youth. My very talented  friend Micaela Scimone photographed her 85 year old Aunt Amelia in Sicily and this wonderful image was selected by Harriet for the front cover of the book.

It's always really thrilling to get anything into print and I am very delighted to have one of my photographs included in the book (see above). This photo is of a stylish lady called Daphne Selfe who, at the age of 82, is this country's oldest model. Her modelling career blossomed in older age as she promoted the benefits of going grey.

"My hair is my fortune, it made me more striking," she says, "I don't feel a day over 60. It's fantastic. I'll continue modelling until they stop asking. I love it. It's fun and keeps me young. I was never one for wild parties and I've never had any need to get drunk."

I love her attitude and wish everyone could be as positive about growing older and having fun like her. She seems to have a natural self confidence and I think it is this quality that comes across in her work. She's having a really good time and is happy to show it.

"Facing It" is an uplifting and moving collection of photographs and reflections on growing older. It's available from Amazon and also the National Theatre bookshop.

The Mood Board

On the advice of an art director friend of mine I made a couple of mood boards to help me come up with ideas for the decoration of the cafe. It's a great way of doing research and putting together a visual picture of what you have in mind. I suppose I could also do a few sketches to convey ideas but this feels more tactile and I love doing image research anyway, especially if it's for something that really interests me. I would like the cafe to have a feminine and elegant feel to it but for it also to be fun and a bit eclectic. It needs to be somewhere that people would like to linger and feel comfortable enough to drink lots of tea and eat cake (of course).

The cafe as it stands is an old photographic studio and is perfect as a blank canvas on which to create this cafe. Light pours into the space as there are two huge windows at the front and that also means that we can create beautiful displays and decorate the glass from time to time if we feel like it... there's a little area outside where people can sit at a table and take tea and I would like to decorate it with flowers and plants so that it looks pretty outside as well.

Returning to the theme of the original post on my blog "home". I guess this desire of mine to decorate comes from the same place as wanting to create a home. It's definitely a creative urge and I think that although I don't have a family of my own I still like to create a feeling of "home" where ever it may be or whatever form it takes. When I am involved in making something I'm searching for the best bits of myself and I try to put these together in a form that other people can understand and appreciate.

I've always enjoyed giving parties as well. It's hard work but also very satisfying to create a lovely atmosphere and open up one's home to friends. That's my ideal way of being sociable. I don't do it that often but when I do I like to make sure there's plenty to eat and drink and that my home looks and feels a comfortable place for my friends to relax and enjoy themselves.  Oh God, I think I just sounded a bit like Nigella but so what... although she may have turned into a rather crazed domestic goddess I like the way she writes her cookery books. She encourages the reader to try out recipes and not aim for perfection and I'm all for that. It's about making something that looks and tastes lovely without falling into the trap of trying to make it perfect. My pavlova's a happy pavlova!

So hopefully this cafe will be a place which exudes charm and invites people to feel comfortable and be happy. Tea and cake, who could want more?

Sketching

 

I went to see the Imperial Chinese Robes from the Forbidden City at the V&A Museum and took my sketch book. Most of these textiles have never left China. They remained in the Forbidden City stores for hundreds of years, treated as sacred and carefully tended even though the Opium and World wars, Boxer and Taiping rebellions, and the dissolution of the entire imperial system exploded around them. As soon as the emperor, empress, concubines and their children died, their clothing was taken to the stores, never to be worn again, never exposed to sunlight and the various effluvia of humanity. The collection is so enormous that it is has taken almost a century since the opening of the Forbidden City to catalog all the pieces. That’s five generations of curators dedicated to the task.

The exhibition includes a wedding gown made in 1889 when Yehe Nara Jingen married the emperor Guangxu, which took three years to make. It is richly embroidered with dragons and phoenix, on red silk, the colour for weddings: the last boy emperor Pu Yi recalled that when he married in 1922, two years before he was expelled from the Forbidden City, the bridal chamber “looked like a melted red wax candle”.

The garments followed a strict hierarchy: bright yellow for the emperor, apricot yellow for his sons, Siberian sable only for the imperial family, pale blue for moon ceremonies, padded robes embroidered with narrow rows of gold to look like metal armour for travelling with an entourage of 3,000 people, 6,000 horses and 1,000 boats. Ordinary Chinese people could never have afforded the sumptuous dragon embroideries, but were in any case forbidden by law to use them.

I found the whole exhibition fascinating and would love to have gone back again but the exhibition ended the the next day. Keeping a visual record of what I've seen is becoming more and more important to me. I like that I now have more confidence in my drawing abilities and feel able to make a little sketch instead of taking a photo when I want to remember something. It feels more meaningful than simply taking a snapshot with a camera. You really have to look and explore your subject as you make your marks on the paper. You also have to be quick as there's never much time and you are forced to make quick decisions about what it is that you find interesting and try to convey that in the sketch. Having said that, drawing can be very intuitive and there's something great about just losing yourself in the act of painting or drawing. It's as if the whole world just melts away and you focus only on creating an image.  I'm learning to be happy with what I've made instead of always looking at how it could be improved and that's quite a significant shift for me.