Bats & Fireflies

Bat and Firefly

Recently, a shop has opened on George's Street in Dublin 2. It is called Needful Things but I've ignored the warning and have taken to buying editions of a magazine it stocks, an encyclopaedic series from the 1970s called Man, Myth & Magic.

It was in edition number 52 that I read

Among these tribes [of Orissa, now called Odisha, an Eastern state in India] bats were reputed to carry fire-flies to their homes because their children could not endure any other light.

I couldn't find out what kind of bat this story referred to. Odisha is home to fruit bats, which always remind me of my greyhound, Lily (she really does look like a fruitbat), but I thought that the horseshoe bat suited better - I think I just associate it more with fairy tales.

So I did an internet browse, including Bat Conservation Ireland, and did some sketches.

 

Last Friday, I visited the Zoological Museum in Trinity College. It's a gorgeous little gem of a museum, with a collection of beautiful Blaschka models. We watched a short film about the Great Auk and I did some sketches of the bats there.  I won't lie, the bat specimens aren't exactly lifelike, and most of them are in jars.

So, yesterday I trotted over to the Museum of Natural History, or The Dead Zoo, as it is also known. The bats here are easier to see & draw.

 

This whiskered bat was is a slightly different position to the others, with his wings slightly lowered, and  when I looked at him from the side, he suggested an interesting pose.

I went home and drew some more.

The sky needed a few layers of pencil work, so it helped that I had good music to listen to - Jacques Dutronc Hippie Hippie Hourrah; Barry Dransfield The Werewolf, and Sea Wolf You're a Wolf, and of course, Big Block Singsong, Bat.

The O'Creans

I began drawing when I was very young, because it was a way of making up stories. I still make up stories and doodle while I'm doing this. A lot of the time, I don't really know who a character is until I've drawn them a few times. This is a family called O'Crean.

Subterranean Trees

This was inspired by the theory, in the 1600s, that 'subterranean trees' were not dead trees that had been preserved in bogs, but were instead a species of tree that grew underground.

Detail showing an Irish elk.

Jaspar Corncrake & Delia Verdigris, or, Where's My Phone?

Yesterday I set up my stall at the Fusion Sunday market in Newmarket Square, Dublin 8, for the last time. (Although, having said that, the last time was also meant to be the last time.) Anyway, I did the usual: set out my cards and prints and packets of letter-writing paper, then went round the still-assembling market, looking for someone who would sell me tea and some sort of breakfast. Back in my seat, I placed my book, copybook and pen in front of me, and then reached for my phone.

But my phone WAS NOT THERE!

I'd left it at home. I drank some tea nervously. I gazed about. I wondered how I would cope, not knowing who had said what on Twitter. Maybe someone famous had said something objectionable. Maybe someone else had quoted them and added a witty retort. I WOULD NOT  KNOW! I ate some almond-and-orange cake, which was delicious, but not as delicious as feverishly following an argument about lobsters.

I thought to myself: Calm down. You lived many, many years without a phone.

I took up the novel.

After a while, I put the novel down, and began to doodle in my copybook. I drew a little vampire. Then I drew a little witch.

I read more of the novel. I thought, this is great.

I went back to my copybook and gave the vampire & witch some friends: a dog, a cat. I wondered about the names of the vampire and the witch. I decided to call them Jaspar Corncrake and Delia Verdigris. Corncrake is a melancholy word to me, because the corncrake is dying out in Ireland. I called Delia after Delia Derbyshire, because I love the song "ziwzih ziwzih oo-oo-oo". I gave them a bat and turned a stray scribble into a spider.

I wondered how I could get rid of my phone for good.

Drawing Dragons

Last weekend I was at the Fusion Sunday market, in Newmarket Square. I got talking to a really lovely fellow stall-holder. She was telling me about the trouble she had drawing dragons.

For me, sometimes dragons just appear in doodles.

Witch with small dragon in her hair

But sometimes, I have the same problem, and I get stuck. What do dragons look like? The trouble with dragons is, that we never encounter them in daily life. Art studios never offer dragon life-drawing classes.

We think we see a dragon in our mind, but do we? Or do we imagine that we see him?

You know when you are dreaming, and you come across a book or other writing. You try to read it, but you find you can't. I think something similar happens when we think we have a dragon in our head, but then find we can't draw it.

So what to do? Well, we have to go and find the dragon in the wild.

Zuni, a lurcher. Or maybe a dragon.

This is one of my two dogs. They're both sighthounds - one's a greyhound, and this one, Zuni, is a lurcher. I sometimes call sighthounds fur-dragons, because to me, they have the same beautiful, sinuous lines that dragons have.

So, I looked around, I found my dragon, and then I could draw him from observation.

Dragons, like moths, fly at dusk

You can find more drawings of dragons here!

Little Red Riding Hood

I drew this picture the other week, and I've been sketching wolves and werewolves for a while, so when I saw that Enchanted Conversation was looking for stories about animals, I suppose it's not too strange that the idea I had was based on Little Red Riding Hood.

If you're interested, you can read my story here.

For the story, I used elements from Irish history which I'd read about in Kieran Hickey's Wolves in Ireland. There's a quote in his book that really struck me. It's from 1691, when someone called Laurence Echard was writing about the 'natural Wild Irish':
They pray for the wolves, and wish them well, and then they are not afraid to be hurt by them.

Illustration (c) 2018

Mind-Gardening

An illustration based on The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry.
This was one of a series of drawings I sold and in return the buyers donated to charities.
Donating to charity and helping other people has been shown to help alleviate anxiety and depression.

Yesterday I heard about someone who fell deep into depression and never managed to get out again. Usually, I would never post about mental health. But that conversation, coupled with other things that are going on at the moment, has made me want to write this.

Everything here is just what I personally found useful. Everyone is different and deals with problems using different tools. I had very bad depression at one point but the main problem I've always had is anxiety, so it might be that the things I found helpful are more suited to anxiety than depression.

This article is really good, and echoes advice I've read in other books. In a nutshell: It's ok to do something and not do it perfectly; Forgive yourself; Wait to worry, and Help other people.

Therapy did not help me, personally, for any length of time, but there is an NHS-approved range of books, and for me, that was a better option.

I use audiobooks a lot - they kind of smother the anxiety, and are really helpful with insomnia. Ones I personally like are Stephen Fry reading the Harry Potter books; Carl Sagan reading Pale Blue Dot; Douglas Adams reading Dirk Gently's Detective Agency. BBC Radio 4 have some programmes that are perfect for this, and they're available online, like The Living World.

Bertrand Russell's book The Conquest of Happiness was the first thing that gave me any kind of lever to use against anxiety. Parts of it are dated, but I've never read any book that's made more of a difference to me. Funnily enough Derren Brown's Tricks of the Mind also had some good advice in it, and Richard Wiseman's 59 Seconds.
 
Naturally, as someone who draws for a living, I use art to some extent too. In 59 Seconds, Wiseman talks about the research showing how the colour green can help diminish stress. Maybe that's why I chose this beautiful Garas François print for my sitting room. I draw scenes that comfort me and cheer me up, like the one below of a park. You don't need to be good at drawing or painting to do this. It can be a way of going to a nice place in your mind.

A windy park in Autumn, with a dog running and a man flying a dragon-kite.
Drawing this let me take a break from a very dark January day.

I wrote this post, and then didn't know what title to give it. I chose 'Mind-Gardening' because that's sort of what I try to do. My mind can grow a lot of unpleasant things in it, and the methods listed above are the tools I use to weed them out, and make it a comfortable place to be.

Hating & Then Loving Jane Austen

I cannot talk of books in a ball-room; my head is always full of something else

I discovered Jane Austen via the 1995 BBC dramatisation of Pride & Prejudice, which I first watched on New Year's Eve, 2001. I waved my boyfriend off to a party and said I'd probably follow on later. Instead I watched all six episodes, and the next day I watched them all again. I was so overwhelmed by love of all things Pemberley that I changed my route to work so I could walk past a carpet shop called Darcy's. I was smitten.

And yet, I'd been introduced to Jane Austen years before, and had thought her a bore. The house I grew up in was full of books and among them was a Complete Collection of Jane Austen, three inches thick and in binding the colour of warm mud. I think I opened it once and quickly closed it again. Unlike the Complete Collection of the Brontë Sisters (also about three inches thick, but binding the colour of pond scum). I knew passages of Wuthering Heights by heart by the time I was thirteen.

Wuthering Heights had a song, though. A really good song. That song sustained me when I came across words like 'penetralium' where Emily Brontë could very well have said 'inside the house'. I never begrudged Emily her long words. In fact I liked them.

Pride & Prejudice did not have a song. Added to which, in school we were told we ought to like Jane Austen, so I immediately suspected her of great wrong doing. We were given only passages of her work to read in school, but I read them resentfully, with the aim of proving to myself how awful she was.

It was strange to think back to that when, in my early twenties, I worked my way through her novels, reading and re-reading them, and illustrating scenes from them just to enjoy and savour them more. I think maybe her books are a little bit like olives or pungent cheese - you have to find them in your own time, when your tastes are receptive. And coincidentally, they tend to go well with a little glass of wine.

He danced only four dances! I am sorry to pain you -- but so it was

Sketchbook: Werewolves

A lot of the time, I draw so I can imagine things more clearly. Lately I've been reading about wolves and coming up with stories about werewolves, so naturally I've been doodling them too.

Wondering what a group of werewolves would call themselves.

Posh werewolves would be differently affected by the condition than poor werewolves, I think.

Werewolves when it's not the full moon.

I don't know why I assume they like smoking jackets so much. (I like smoking jackets and think they're very practical & would save on heating bills - I think smoking jackets should be relaunched in an age of sustainable home heating).

A plain old wolf, wondering why he never got a smoking jacket.

Neighbours wondering what's going on over there in that big house each full moon.

Right. I have to press publish now and leave it at that, because my dog is howling for me. Really.

All pictures (c) Sheena Power.

Goodbye Facebook!

 

I have been a heavy user of Facebook. I've had a love/hate relationship with it for almost ten years. As I work from home, I don't have those office colleagues you can turn to and have a light bit of banter, and Facebook was a kind of substitute. It also seemed a good way of displaying my work, as I am pretty terrible at marketing.

However.

I've known for a long while that Facebook has not been good for me, in much the same way that it isn't good for a lot of other people. I tried using it only for my work page, but once I'd logged in, a half-hour would evaporate and I'd find I'd been staring at gifs of dancing burgers, or whatever the current meme is.

The recent scandal about Cambridge Analytica is both shocking and unsurprising. I downloaded my Facebook data and found a list of advertisers who had my contact details. I read the profile Facebook had compiled of me, my interests, beliefs and political leanings. When any of my Facebook friends accessed an app, some of that information would have leaked out.

All in all, I think it's time to leave Facebook. I'll be blogging far more regularly, if you'd like to follow this blog. I'll be posting times of markets, news of retailers who stock my work, and new and old designs. You can see all my designs on my website, and contact me that way too. You can also contact me on Twitter.

Thanks to everyone who followed my Facebook page. I really appreciate your interest & support, it has meant a huge deal to me.

Sheena

Maia, a Spring Goddess

Maia, Goddess of Growth

This is an illustration from my 2017 calendar. It's thought that May gets its name from the Roman goddess, Maia.

The Greeks also had a Maia, mother of the god Hermes. It could be that the Roman goddess was based on the Greek one, or it could be that there were originally two, and their stories mingled together.

I based the woman's hair and t-shirt on this Greek vase, which shows Maia and her son.

 

To create the image, I drew the figure in black biro (this is my favourite medium) and colouring pencil. I made the background using buttons, dried lavender, rose petals and colouring pencil on a recycled green card stock. Then I digitally superimposed the figure on the background.

I sell this as an A6 greetings card, printed onto 100% post-consumer recycled card stock and paired with a recycled envelope. If you bought this in a shop or at a market, it will have been protectively packaged in what looks like cellophane, but is actually a 100% biodegradable material made from cornstarch.

Day-Trip to Dalkey

My husband and I gave up flying in December 2015, after reading David McKay's 'Sustainability Without the Hot Air'. It felt like a really dreary decision to make, but we figured we'd just try it out and see how it went. (It's actually gone surprisingly well!) In 2016, we spent our annual week-long holiday at home in Dublin. I kept a cartoon diary. This is from the 25th September, a very rainy day when we went to Dalkey.

 

Bus to Sandymount - Sandymount Dart Station - Two very old ladies with lovely hair like cobwebs - Lovely view from Dart (this is the train that goes along the east coast of Ireland)

 

Dalkey - Indian food at Jaipur

 

On Bullock Bay / Zuni-breath* Bay (fishy) [*Zuni is our dog] - Very cute collie that wanted us to throw a dried flower for him - Bollard & Silvery Sea - Walk to Dalkey [this should read Dun Laoghaire] - Signs everywhere saying 'No Dogs'. also everywhere: Dogs.

 

Dalkey market [this should read Dun Laoghaire market]. Three women dressed as air hostesses singing (very well).

Sake & the film 'Gaslight'.