This week I have been...
Drawing...
Magnolias for my dear friend Sam, who has a tree overlooking her kitchen window that explodes in a cloud of creamy white flowers every April and which she celebrates each year with a suitably extravagant party. Scribble & Daub has been charged with illustrating the invitations which will be sent out by the internet's favourite postal service, Paperless Post. A perfect excuse for a party, and the perfect excuse for me to linger in awe over Ellsworth Kelly's drawings of the aforementioned flowers before attempting some of my own...
Ellsworth Kelly, Magnolia from Suite of Plant Lithographs, 1966 MoMA Collection
Reading...
Andy Warhol's Diaries - Warhol was a conscientious keeper of the marvellously mundane minutiae of his daily life (cab $2, books & magazines $5 etc.) and a merciless observer of the lives and loves of a litany of famous and fabulous friends in 1970s New York with whom he spent his days and nights. His diaries take you as close as you're ever going to get to partying with Bianca Jagger at Studio 54, but are also an endearingly human chronicle of his creativity and insecurity.
Image: Exhibition preview card which lives on the studio wall, from Andy Warhol: portraits & landscapes at Timothy Taylor Gallery, London in 2008
Watching...
Inside Dior - facelifts and frocks, and the luminous Maria Grazia Chiuri in this documentary on Channel 4
Eating...
Jack Monroe's Chickpea & Aubergine Curry - The Holy Grail of quick, nutritious, delicious - and most importantly - easy! Even I can manage to get a big pot of this bubbling away at some point during the day without taking away too much precious studio time and avoiding lastminute resort to yet another cheese on toast / fishfinger dinner when the kids come home clamouring for food... (nb. add an extra tin of tomatoes and you get a batch for the freezer)
Wearing...
MABLI - Despite an unfortunate and persistent inability to knit, my clothing of choice for the children is almost always of the knitted variety, so I was very happy to come across MABLI this week, a new company founded by Lisa Roberts (previously a women's knitwear designer) who has moved to the Brecon Beacons and turned her attention to small people, making things for them which are as practical (machine washable, unisex, generous sizing for a long life) as they are beautiful (gorgeous colours, witty Welsh references, cleverly unusual but classic designs)
