Waiting for winter...

...and the joy of being in sync with the stories that fill my inner world.

A beautiful apartment building in Tallinn! So much texture, and beautiful shapes. It was wonderful to spend time in Tallinn this summer… and see how it was so differently to our month spent there one winter.

I am writing this from Helsinki, where the cool air of autumn seems to have just arrived. When I landed here 10 days ago, it felt like the end of summer. There was warmth in the sun and the sky felt quite golden. But now, in just ten days, it feels like something has shifted. The beanies and scarves have come out and my cheeks feel icy when I wander outside. Even in just the last couple of days I have felt like the tops of the trees have gone from just the hint of colour to quite rich oranges and reds. I think this has to be almost the best time of the year. I feel filled up with anticipation… change is afoot and it is impossible not to notice. I was listening to an interview with one of my athletic heroes who had just won the world championship trail running event and she was asked what was next in her calendar for the year. She said watching their world change colour and then just waiting for winter (she lives in alpine France). When she said that, my heart actually leapt. I think my favourite thing in the world might be waiting for winter.

It is now close to six years since Dave and I moved ‘north’ and I have completely fallen in love with what it means to live so far from the equator. Living at almost 56 degrees north in Edinburgh, means for the long days of summer to become the short days of winter, the shift is wonderfully dramatic. I remember camping on the Isle of Mull one June and going to the loo at about 1am and seeing a line of pink all the way around the horizon. The sun had set but only just.. and it was soon to pop up again. And then in winter, if it is cloudy and drizzling (like a large part of Edinburgh’s winter) it can feel like the sun never rises at all.

I think it is this vast change that have brought a rhythm to my life in a way that I haven’t really experienced before (or maybe I am just getting old). Growing up in southern Australia there are definitely seasons. Summer feels endless and is usually relentlessly hot and dry. Winter is brief and the light is always quite bright, and the sun rarely loses its warmth even when on the shortest days. Plants change but far more subtly - it is only in Tasmania where there is a native plant that loses its leaves. And animal migration is less obvious unless you are a well tuned in bird watcher.

But more than any of this, I think I realised in these last 6 years what it means to live where the rhythm of the seasons match the stories that I grew up with, the stories that still seem to fuel a lot of my inner world and creative work.

This week in Helsinki… sketching what felt like the last days of summer… before beanie and cold rosy cheek season suddenly rolled in.

Heidi & Jo and little me: the northern hemisphere seasons… a feeling of coming ‘home’ creatively.

A friend asked me a question recently which I quite liked. I can’t remember it exactly but it was something like “who are the characters in books that accompany you through your life?” I asked Dave and he said he didn’t have any (nor did my friend’s partner). But my friend had quick easy answers, and the friend who had asked her did too, and so, I found, did I. My immediate answers were Heidi and Jo (from Little Women).

It interests me that they are characters from stories I first read when I was such a young child. With Heidi, I think I was enraptured with how much she loved her mountain world. I remember her being in awe with the sun saying goodnight to the mountains with a great big colourful glow and how much her life changed with the seasons. All I wanted was an attic bedroom room with a window in the roof so I could see the stars. And, like I think so many young girls, I fell in love with Jo not just because of her fierce independence but also because of how intensely she loved (everything). I also constantly find myself remembering the line when her mum told her “go and embrace your liberty” when she was heading off to New York to be a writer and I think this line has come with me as I have constantly gone far from my family due to a seemingly never satisfied great curiousity for discovering the world. I also deeply loved the wintery christmas described in the March household, their layered outfits, and winter adventures involving skating on frozen lakes.

I hadn’t really realised it until I was asked this question, but both these characters often still enter my mind. I don’t think I’ve even reread Heidi as an adult but she is there (I have reread Little Women). Heidi and Jo and the worlds they are part of still play a role in my own dreams or my way of measuring up how my life is going. I still long to live among sheep and goats in the alps, and despite being 46 usually still feel like I am heading off with great delight to ‘embrace my liberty’ and soak up the wonders of the world. I have also realised that the world’s that they lived in were not wildly imagined fantasies (as my young Australian self had thought), but instead based on very real places and very real seasons, and I haved loved in these last six years feeling part of these same worlds and patterns. I felt like I finally belonged, in a very weird way.

Even though it rarely snows at Christmas in the UK, it does get dark, and fires are lit and the knitting comes out and all the traditions feel so beautiful and relevant. Same with Halloween. The way of lighting up the coming darkness that this festival represents is a new joy for me. And it has lit me up in a way that I didn’t really know I had been missing - by bringing to life the imaginary world of my childhood that was fuelled and developed by a world of books mostly written by writers in the northern hemisphere (despite living in Australia where none of these seasonal things make any felt sense).

A little illustration I made after returning from another magical christmas in Cornwall spent walking in the cold, the odd swim in a freezing sea and eating and knitting playing games by the fire with the wonderful family.

Tallinn - a celebration of seasonal extremes

I fell in love with Tallinn one winter when Dave and I spent a month there. Or, I spent a month there and Dave got called away for work, so I ended up spending unplanned time alone in a particularly frozen January/February. Despite often not liking being the one left behind, being left behind in Tallinn in the snow turned into one of my most content periods of my life. It snowed heavily almost every day. Every evening I went to bed and watched the snow fall in the light of the lam posts and hoped so much it would be still snowing when I woke. And, almost every day, it was. It snowed and snowed and snowed. Each day I went out to draw… and worked out how to draw when it was so cold that the ink would freeze into little ice crystals on the paper and my hands would stop functioning. But it was such a delight and I made drawings then that I still really like today (maybe because they’re nice, but maybe also just because of how happy I felt when I made them).

Some of the drawings I made during my solo time in Tallinn in Jan/Feb 2019. I still like them which is unusual when I look at old work, and I think this is because of how happy I was when I made them.

The incredible overwhelming beauty of winter in Tallinn

I went back to Tallinn on my own this summer, in fact I was there on the longest day of the year when darkness did not descend at all on the city. The sun sets, but it isn’t dark. And midsummer festivals filled the air. I was slightly worried about what going in summer might do to this place that I so deeply loved at such a different time. I knew it would not be the same and without the snow something would be missing. This was true.

I took minimal art supplies on this trip… deciding to go back to simple so that I could carry my things easily everywhere. And I loved focusing more on the people and the loose lines - really soaking up the observation. This was the first spread I made, starting with the bottom right where I sat and had coffee at the most marvellous bakery. There was an old juke box inside with fabulous tunes. It was early, before a warm day. Delightful.

But I landed late in the evening, then strolled to the supermarket for food in bright daylight. And when I woke the next morning I sauntered (no need to rush to keep warm) to a beautiful bakery/cafe for coffee and started drawing. The light was gorgeous and the town was just waking up. I was curious how the limited tools I brought with me would work. In the winter, I was forced to limit things to keep from freezing, but this time in the summer I just didn’t want to carry very much. As it turned out I think summer suited the marker and pencil approach. The simplicity made things feel light, and just like summer I felt like I could sit there all day and explore what I could see with loose squiggly lines.

I spent the week wandering and thinking and writing and drawing. The days had an endlessness to them that I actually enjoyed, and I realised for the first time in a long time, I really didn’t like summer. Summer, when it comes after a long winter, and when it is not relentlessly overwhelmingly hot is quite a delight.

I drew so many of these pages filled with tiny scenes of Tallinn summer life.

Tallinn in summer.. as richly textural and glorious in many ways as the winter.

Flying away from the autumn… and becoming out of ‘sync’ with my childhood imagined world and my fellow illustrators

I keep thinking of Tallinn here in Helsinki, where it is just a short ferry ride away. And I keep thinking of the wonderful winter that is coming. More than anything I want to start burrowing down, soaking up the autumn colours and the darkness coming in and delve deep into all the creative energy I find when I am waiting for winter.

But, tonight, I get on a plane to fly far from this northern world.

I have been realising that what I am leaving behind is not just my favourite seasonal shift, and the creative fuel that I have found from being part of a world that matched the one of my childhood imagination, but also being in seasonal ‘sync’ with the massive northern hemisphere illustration community.

When I first started trying to become an illustrator I was in Australia where I found a large amount of community online rather than in real life. I didn’t know any local illustrators. And this online community that I slowly developed was overwhelmingly based in the UK, Europe and the US. Here, I found friendship and also online drawing challenges, that so often had a seasonal vibe. I would find myself able to draw the autumn thing or the winter cosiness but not really feeling it as I would be drawing winter while sweltering and autumn while everything was getting brighter not darker.

I love making pictures and they are overwhelmingly fuelled by my feelings and reactions to the real world I spend my days walking and running and living in. I love the real world. My work feels like it’s good when it is a direct response to these feelings, not just the execution of an idea.

So, as I get ready to head to the airport tonight to get on a plane to take me all the way to the very wrong season that will be spring in Australia, I find my heart filled with a whole lot of turmoil and my mind keeps rolling circularly through too many questions in relation to my creative work:

• Can I find inspiration in the landscape both built and growing in Australia?

• Can I find creative joy in the hot and dry world that I am about to find myself living?

• Is it just a way of becoming more mature as a creator - to find fuel outside of my natural and deep childhood imagined creative home? A way to not get lazy?

• Can I find a creative community in southern seasonal sync that I find inspiring?

• I have a feeling that I might spend this hot summer in Australia painting the winter I am missing in the northern hemisphere. I guess this is okay?

We don’t know exactly how long we will be in Australia. We are heading back to clean up the mess we left behind six years ago (a car, a house, all our belongings in a shed - definitely unexcited about unpacking that) when we thought we were moving to the UK just for one year, and probably sell our home. And work out where to buy another one. And where this will be, we do not yet know.

It will be so incredibly lovely to see my wonderful family and friends (most of whom I have not seen for over a year), and I am (perhaps naively) looking forward to doing very physical and practical things like next week painting the interior of our house. But I think I’d prefer to drag Australia all the way up to the northern hemisphere - it could go just southwest of Portugal then they can all stay warm, I could visit far more easily, and while I am wishing, instead of selling our little home we could pick it up and move it to somewhere in Scotland.

But today as I write this, I feel very done with summer. I am definitely in sync with the rapid shift towards the cold. I feel very pleased that in a minute I am about to go on a long walk through autumnal forests by the sea in Finland.

And I feel like my heart is a bit broken as I try very hard to stop myself from wanting to stay right here and put all my joy into waiting for winter.

An imagined wintery Tallinn home where I would definitely need to work out how to have enough blankets and wooly layers so that tea on the balcony was exciting even in the snow.

---

Oh, and since I last wrote, I have two new books out in the world! I am so proud of both of them. Each book is such a joyous learning experience and I feel so incredibly lucky to make them. They are the wonderful novelty book with die cut holes, The World Within Me, written by Harriet Evans, art directed by the phenomenal Emma Jennings and published by Little Tiger. This was so hard to make and also such a joy. And the other, is my second book with the hugely joyful and talented Maryam Hassan and the team at Hachette called The Taste of Home.

And, at the moment, I am lucky enough to be painting two more!

Me with my first ever ‘novelty’ book with holes! Possibly my greatest challenge but I feel so pleased with it.