It’s non stop partying here in Grub Street. Last Weekend I, as Maid of Honour took my sister on a razzmatazz hen-do down in Milton Keynes and next week will be at the wedding itself. In the meantime, I am off work and have tickets to the ‘Feminine power: the divine to the demonic’ exhibition at the British Museum where I will be meeting my gal Inanna. I also made one of my crappy arts.
One of the things I love but don’t mention very often on this site are mediaeval bestiaries. I like them for their goofiness, the weird pictures and peculiar legends but I also like them on a window of a different way of seeing, of understanding what knowledge is and the natural world around us.
Among the beavers biting their own knackers off to escape hunters and unicorns laying on the laps of virgins are the bears. According to long understanding, bear cubs are born as shapeless putty with eyes and claws and the mother physically licks the bear cubs into bear shape, lick by lick. It’s where we get the phrase.
Writing a book is a similar process. Each draft is another batch of licks, slow and time consuming, licking this formless little lump into the proper shape. For this reason I painted a bear in the style of a mediaeval bestiary, licking a book into shape.
I was inspired by this..
and I created this…
I know it’s not good exactly, but I enjoyed doing it, it sits nicely with my other crappy arts and it reminds me to keep patient with my book and keep licking because it’ll reach its final shape eventually.
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