My flat piece of wood from the allotment was sitting waiting for me to paint it or mark it in some way. I’ve been thinking of old wooden desks at school engraved with the initials of countless children and of trees engraved with messages, “so and so woz here” etc.

And, because I’m waiting for Spring to arrive, I’ve been admiring Botticelli’s “Primavera” as I have a print of it on my kitchen wall that I took from a book of mine. I particularly like the Three Graces in the picture and thought I’d add my own three graces in my next piece of art.

I had a picture to draw in mind, a woman bathing in a green sea. I was thinking of it as a Sea of Tranquility (keeping the moon theme going.) I hesitated a bit, not knowing quite how to create the picture I saw in my mind’s eye. In the end I just plunged in as though doodling on a desk with a biro and made a sketchy, scribbled drawing and went over it with watercolour pencil. The wood has it’s own history of moss stains and knots.

It’s rough, it’s sketchy but I made something come to life on the old wood, and, I rather like the ghostliness of it, the scratchy lines and layers.

I’ve been pondering the moon in my pictures. The last illustrations I did featured a full moon but it was new moon when I did them. I looked through some of my other pictures – for example my “Wooden Man” – and there are many crescent moons and all of them sit facing to the right.

My boyfriend told me that the moon doesn’t look like this in the northern hemisphere evening. So I checked out the moon the other night. It is currently waxing, creeping up high and visible in the western sky and it was definitely facing with its glow on its eastern side. My photo doesn’t show it very well.

However, I don’t mind which way around it is in my pictures…

Another thing I’ve heard about the moon at the moment, is its “earthshine”. How lovely, the moon picking up the glow from the earth! This is also known as “the old moon in the new moon’s arms”. There’s something beautiful about that! I couldn’t see any earthshine last night but I’ll know to keep looking in future.

Another special moon feature I saw once was over Victoria Falls. It was quite a long time ago and I vaguely remember the thundering waters. I went out at night with a full moon, and there it was, a moonbow glimmering magically over the waters. It was very special. Moonbows are lunar rainbows formed by light from the moon instead of the sun. They are rarer than rainbows but just as beautiful.

Here is a picture I did last weekend entitled “Writing by the Moon”. I enhanced the blue colour in photoshop and now it has an underwater quality to it!

I’ve a fascination for wood at the moment. I’ve been photographing trees and gathering wood to paint which is now drying in my kitchen. I found a log and a flat piece with knots like flattened souls staring out at me on my allotment. The odd woodlouse finds itself lost on a desert of lino, but I think I’ve shaken most of the wildlife out. While I wait for them to dry, I’m turning to some illustration. Today I’ve finished two pictures, both feature trees and the moon as usual. This one has a girl transfixed by a full moon beside a wood full of eyes.

I’ve turned once again to my altered book. I was listening to the duet Panis Angelicus by Cesar Franck, which is one of my favourite pieces of music. It was one of my mother’s too. I remember her when I listen to it and it means “Bread of Angels” in latin.

I kept thinking of flying swans so I decided to give my book wings. They looked like stone angel’s wings before their wash of blue, so I found some photos of angel statues I took a while ago in a cemetery and a haunting, “gasping”-faced statue I took at Ephesus in Turkey which I particularly like. I printed out copies and stuck them in along with some latin lyric scraps of Panis Angelicus. I tore up a page of notes that I’d made for my “about me” page (that I’ll put up soon) and stuck the pieces on to the wings. I intend to do more with shreddings, scribblings, fragments, messages and murmurings in other projects.

Here is my stone angel swan carrying the night on its back.

I received my Amharic translation yesterday, I felt so pleased, it was as good as I’d hoped. The words translate as “Blue Female God”. I know that this art piece isn’t similar to the ancient Ethiopian Orthodox art that I like so much, but it gives my work a connection of a sort. (I was going to visit Ethiopia a few years ago with my boyfriend, but our passports went missing while applying for visas so we never made it. I’d still love to go…..one day…)

Anyway, here’s a photo of the script and my finished “Blue Goddess”. I have another piece of scaffolding board ready to sand down and work on. I think that I may keep to a similar theme.