Home and home ...

Looks like we've sold Gloster Street (above)! It went on the market the Friday before last, and we had an offer the very next day. We knocked it back, saying we wanted what we were asking, and they came back last week with the full amount.
So now, this really is home ...

... and if I do say so myself, it's looking pretty darned good'n'comfy here these days. Dave and I struggled to bring home - as baggage on the plane - two big paintings from Australia, and hanging them in the living room here in cookie-cutterville has made a world of difference. The first is the wonderful Jane Flowers painting, Dam in Landscape - an almost totally white-on-white work with just the subtlest touch of colour ...

... not photographed very well at all, but there you go. It looks really good here - though it also looked amazing in Gloster Street on the aubergine wall in the front room, and on the dark, dark green wall of the big room, where you might have seen it.

The second is this red pic (below) I painted a few years ago, which has always been a favourite of mine. I'm very pleased we managed to get it and the Flowers here safely - thanks to Konrad's fantastic wrapping skills with cardboard, bubble wrap and about a kilometre of duct tape.

The two blue-and-white vases were a wedding anniversary prezzie from David; the skeletal lady is a Katrina doll (a Mexican Day of the Dead figure) that Lily brought back from Albuquerque for my birthday last year; the leafy thing with the stick was one of those glorious moth orchids - it's been hanging in there for several months now, putting out new roots, and I kid myself that one day it will send out a lovely stem full of flowers; the sunglasses shouldn't be there (no-one knows who they belong to); the little earthenware animal figure is from Guatemala - Lily bought it at a museum shop to give to someone in Australia, but she left it wrapped in tissue paper on the floor and Will trod on it, reducing it to a jigsaw - I patiently glued it back together again, but there are bits missing that were either pulverised or too minuscule to work with. But we love it all the same. The blue-and-white dish is an old Chinese bowl that I bought at an estate sale last year when Dave Lilburne was visiting from NY on the hunt for old prints.

And with a few bits and bobs about me, my own little corner (below) is very much my special place.
It's always messy, and as it's the first big horizontal surface you meet when you enter the house, it's the constant repository for stuff that really should live elsewhere. Like mail, washing, tools, pills, newspapers and mags. But I'm very happy right here.

:: I've decided to return to art school - so I'll be enrolling in a painting class at the art academy just as soon as poss. I've been looking longingly at my paints and brushes lately - but there's just nowhere to work at home. So class it is. Yay!