Category: coloured pencil

A Japanese Folk Tale

On By Michael Richards (certainline)In art, bereavement, children, coloured pencil, dip pen, drawing, folklore, illustration, ink11 Comments
Rai Taro and his Foster Parents 30 cms x 30 cms, mixed media (ink, watercolour pencils, acrylic), 2025

I’ve neglected my poor blog for so long – largely for the reasons I’ll explain in a forthcoming post – and even forgot to share my favourite Instagram event: the Folktale Week challenge. Every November, a talented group of illustrators compile a list of seven prompts – often single words – to which we have to fit folktale-based texts with illustrations. Last year I finally managed to complete all seven prompts, of which this one, “Storm”, was my favourite.

The Japanese god of thunder, Raiden Sama, decided to send his infant son, Rai Taro, down to Earth from his castle of clouds to learn the ways of humans. Together, they looked over the battlements at warriors engaged in bloody warfare, a princess lounging in her perfumed bower, and monks worshiping in their temples. But it was a poor peasant couple that caught Rai’s attention: they toiled in their field in ragged clothes, exhausted from their labours. As they had no children, Rai thought they might love him and in return he could help them and ease their burden.

Raidan caused a violent storm, the rains lashing down to water the peasants’ parched field. When the thunder and lightning subsided and the rains ceased, the peasant found the infant child. He ran home and presented Rai to his astonished wife, whose heart melted at the sight of this beautiful child. The poor couple looked after him to the best of their abilities, showering him with love and affection in the absence of material things. From the age of ten he helped them in the fields, and could, of course, predict the weather and the best times to sow and harvest their crops.

On his eighteenth birthday, the couple, now much wealthier because their crops never failed, threw a huge feast for their adopted son. Rai Taro was sad, however, and at the end of the feast he said to his foster parents, “Now I’m a man I must return to the castle in the clouds and tell the gods all that I’ve learned about humankind.” His foster mother asked what he had learned living among poor farmers. “I’ve learned three important lessons,” he replied. “First, how to work; secondly, how to suffer with dignity; and most important, how to give love unconditionally. I’m now more learned than the Immortals and must teach them too.”

With this, he embraced both foster parents and dissolved into a cloud, floating high up into the sky where he was greeted warmly by Raiden Sama. Down below, his foster parents wept and his earthly father said, “We are grown old – our time is short now and we won’t have to live too long without our beloved Rai.” His wife replied, “That’s true, but Rai will never learn the lesson of death and the gods will never know.”

The full version of this story can be found under the title, “The Good Thunder”, in Japanese Fairy Tales by Grace James, free to read on Project Gutenberg.

In the pub with Ardizzone

On By Michael Richards (certainline)In art, artistic development, coloured pencil, creativity, dip pen, drawing, Edward Ardizzone, illustration, ink, inspiration, nostalgia18 Comments
(In the Pub 2025 pen and ink and coloured pencils A4)

There is one illustrator who, I would argue, towers over all of us: Edward Ardizzone (1900-1979). His illustrations are loose and lively yet full of character and humanity, his artistry always secondary to his affection for the people he pictures, whether it was young boys off to seek adventure, plump washerwomen with forearms like ham hocks, witches cleaving the darkness of midnight on their broomsticks, or red-nosed travelling salesmen propping up the bar at the Crown and Anchor.

People in pubs was something of a theme with Ardizzone – some of his most endearing drawings show goings-on in the  public houses of the 1940s and 1950s: dark, smoke-filled dives populated with the jovial and the rotund, the lost and forgotten, the rowdy and loquacious. My own drawing (above) pays tribute to a situation that could have come from an Ardizzone illustration (but his would have been much more accomplished!).

When I was a young man in my 20s, back in the early 1970s, I wrote to Ardizzone and asked him for advice, as I mentioned here some time ago. In his letter, the original of which you can see on this earlier post, he wrote:

An illustrator cannot, by the nature of his job, draw from life. He has to draw from his imagination informed by knowledge. To acquire knowledge, attend life classes, then go into the countryside to draw landscape and in particular trees…Never be frightened to gain knowledge by copying works by masters of the past. It is how they gained their knowledge.

After some further tips, he concluded, “This sounds like a formidable list, but have courage.” Then, somewhat mischievously in a PS, he added: “I could not draw with the pen you use [a Rotring Rapidograph]. I use an old fashioned steel nib (a Waverley) in an old fashioned pen holder, the nib being dipped into a bottle of old fashioned Indian ink.” I eventually took Ardizzone’s advice to heart: the above drawing was largely executed with a Tachikawa nib in a very comfortable Japanese pen holder.

The three drinkers in my picture bring back memories of my dear old Dad. Returning to Manchester for the weekend from studying in London during the 1970s, I would arrange to meet my Father at his tailoring business. When the shop closed, he, his assistant Mr Rose, his cloth cutter Mr Vincent, and I would make our way to one of the smoky, dingy city pubs that they frequented. This was their routine every evening: they would close the shop, buy three copies of the Manchester evening newspaper, go to the pub and order three rounds of drinks, while reading interesting tidbits from their newspapers to each other (even though they all had the same one). Their nightly routine made few allowances for my presence. Sometimes Mr Vincent would ask me about drawing or Mr Rose would talk about his years in London, but usually they were hidden from view behind their newspapers and I was left to nurse my half pint and observe the other customers.

So the three men in a dark city pub in my drawing conjure up the ghosts of Friday evenings past. Whenever I returned ‘home’ from wherever I was living at the time, it was my Father’s great pleasure to drop into a pub for ‘a quick pint’. That’s where we had our most meaningful conversations, there among the the jovial and the rotund, the lost and forgotten, the rowdy and loquacious, just like in Edward Ardizzone’s drawings, or the three figures in my own version above.

What we can learn from Paul and Nick

On By Michael Richards (certainline)In art, coloured pencil, creativity, ink, inspiration13 Comments
Spring Bulbs (A4 ink and coloured pencils 2024)

“A lot of this writing, it’s just what comes out. When something bubbles up and it either catches my eye or it amuses me or, if I’m really lucky, it moves me – I keep those things. I don’t have to question them any further. There’s already something about them that means they’re worth keeping. I don’t really analyse every speck of a song: if it feels right, I leave it because it feels right.” Paul Simon

It can be interesting to hear what creative people in other fields say about their work. This quote from Paul Simon touched me. I liked the idea that something – a phrase, a subject perhaps – catches your mind’s eye and becomes authorised, so to speak, for later use. It needs no further processing because you’ve already decided that you want to use it, that it’s fit for purpose.

“Even though [my] notebooks are full of meaningless words, there are always little bits in there that in time begin to rise off the page. It’s like those classic spy movies where someone is trying to break a code. They’re staring at random numbers or letters that seem to mean nothing and then suddenly something appears as if by magic out of the mess. With songwriting…what happens is that [ideas] suddenly present themselves, rise from the page and begin to hold hands. Not all at once necessarily, but quite rapidly, and then you start to get creative momentum, a kind of collecting together of information that moves forward towards the basic framing of a song, That’s the thrilling part. It’s really the best part.” Nick Cave

In Faith, Hope and Carnage, Nick Cave talks eloquently to Sean O’Hagan about his religious faith, the tragic deaths of two of his sons, life on the road in a rock band, and – in this excerpt – the creative process. His description of ideas rising from the page and beginning to hold hands will be something that we all can recognise whatever form our creativity might take: that moment during the act of creating when suddenly things are going well – the words flow, the notes gel, the brushstrokes form into an image.

What’s intriguing about hearing or reading the thoughts of artists from other disciplines is how their stories can inform our own practice even if the medium is very different. Last year, my partner and I visited the Dingle Lit festival where she, an abstract painter, found herself inspired and moved by hearing authors such as Max Porter and John Banville – both novelists – speak about their work. Issues they encountered with inspiration mirrored her own. It’s less the type of work that matters in this cross-fertilisation than the map that informs the journey.

Social media is awash with snippets of wisdom that are intended to readjust your thinking, your outlook, even your life. “People are afraid of those who know themselves”, for example, or “Life doesn’t give you the people you want but the people you need.” If you find these phrases helpful – fine. However, nothing, I’d suggest, beats a flow of ideas rather than a phrase plucked out of the ether. So hearing Paul Simon talking at length about his songwriting process and the inspiration behind those familiar hits is more rewarding for having context. Equally, I would urge you to seek out a copy of Nick Cave’s book, simply to hear an eloquent man talking about the defining issues in his life and art, and to witness his ideas developing as he explores.

We all struggle with similar issues. Take the blank page, for example. There are any number of exercises you can do to overcome the fear of starting something. Art teachers, life coaches, and psychologists will walk you through their preferred steps to fill that white sheet with notes, words, marks. Yet how much more encouraging it is to hear Nick Cave struggling with his notebook full of nonsense or Paul Simon filing away things that move him or make him laugh for later use like a mood board in his head.

Let me leave you with a quote from another book that, like the Nick Cave, was given to me as a gift. Towards the end of “Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story in Music Lessons” by pianist Jeremy Denk, he writes about a particularly annoying period of practice:

“Occasionally, I felt I would rather be crucified while listening to Donald Trump read Dante aloud than practice the piano another minute. But each day, I found more in the music, or at least not less: a stubborn value that wouldn’t vanish.”

Isn’t that what we seek in whatever artform we practice: the stubborn value that won’t vanish? I’d say so, whatever form it might take.

The Folktale Challenge

On By Michael Richards (certainline)In art, coloured pencil, dip pen, drawing, folklore, illustration, ink, inspiration8 Comments
Lost (30 cms x 30 cms, ink and coloured pencil, 2023)

How I hate January with its post-Christmas comedown, its grey skies of piddling rain, endless newspaper articles about ‘new year, new you’, veganuary, and giving up drinking. Giving up? Without gin I’d never make it to February 1st.

So let me infuse your January with a little bit of cheerful whimsy. As autumn turns to winter each year, a group of illustrators on Instagram initiate something called Folktale Week. For those of you who eschew Instagram because it’s another Zuckerberg owned thing that will steal your soul (I do understand), allow me to share some of my own contributions to that – for illustrators – engaging and stimulating challenge.

We start with the prompt, Lost (above). There are many lost things in folk tales –  lost rings, lost books, lost daughters – but nothing as scary as being a child lost in the forest. Our babes in the wood, apprehensive as night falls, are innocent of the dangers that await them. If only the owl could warn them what is to come… I love drawing stylised winter trees, and was thrilled when someone on Instagram pointed out that the branches looked like a maze, which was my intention.

Sleep (30 cms x 30 cms, ink and coloured pencil, 2023)

For the prompt, ‘Sleep’, I chose the legend of the Sandman. A well-known figure in folklore, the 19th century German tale by E.T.A. Hoffman has him throwing sand in wakeful children’s eyes, causing their eyes to fall out.

So I decided to illustrate Hans Christian Anderson’s more benign version, where the Sandman sprinkles magic dust in children’s eyes and tells them stories to lull them to sleep. He also carries two umbrellas to hold over them: one with pictures inside to provoke sweet dreams for good children, and another that is blank inside if the child has been naughty. No-one’s eyes drop out in the Danish version.

Underground (20 cms x 20 cms, ink and coloured pencil, 2023)

The prompt, Underground, had me looking at Knockers (Cornwall) or Coblynaus (Wales). These are subterranean, troll-like creatures, about 40 cms tall, dressed in archaic miners’ clothes. They are benign if rather mischievous, guiding miners to the richest seams of metal or coal, but stealing their tools or even their sandwiches from their lunchboxes if they weren’t careful.

If you would like to see the rest of the prompts, simply click here. You don’t have to register and you can get away at any time.

I hope this has brought a little light to your cold winter’s day if you’re suffering with me here in the northern hemisphere. As I write, Storm Henk is raging outside my window: we have been warned to fasten down our bins and garden furniture, transport is in disarray, and one man has been killed by a falling tree. Why does it have a Dutch name? Well, despite the idiocy of Brexit, we in Britain name our storms along with the Irish and Dutch meteorological offices, and everyone gets a stab at naming a storm or two.

Whatever it’s called, it’s still cold, wet, and windy (but it’ll soon be Spring).

The Carnival is Over

On By Michael Richards (certainline)In art, coloured pencil, dip pen, drawing, ecology, illustration, ink11 Comments
The Carnival is Over (A4 ink and coloured pencils 2021)

We’re told that we have ten years to slash the emissions that lead to climate change before it will become impossible to reverse the process. The pollution of the world’s oceans disturbs me more than any other environmental crisis, possibly because it’s easier to observe its effect than rising temperatures or melting polar icecaps.


This drawing was inspired by two events. Recently I walked along a holiday resort beach at the end of a sunny day, when families were packing up to go home. The amount of rubbish they left behind was unbelievable: polystyrene food containers, plastic wrappers and carrier bags, all sorts of junk they could have taken home. Some helpfully put all their garbage in a plastic bag and left it on the beach for seagulls to tear apart and the tide to wash away.

The other event happened 25 years ago off the coast of Mumbai. I was on a boat with about 30 others when the engine stalled. As the crew tried to fix it and the boat drifted aimlessly, I wondered if we might have to swim to the shore. The water was brown and uninviting, dotted with the untreated detritus of a large, densely populated city.

The micro and the macro.

Oh when the saints…

On By Michael Richards (certainline)In art, cartoons, coloured pencil, drawing, illustration, ink, martyrs15 Comments
Detail of St Margaret and the Dragon (see previous post for the complete image)

My previous post, way back in April, was all about drawing and featured an image of St Margaret and the dragon. It was based on a medieval French oak carving in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Apparently Margaret was swallowed by the devil who appeared to her in the form of a dragon. Fortunately for her, the crucifix she was carrying got caught in the devil’s throat and he threw her up again. I had such fun drawing that improbable situation I thought saints and martyrs might make an interesting occasional series.

I next came across St Vitus. He was only 12 years old, and had already been tortured by his father, when he was asked to expel a demon from the son of the Roman Emperor Diocletian. This he did but made the foolish error of not joining in the pagan celebrations that followed. Rather ungratefully, Diocletian had him thrown into a pot of boiling oil, along with a rooster to ward off evil spirits. Vitus died of his injuries the following day. The fate of the chicken is unknown.

St Vitus (ink and Prismacolour pencils in a Stillman and Birn Gamma sketchbook)

The dancing (St Vitus’ Dance) came much later when medieval Germans believed that throwing shapes in front of statues of the hapless boy would ensure a year of good health. Since then, Vitus has become the patron saint of entertainers, Methodists, epileptics and, oddly, oversleeping.

These are irresistible stories, I hope you’ll agree. In case anyone is concerned about the practice of throwing mystical youths into boiling oil or virgins being swallowed by dragons, neither of these stories can be historically verified, deadpans Wikipedia.

These drawings originally appeared on my Instagram feed: both were drawn in ink and coloured pencil.

Celebrating the drawn line

On By Michael Richards (certainline)In art, charcoal, coloured pencil, dip pen, drawing, illustration, ink, life drawing, Why draw?15 Comments
My drawing of St Margaret and the Dragon (Uniball Micro Deluxe pen with Faber-Castell coloured pencils in an A5 sketchbook 2019). Based on a C15th French oak sculpture in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Last week’s Observer Review devoted six pages and its cover to drawing.

Published to coincide with the Draw Art Fair at the Saatchi Gallery in May – yes, the home of sharks in formaldehyde is staging a drawing show! – the Observer’s art critic, Laura Cumming, took us through a short history of the drawn line and illustrated it with examples by Hokusai, Leonardo, Paul Klee, Frank Auerbach, and many others.

Drawing is a wonderful gift – anyone can do it – and the drawn line is a thing of true beauty. Make a mark in charcoal on a piece of textured paper, load a dip pen with ink and pull it across a blank white sheet, take an old piece of soft pastel and draw a rough circle – those simple marks are beautiful in themselves before they’re combined to make a still life or a portrait of your mother. I have one of those old printer’s glasses that you lay on the paper and look through a powerful magnifying glass to see things in staggering detail. Using that to look at a line drawn by hand – with the edges disintegrating, the solid black actually many shades of dark grey – is to appreciate the wonder of small things.

Laura Cumming reminds us that drawing is a thing in and of itself, not just the prelude to a painting. Conceptual art tried to do away with the need for drawing and life classes were phased out of many art schools. As conceptual art was revealed for the naked emperor that it was – no-one would ever be moved by a light going on and off but a drawing can break your heart – drawing came back to claim its rightful place as the most democratic of artforms.

The life drawing class that I’ve been attending for the past two and a half years came to an end last week – our teacher discovered that her own work was suffering and needed some time to re-calibrate – and it’s as if I’ve lost a friend. It was a journey of discovery, truly, from my initial wonder at how liberating it was to draw on a large scale, through months of overly pretty but rather lifeless drawings, to the revelation in the second half of last year that drawing with a piece of charcoal on the end of a 30 cm stick was the way to loosen up, to a series of drawings over the past couple of months that I finally liked – it was a thrilling experience. Looking back down the years I attended Annabel Mednick’s classes, drawing the same skilled model week after week, I can see the way stations of learning and development stretching back to that first thrill of charcoal marks on a really big piece of wallpaper backing paper!

Thomas Fluharty, in his essential book, The Joy of Drawing, writes: “Drawing is the coolest thing I do as an artist…I am amazed how I can forget my problems and be transported to a place of joy just by drawing…It is the one thing that grabs me and keeps me excited as an artist.”

So let’s celebrate drawing. Let’s celebrate the beauty of the drawn line – a person, you, me, making a mark, on a surface, with a thing! – and remember Picasso’s famous remark that it took him only four years to draw like Raphael but a lifetime to draw like a child. That’s not a bad life in my view.

[If you’ve got out of the practice of drawing there’s a fun way to get back into it going on at the moment: Karen Abend’s free online course, Sketchbook Revival 2019. A number of different artists demonstrate something and you can join in if you wish and post the results to Facebook.]

Edward Gorey’s Great Simple Theory

On By Michael Richards (certainline)In art, coloured pencil, creativity, dogs, drawing, Edward Gorey, inspiration, portrait34 Comments

rosie blog
Rosie (Prismacolour Indigo Blue pencil on Stillman & Birn Gamma sketchbook page 14 cms x 21.6 cms) 2019

Mark Dery has bravely published the first full-length biography of writer and illustrator Edward Gorey, who died in 2000. It runs to over 500 pages which, bearing in mind Gorey did little except go to the New York City Ballet and draw, is probably too long. Dery is an astute interpreter of Gorey’s art and writing, but spends far too long speculating on Gorey’s sexuality and his shortcomings as a fully-rounded human being (show me a great artist who is).

I used to be mildly obsessed with Edward Gorey, ever since a good friend showed me a copy of The Doubtful Guest, which had been given to her by a New York gay couple who were friends of her father. I started buying his intriguing little books in the pre-internet days when one had to write letters to the Gotham Book Mart in NYC and send them international money orders as payment. I’ve no idea how many hours I spent in my twenties just cross-hatching like the Master.

Mark Dery is also insightful on his friendship with author Peter Neumeyer which was largely conducted by letter, and has since been published as a beautifully-illustrated book. He reminds us of Edward Gorey’s Great Simple Theory of Art, which is basically:

Anything that is art…is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it’s no good having one without the other because if you just have the something it’s boring and if you just have the something else it’s irritating.

He continues that things ‘that on the surface…are so obviously’ about one thing make it ‘very difficult to see that they are really about something else entirely’ (unfortunately Mark Dery then goes on to say that this demonstrates Gorey’s ‘Derridean-Beckettian awareness of the limits of language’ and ‘his Asian-Barthesian belief in the importance of ambiguity and paradoxes as spaces where readers can play with a text, making their own meanings’).

I’ve spent a long time on this blog trying to pin down the ‘something else’. I think we can agree that whatever we are inspired to draw or paint, that object or landscape is more than just that picture on the paper. Take the drawing of Rosie, the retriever-samoyed cross, above. On one level it’s a drawing of a dog using a Prismacolor indigo pencil on Stillman and Birn gamma paper. The ‘something else’ might well be my affection for Rosie and her owners, my enjoyment of my time with them all, my drawing Rosie as an expression of my feelings about being welcomed into someone’s home and family life over Christmas, how much I miss my own departed greyhound, and so on. What it isn’t, ultimately, is just a drawing of a dog.

Gorey has it spot on that ‘if you just have the something it’s boring’. Have you ever started drawing or painting something and you feel you’re just going through the motions, that what you’re doing is so superficial that you simply can’t face taking it any further? You might be surprised to learn that I’ve occasionally started drawing a piece of fruit and have abandoned it because it simply bores me to death, and if I don’t like drawing it why should you like looking at it? I believe that’s just having the ‘something’ in Gorey’s Great Simple Theory.

I once met a painter who gave his landscapes titles like ‘Heartbreak is the end of all of love’s journeys’. That might well be true but it had the effect of not letting you see his paintings of nature as anything other than symbols of his inner turmoil. This is, perhaps, an example of when you ‘just have the something else [that’s] irritating’. It’s frustrating seeing or hearing something that you think is simple and its creator telling you it’s actually incredibly profound. Van Gogh did inner turmoil to a tee, but he called his paintings “Starry Night” or “Crows Over a Cornfield” not “I’m so wired up I’m going to punch Gauguin in the face any minute”, allowing us to form our own interpretation.

That, at least, is my take on Gorey’s Great Simple Theory. You might see it very differently, which is fine with me. And with Edward Gorey, I’m sure.

Kick-starting inspiration

On By Michael Richards (certainline)In art, artist's block, coloured pencil, creativity, drawing, illustration, inspiration, Robert Dukes, still life26 Comments

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Horse Chestnut (after Robert Dukes) A5 (coloured pencils, ink and collage on Stillmann & Birn gamma paper) 2018

Do you know that feeling when you’re working on something and suddenly you think, this is so dull? Last week it happened as I was working on a drawing in four panels showing how a quince rotted over time, based on a sequence of paintings by Horst Janssen called Tagebuch der Amaryllis (Diary of an amaryllis).

There are various ways to deal with this but my preferred method is to copy something by someone else – not exactly, using it simply as a jumping off point without having to set up a still life or think of a subject. In my reference file I found an oil painting of a conker by Robert Dukes and started to reinterpret it in ink and coloured pencils, the change of medium ensuring a different outcome (not to mention his greater talent!).

Dukes is a London-based painter and teacher who was educated at Grimsby Art College and the Slade under teachers such as Euan Uglow, Lawrence Gowing and Patrick George. Although he also paints landscapes, his expertise in single object still life painting is astonishing. His own problems with inspiration and trying to fit art around the need to make a living will be encouraging for many of us:

I went to the Slade hoping to be inspired and excited but it had the opposite effect. I left in 1988 and did almost no painting for the next ten years or so. I kept drawing the whole time though. Also, I had to earn a living and as a result I had little time to paint. When I did paint I felt that I had no control over the forms I was trying to depict- and that had the effect of making me not want to paint, which of course meant that when I did paint, I was out of practice so it inevitably went badly.

He has also done his share of copying paintings by others (he was fortunate enough to work at the National Gallery in London for many years) so I’m sure he wouldn’t mind my borrowing his horse chestnut to work through my own creative block. It’s an effective way of kick-starting creativity, reinterpreting what someone else has done, observing how they’ve used colour, form and composition, feeling your way around another’s work. What’s more, as Dukes has said, “I do think making copies is a good excuse to spend a long time looking at a painting you admire.”

Season of the Quince

On By Michael Richards (certainline)In art, art, Autumn, coloured pencil, drawing, food, fruit, quince, still life17 Comments

Quinces on a Plate (A5 ink and coloured pencil on Stillman & Birn Gamma paper sample 2018)

This year I didn’t have to drive around the country lanes of Suffolk looking for unwanted quinces, left at garden gates with a sign saying “Help yourself.” This year my own tree – encouraged by the hot summer – had its own bumper crop.

I’ve no idea what it is about them that I find so alluring. Perhaps it’s their irregular shape: sometimes bulbous and knobbly, sometimes like tight yellow apples, sometimes golden pears. It could be their range of colour, from orangey-gold to clear, bright cadmium yellow through pale greens, their bruises turning from a rich reddish-brown to the darkness of old varnished oak.

There is also a certain mystery about the noble quince. Is it ripe yet? Wait for the distinctive scent and the pure yellow colour, my neighbours said. But they rot from the inside out: cut open a fruit that looks perfect on the outside and the flesh is already turning brown.

And that scent: so long absent, then suddenly there. The downy skin and the gentle perfume, like the touch and scent of a baby’s head. It smells, too, of the sun and the south, of shady gardens in places where you’d like to be – far away from your computer and your workload and your deadlines. The scent, in short, of contentment, of joy, of delight.

This year I decided not to risk making my own jelly or marmalade, which always results in several jars of quince syrup. Instead a much more competent friend agreed to make it on my behalf. The first results of this arrangement have been jars of golden jelly, fragrant as the fruit itself, looking like a fairy tale gift when held up to the light.

Do I exaggerate the wonders of quince? I think not. It’s very possible I was put under some spell that holds me in thrall to their beauty, that I’ll admit. I never tire of drawing and painting them, as long-standing readers of this blog will know. I bet that breakfast in Heaven is quince marmalade on Pump Street Bakery sourdough bread, lightly toasted.

Lunch will be Rebecca Charles’ lobster roll.