Sadly the water colouring of the sketches I made in Venice has to be paused until after Miniatura. I have really enjoyed them and would still be sitting in my shed with the paints were it not that the OH has broken my shed door.
The shed door was put on at the same time as the shed was constructed but was not the original shed door. It is really a tilt and turn window that was bought from an amazing place that sold second hand, factory overstocks, wrong size, different colour and what do you mean it doesn’t fit? windows and doors. There was a shop but through the shop there was what had once been a long, no longer than you’re thinking of, garden, chock full of every type of plastic framed door and window you can imagine. Wooden windows and doors can be altered by any old chippy with a chisel, whereas plastic factory made windows and doors, are exactly as they come off the production line, knocked up according to the approximate measurements and notes written resting on a knee in a van, in a rush before the pubs shut.
Mine was a slim brown plastic door, really a window. If you turned the handle one way the door opened like a door. If you turned it up the top leaned out. This was a very fashionable arrangement well over twenty years ago to allow warmth out and rain in. I had a notice on the inside to remind myself not to turn the handle down while I was inside because, for some reason, that locked the door.
I obeyed my notice and all was well until the OH built his shed, storing all his stuff in my shed, meanwhile. Every morning he flung the door open to gaze at his tools, until the top hinge gave up and hung open anyway. This was fine as long as I remembered to support the door at the top as I opened it but inevitably the door began to pivot on the bottom hinge as soon as a hand was laid upon the handle.
The OH volunteered to fix it by securing the pivoting hinge with a screw through the top of the door. He even checked with a local window firm to make sure this was a good idea, so it was not until a long screw had made no difference, and had had to be drilled out, leaving a handle that would not move the locking pistons, or itself, at all, that it became apparent that the mechanism tracked right round inside the plastic frame.
With the door now propped shut with two garden chairs and a block of concrete and a tilt and turn expert muttering about the second week of September and £400 starters in the same breath, the shed is off limits for now.
I do enjoy late summer evenings in my shed, or, rather, I used to enjoy… Big Yellow Taxi, isn’t it? You don’t always know what you’ve got till it’s gone.
But before it went I painted this view of Venice
I quite like this, so it is now in a frame on the mantel piece. If I were to do this view again I would do it differently in some respects but I shall leave it as it is.
What it shows is a mail order delivery in Venice. I did not stop on the bridge long enough to watch the delivery agent in the boat putter up to one of those doorways with the stanking board keeping the canal out of the dining room, but that’s what he was doing. I didn’t see a bell for him to ring, maybe he does the same as they do here, chucks it over the board before carefully photographing it in the wrong doorway prior to someone in really high waders coming along to nick it.
It is incredible to know a city state so picturesque that even the mail order deliveries are worth painting. I have to go back to the place where every prospect pleases and then some.
Meanwhile I am dressing dolls for Miniatura, as always if there is something you’d like to see please let me know by clicking on: Leave a comment below.
Details, tickets, information, all things bright and Minderful at: www.miniatura.co.uk
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