A New Place

ON THE ROAD OF MY NAME, a motley band of travelling misfits vagabond their way to Another Place...

And thus you enter my new website! I have kept a rather dusty web-place for some years now, which although pleasingly rooty and interesting, was not at all easy to update and lost in the grand job that internet housekeeping has become, it has not been tidied for years! So I decided to take action, and build myself a new one - this time, super-simple, no faffery or frippery, just a good online portfolio collection of all my creations, where I can easily slot in new works as they are created. This website should work smoothly on all the varying whatsits that people might choose to use to look through the veil, and be a good window to all that I do. It will grow over time, but for now, please go and visit it, pass on the link to your friends and let me know what you think of it! 

 www.rimastaines.com 

In fact, there's a whole basket of new things to tell you about - the website being the first. I'm also beginning a little newsletter - a ether-pamphlet of sorts in which I will send you occasional tidings of news and happenings. This blog will remain the place for long tales, unfolding paintings and rambles on the moor, but should you wish to be kept informed of exhibitions, events and other such ephemera, please sign up here:

Subscribe to The Hermitage Pamphlet by email

Those of you who have stepped into my etsy shop lately will know that there are many wonderful new things in there. Not least, a selection of fantastic prints on delicious heavyweight (320gsm) cream-straw recycled card. 

I've wanted for a long time to get away from the glaring white background, and have finally managed to do it, with these tactile and lovely prints, which have a feathery hint of inclusions in the paper, giving each one an earthy feel. 

On the reverse of each print are details about the painting. 

There are prints large and small, and a slightly smaller selection of works than before. As part of the spring clean of my online work I have decided to stop selling my much older illustrations, which I feel I have artistically outgrown.

You will, however, notice a few new ones which you'll not have seen before!

So perhaps I'll tell you their tales...

This one I painted last month to take to the Weird & Wonderful Wood Fayre. A green-and-anchor-clad woman crouches in her small boat, setting sail towards I-know-not-what, propelled by paddle & sail, and led by a strange figurehead. 

The image is painted on an old wooden paddle that I found in a junk shop some years back, but I am not entirely sure what it was - a butter pat? a tiny oar? Any thoughts welcome! This original painting is for sale here if you love it. Or you can buy a print!

By Paddle & Sail ~ oils on wood ~ © Rima Staines 2014

From venturing to homing, the other new painting you'll find in my shop is in fact not very newly painted. It was made in 2011 for my brother Jan and his wife Maria's 2nd anniversary at Jan's request - a humourous pondering of what Maria (a frequenter of jumble and car boot sales and a collector of many beautiful old items) might be like one far-off day when she's living alone without Jan to maintain the house (as he does brilliantly) and only her hoarded and squirreled artifacts to hold up the crumbling dwelling! 

I had great fun detailing many little items and stuffing them into the cottagey corners of this chunky piece of Yew, which had a convenient branch-sprout for the range's chimney.

As always, I drew the image in first, particularly important with something as finnickety and detailed as this one.

This old woman ended up with a Turkish kilim-carpet and boots and shawl-decoration inspired by the Tales of the Amur -  Gennady Pavlishin's beautifully illustrated depiction of the stories and beliefs of the Nanais people of far Eastern Siberia on the great Amur river.

There are old bottles, tilley lamps, top hats, broken perambulators, parasols, books, cameras, clocks, trunks, typewriters, wheels, wool (even holding the window together - knitting needles between the panes, and knitted curtains too); there are tin baths, rolling pins, jars, spoons, fiddles, cups, clogs, spools, tongs, teapots, pepper mills, chamber pots, bellows, baskets... all holding together this home, in which the old woman sits serenely drinking tea.

And there we have it - a little view into the nest of a happy crone, whose journeys (perhaps by paddle or sail or foot or wheel or wind-horse) have brought her to this place, cocooned by all these mementos of those adventures, and the age-old wisdom there is to be found in a pot of tea.

Brickabracks & Mortar ~ oils on wood ~ © Rima Staines 2014
prints available here

The Return

THESE FEET, shod in second hand boots from New Zealand, are once more reunited with beloved Dartmoor soil from which, unaccountably, primroses spring! It is strange and lovely to be home. Our seasons and bodyclocks are all upside-down, and I have a bagful of experiences to unpack still. The journey was incredible, and I have much to tell you. Those tales will come in time. But for now, these feet have taken me back into my working life, and my studio beyond the trapdoor.

My shop is having a long overdue overhaul. All the prints are HALF PRICE for a limited time, so I encourage you to zoom over there and help me spring clean my shelves to make way for new works and prints of a different ilk. Many of these designs will be available here for the last time, so grab them while you can!

I am back in my studio, which has warmth at long last (something we have not been short of these past months in Pacific Summer but, thus spoilt, are now craving even more!) Projects varied and exciting are bubbling away in that kettle. I am returned remade by travel in distant lands, with renewed energy for creating.

More soon. For now, a few words about some things I'm up to over the springing months:

April 18th - Spring Artisan Fayre - Chagford, Devon - 10am - 4.30pm  

I will have a stall of wares here alongside my fellow wonderful artisans Danielle Barlow, Lunar Hine, Virginia Lee, Miriam Boy-Hackney, Angharad Barlow, Damien Hackney, Diana Dench, Sonny Parsons and Sharif Adams - there'll be woodcraft, herbcraft, stitchcraft, paintcraft, metalcraft and, of course, tea.

May 17th & 18th - Weird & Wonderful Wood - Wetherden, Suffolk 

I will be proffering wares in my fire-warmed tent as usual this year. Do come along to sample the many wondrous wooden wonders of my favourite fayre of the year.

May 23rd - 25th - Ocmundtune Creative Arts - Okehampton, Devon

This arts weekend boasts many creative delights not to be missed, including a Storytelling of Gypsy Traveller Tales from Eastern Europe by Tom and me on the Saturday, and an all-weekend Art Exhibition where some of my pieces will be on display alongside other (quite incredible) painters from the South West.

Albion to Aotearoa

THE LITTLE GIRL in this picture is my maternal grandmother Lois Florymel Thorn Hunter (née Shutes), with her parents Elsie and Arthur (and a bear). It was taken a century ago in 1913 in Cornwall where my great grandfather was mining tin. Lois was born in New Zealand, as was my mother. And now I write from just outside a Stannary Town in the West Country where the mined tin would have been brought to be weighed and valued, preparing to make a journey of my own to the other side of the world where it is summer now, to the land of my mothers - New Zealand!

This is how I remember my grandmother Lois; she died ten years ago aged 93, and her ashes were scattered off the headland of the subtropical idyllic Northland coast she lived on and loved so well, and where I remember blissful days swimming as a girl when our family visited her there.

This will be our first holiday together, a celebration of Tom's graduation - his long studies in acupuncture having taken him every week of our relationship away to Reading, and at the end of it now we carry a huge backlog of deep tiredness. Our usual trips away involve lugging heavy damp canvas, driving the A-roads, storytelling, stallholding, a vanful of muddy belongings, and returning home tireder than when we left. Perhaps I've reached some mysterious age when you suddenly yearn to swim in turquoise seas and warm your cold moor-drenched bones with tropical sun. But also, this is a journey for me to see half of my family - antipodean cousins I last saw when we were children, and aunts and uncles and all the long-reaching southern circle of my family's web. It is to be an adventure and a rest and a re-weaving. I sit by the fire in this cottage on the edge of Dartmoor as the winter rains and winds lash these hills incredulous and nervous and excited about our long leap to other greener summer hills in less than a fortnight. We also travel from Middle Earth around the earth to Middle Earth, as these beloved Dartmoor rivers, tors, forests and mossy undulations were direct inspiration for our artist neighbour Alan Lee's conjuring of Tolkien's world. And for the last decade almost he's been in New Zealand re-conjuring Middle Earth for cinema, from which have grown new generations who now think of New Zealand as land of Hobbits and Elves. So we'll find both a familiarity and a strangeness in the land where my mother grew up on a remote and wild farm under the watchful volcanic presence of Mount Taranaki, her mountain.

We have my great aunt Una and uncle Ed to thank for the wonderful gift of this unimaginable adventure, as they paid for our flights, hoping to see me again whilst they're still on this earth! Una is Lois's younger sister, and a valued reader of this blog! We cannot thank them enough for this gift of a journey.

And we go too to the land of the people who were there living in relationship with it before my ancestors arrived to take it from them, and who are also now fighting against the fracking of their beloved land as we are here, even in the beautiful national park and underneath that incredible mountain Taranaki. 

Captain Cook's map of New Zealand from 1770, with Maori-sounding names for the North and South Islands
(actually Te Ika a Maui for the North and Te Waipounamu for the South), and English place names

A map of the two islands of Aotearoa - artist unknown

My name has roots in this far off land - Rima is Maori for five or a hand:

1 Tahi
2 Rua
3 Toru
4 Whā
5 Rima
6 Ono
7 Whitu
8 Waru
9 Iwa
10 Tekau

We will be away for two whole months, stopping in Fiji on our way back to visit my mother's sister and her family who live there. I imagine I'll not be online much, though an occasional blog post may sneak through depending on internet and inclination.  My etsy shop will be closed until I return (in the spring!) when I plan to reopen it stocked with new wares. I'll take my camera and sketchbooks with me into the land of Pohutukawa tree and Bellbird, of white sand and blue water, of volcanic mountain and hot spring, of ancestor and adventure...

I leave you for now, with a handful of questions to those of you living in New Zealand...

We'd be very grateful for any recommendations of interesting artful and wild places to visit, eco-communities, artists, storytellings, activists, multi-bed acupuncture clinics, festivals and the suchlike... I also have an accordion-dilemma: I don't think I can take my accordion with me as it won't fit in my hand luggage and I don't want to risk putting it in the hold, but I'll be bereft for two months without it. This is an extreme longshot, but do any of you know where/if in NZ I could borrow or hire a B-System chromatic button accordion such as I (and the Russians and Yugoslavians) play?! 

This beautiful carving is a Maori door lintel or pare, carved in c. 1850 for the door of a meeting house. It shows a typical lintel-image of the Earth Mother Papatuanuka giving birth to all the gods of the land and sky on which she stands.

We go now through this mother-doorway from Albion to Aotearoa - land of the white cliffs to Land of the Long White Cloud...