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![Jacques-Émile Blanche, “Portrait of Marcel Proust” (1892), oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay ([Public domain] via Wikimedia)](https://firstnightdesign.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/jacques-emile_blanche_portrait_de_marcel_proust_1892.jpg?w=466&h=568)
Jacques-Émile Blanche, “Portrait of Marcel Proust” (1892), oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay ([Public domain] via Wikimedia)
Bergotte, a terminally ill novelist who has had a decisive influence on…
via Marcel Proust’s Dream of Art
Axel Scheffler said that Brexit makes him “sad and angry every day” as he picked up the Illustrator of the Year prize at The British Book Awards last night (14th May).
When receiving the award, Scheffler, who is German, said that while he was “grateful” to receive the prize, he did so with “a heavy heart and maybe even a slightly bitter feeling – it feels like a consolation prize, or even a farewell gift.”
Read more: Scheffler blasts Brexit in British Book Awards speech | The Bookseller
Originally published 19/11/2015
To say I was influenced by the atmosphere of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White — must read it again — would be bending the truth, although I’ve included that sentence in the description boxes at galleries. However, only when I had finished creating it did the book come immediately to mind.
I have used a detail from a photograph by…
via First Night Design | Church at Twilight #Art | First Night Design

Embroidered book cover for Henshaw’s Horae Successivae (1632), white satin with a floral design edged in gold cord, featured in Cyril Davenport’s English Embroidered Book-bindings (1899) — Source.
Fashionable in the 16th and 17th century, the art of embroidering unique covers for books saw a comeback in late 19th-century England, from the middle-class drawing room to the Arts and Crafts movement. Jessica Roberson explores the…
via Pens and Needles: Reviving Book-Embroidery in Victorian England – The Public Domain Review
To celebrate what would have been Maya Angelou’s 90th birthday, here is the great lady herself with ‘I Rise’. She is never less than inspiring. I’ve posted this video before but it never fails to touch my soul.
Take care and keep laughing!
Mother’s Day in the UK is this Sunday, while tomorrow is International Women’s Day. This is a post I wrote in 2014 which some of you have seen before.
Benedicta Leigh 1922—2000 [photo: David Sim] Born Benedicta Hoskyns in 1922, my mother spent a large part of her childhood on the island of Malta where her father was serving in the Rifle Brigade.
She later spent a year drawing from life at Salisbury School of Art. During World War II, she nursed with the Red Cross in Auxiliary Hospitals and Convalescent Homes throughout the country, also finding time to write, produce and play in several revues for her patients.
The war over, she trained for the stage at RADA where she received commendations from Sybil Thorndike and Laurence Irving and won the George Arliss prize as well as sharing the Dialect prize with Cyril Shaps.
Her subsequent career included repertory at Windsor, Bromley, Sheffield, Coventry and Nottingham, No Other Verdict at the Duchess Theatre in the West End (“stealing all the notices as the maid” she would tell me…
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Pixabay
Baa was the leader among a herd of beautiful goats. He was brave, kind and well-loved by everyone. He was fair and had no favorites, other than the kids who followed him everywhere, begging for stories. “Just one story,” he would say, but he always ended up telling them two or three.
One day he told the kids to sit down because the story they…
Long before there was Paddington Bear, Shaun the Sheep and Peppa Pig, there was Winnie the Pooh. For over 90 years, the bear with very little brain and his friends Piglet, Rabbit, Owl, Tigger, Kanga, Roo and Christopher Robin have entertained and enchanted both…
via Exhibition Review: Winnie the Pooh: Exploring a Classic (V&A) | Enough of this Tomfoolery!
Holocaust Remembrance Day
Letter To My Son
(Ilse Weber – 1903-1944).
My dear boy, three years ago today
You were sent into the world alone.
I still see you, at the station in Prague,
how you cry from the compartment, and hesitate.
You lean your brown head against me
and how you beg; let me stay with you!
That we let you go, seemed hard for you —
You were just eight, and small and delicate.
And as we left for home without you,
I felt, my heart would explode
and nevertheless I am happy that you’re not here.
The stranger who is taking you in
will surely go to Heaven.
I bless her with every breath I take —
Your love for her will not be enough.
It has become so murky around us here,
Everything has been taken away from us.
House, home, not even a corner of it left,
Not…
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Alice in Wonderland: Alice and the Flamingo Postcard | Zazzle.com
To illustrate my Alice card, the following is a very satisfying interpretation, written by Gigi at Rethinking Life, of what Alice in Wonderland is really about.
Alice didn’t fall down the Rabbit Hole, she bloody well jumped. She was tired of her pre-planned life and wasn’t looking forward to marriage and the rigid rules that went with it. She ran after the rabbit, curious and terrified that she would lose sight of him and be forced to stay where she was. She saw him jump and she dove in head first after him. Because she was willing to risk everything, she drank, shrunk, grew, found a new world, went to a fabulous tea party, met a crazed hat maker, a door mouse and enjoyed herself immensely.
She got to see an amazing cat, one who could disappear but leave his smile behind, a drug-addicted caterpillar and twin boys named Tweedle who were strange, to say the least. She got to hold a flamingo. She saw huge, brightly colored, flora, fauna and she learned that everything she saw could not be trusted to be real. She saw the Queen of Hearts and ate a tart. She saw that life didn’t have to be dull and boring, it could be so much more. She didn’t have to to get married, live in a house and do as she was told. She realized that she could be free to explore everything. Even the Jabberwocky was interesting. The biggest thing she learned was that she had the courage to take whatever risks came her way. She was brave and wild. She wasn’t cut out for a ‘normal’ life, she was meant for something different…she wasn’t going to settle, she was going to fly. And that is the true meaning of the Rabbit Hole. Source: Alice.. | Rethinking Life
Take care and keep laughing!
From the archive 19-11-13
Oh, what fun I have had creating this collage! It has been a while since I’ve experimented with my various pieces of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Alice’s Adventures Throug…
Source: Newly-minted Alice: Collage | First Night Design
Take care and keep laughing!