First Night Design | The Magic Lighthouse #Art #DeliciousRepost!

FROM THE ARCHIVE 6th October 2015

The original photograph is by Joshua Hibbert at Unsplash and I had enormous fun changing the dimensions of each element and layering the result with a couple of my textures, one orange and one a gr…

Source: First Night Design | The Magic Lighthouse #Art

First Night Design | The Magic Lighthouse #Art

The Magic Lighthouse © Sarah Vernon

The original photograph is by Joshua Hibbert at Unsplash and I had enormous fun changing the dimensions of each element and layering the result with a couple of my textures, one orange and one a grungy yellowy cream. The outsize marigold is from The Graphics Fairy. I guess you might call it a cross between surrealism and magic realism.

Using exactly the same combination of photo and textures, Mr FND created his own surrealistic take.

Lighthouse © Mr FND

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“Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”
― Roald Dahl

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Take care and keep laughing!

Roald Dahl on How Illness Emboldens Creativity: A Moving Letter to His Bedridden Mentor | Brain Pickings

“I doubt I would have written a line … unless some minor tragedy had sort of twisted my mind out of the normal rut.”

My daily rhythms of reading and writing were recently derailed by a temporary but acute illness that stopped, unceremoniously and without apology, the music to which mind and matter are entwined in their intimate tango. For the second time in my adult life — the first being a food poisoning episode — I was made palpably aware of how body and brain conspire in the thing we call being. The extreme physical weakness somehow short-circuited the “associative trails” upon which fruitful thinking is based and my card to the library of my own mind was mercilessly revoked, and yet I was granted access to a whole new terra incognita of the mind, a Wonderland of fragmentary ideas and sidewise gleams at Truth. Then, as recovery airlifted me out of the mental haze, returning to my mere baseline of cognitive function felt nothing short of miraculous — as soon as I resumed reading, everything sparked fireworks of connections and illuminated associative trails in all directions. It was as though the illness had catapulted me to a higher plane of what Oscar Wilde called the “temperament of receptivity.”

This, of course, is not an uncommon experience — both the tendency to treat illness as an abstraction until it befalls the concreteness of our body-minds, and the sense of not merely renewed but elevated mental and creative faculties coming out on the other end of a physically and mentally draining stretch. But no one has articulated this odd tradeoff more masterfully than…

View original: Roald Dahl on How Illness Emboldens Creativity: A Moving Letter to His Bedridden Mentor | Brain Pickings.

First Night Design | About Last Night

Foyles, Charing Cross Road
[photo: Wikimedia]

Last night I dreamed I went to Foyles Bookshop again. The old Foyles, the Foyles where you could never find the book you wanted but had so much fun in the trying; the Foyles in which every employee knew exactly where you would discover the desired volume.

Roald Dahl was there.

Roald Dahl
[photo: Wikimedia]

Harry Dean Stanton was there.

Harry Dean Stanton
[photo: Wikimedia]

Roald Dahl told me I should read Harry Dean Stanton’s autobiography.

Harry Dean Stanton said it was up to me if I wanted to buy his book or not.  He could care less.

I bought it. Stanton had written it under the pen-name of ChlsLachlos.

“I don’t understand.”

I woke up.

Discuss with reference to symbolism, children’s literature, iconic cinema, dreams and Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

Answers on one side of a postcard only.

Take care and keep laughing!

#NaNoWriMo: Comfort in a Cotton Frock – 3rd November

#NaNoWriMo Day 3

In which I decide this will be the last post with extracts from my ongoing memoir as a NaNo Rebel.  I hope it leaves you wanting more!

I’m a Survivor, Darling!

I am standing at the bottom of the stairs. I can hear Granny’s stick on the floor above and I turn back.

‘Is that you, Rich?’

As I creep towards the kitchen, a fountain pen falls out of my pocket. ‘Rich?’ The woman is a stranger to me. I know she is standing at the top of the stairs looking down. She wears a long narrow skirt and an equally long, grunge-coloured cardigan. She reminds me of my history teacher whose buttons are always done up the wrong way.

I scuttle through the kitchen and clamber over gumboots and riding hats to get to the back door. I love my cousins’ house. I love pootering about in and out of the rooms and up and down the corridors but now there is a granny flat within because Grandpa has died and Granny is living with my cousins.  It means  the freedom to roam is no longer there.

She is not a witch. She is not even horrible but I cannot talk to her. She makes me shiver. She is so tall and long and thin and gaunt, and the noise of her stick makes me want to bash her with it to see if any emotion can be harvested. She cannot touch or hug, and is it violets or lavender I smell?  Perhaps it’s mothballs.  I know her name is Violet, Vi for short, but I cannot associate it with flowers.  Only later do I learn that she used to be very active, that she fell from a ladder while decorating and broke her hip and was never the same again.

Comfort in a Cotton Frock Day 2
Comfort in a Cotton Frock Day 1

Sarah Vernon © 3rd November 2013

Take care and keep laughing!

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