Drawing through darkness

The Cuckmere prints

It’s coming up to a year since my mum passed away and my thoughts have been going back to her final months. The hospice days. Determined to live forever, my mum managed to convince everyone that she wasn’t dying. In the Netherlands you are allowed to stay in a hospice for up to three months and my mum died a few days before her three months were up. She was not planning on resting in peace, instead she stood in her power and I watched from her bedside how her body slowly gave up.

I did a lot of drawing in those three months. Both my new Cuckmere illustrations were made in that hospice room and seeing them still brings me comfort now.

I moved from Amsterdam to Brighton in 2003 and from Brighton to Seaford a couple of years after that. I can’t quite remember the first time I saw the Cuckmere and the coastguard cottages and the Seven Sisters cliffs but for years and years that landscape blew me away. It still does. Now is a good time to walk through the Cuckmere Valley and watch the Canada geese fly over and coming in to land. It’s always a spectacular sight.

It was winter when we first realised that my mum was dying, the chemo no longer working and the pain coming back stronger. She was determined to have one more spring, and then made it to one more summer. Last autumn there were still some days when I managed to get her into a wheel chair and take her outside. The hospice was on the estate of an old monastery with beautiful tall trees. It was the most colourful autumn I had seen in a long time and I also realised that maybe it wasn’t, that it was just me noticing it more, in the quiet of the hospice days.

For a while I have wanted to find a space where I could write more about the landscapes that I draw. I tried a newsletter for a while but it felt too much like another sales channel. And then I came across Substack and it made me feel a bit like the early days of blogging, which I loved. Do follow me along. There won’t be a paid subscription, just some irregular posting about wild flowers and moon cycles and pink skies.

Talking about the moon… There are two places where I like to go to watch the full moon rise and both look out over the Cuckmere. The first one is High and Over. We used to pack the kids into the car sometimes, pyjamas tucked into welly boots, to watch the full moon rise over Friston forest. The second place is from the top of Seaford head, walking towards the cottages.

My lunar calendar for 2024 gives you the dates and names of all the full moons and also lists the meteor showers and eclipses for 2024. You can click on the images to take you to the listing on my Etsy.