Musical Heroines

Below are my paintings and sketches of eight of my favourite musical heroines. You can listen to some of the wonderful music created by these women on my AmiloFinn playlist Music Mistress Please.

Jazz is inspired by Ella Fitzgerald, apparently she was Marilyn Monroe's favourite female singer and Marilyn gave her a small helping hand in the early years of her career. Songs I love Ella singing are My Funny Valentine, Every time we say goodbye, The lady is a tramp and a host of other jazz standards.

My ultimate rock chick is Debbie Harry of Blondie. The first music album I bought was Parallel Lines. She is responsible for my lifelong obsession with New York City. She is wonderful to watch and to listen to. Sunday Girl was my favourite song for a long while, nowadays I really admire Atomic, Call me and Rapture.

There exists a lovely film of Jacqueline du Pre's life called 'Hilary and Jackie' about her complicated relationship with her sister, it stars Emily Watson as the cellist. Listen to Jacqueline du Pre playing Elgar's cello concerto for a really moving musical experience.

My alternative songstress is Enya. She is a visual and aural treat, just listen to Orinocco Flow or Carribean Blue and watch their accompanying videos and you'll see what I mean. I don't know if I'd guess she was Irish from her music, but I do think there's definitely something of the mysterious, emerald isle about her. My favourite Enya piece is Boadicea from the Celts.

My favourite folk songstress is Joni Mitchell. My favourite song is the very famous 'Both sides now'. Other lovely thoughtful pieces are Woodstock, Chinese Cafe and a Case of You.

My pop princess is Kate Bush. I've loved Kate Bush for as long as I've loved Debbie Harry. My favourite music by Kate is The Ninth Wave, the B Side of the Hounds of Love album. I recently bought her triple album 'Before the Dawn'; a new live version of The Ninth Wave fills the second disk as Act Two. It is my favourite music to listen to; it helps me get to sleep.

Punk rock was full of rude, scary men, although some of them were also quite attractive. Siouxsie Sioux looks a little scary, but also very appealing, with very artistic make-up and very strong, tuneful music. My favourite song is Spellbound. I also love Happy House, Israel and the Banshees' version of the Beatles' Dear Prudence.

Sade was quite a unique act in the 1980s, sophisticated and soothing, a real 'Smooth Operator'. Favourite songs incude Your love is King, The Sweetest Taboo and 'Why can't we live together'.

Maybe my tastes are getting a little old, I think my daughter's list of musical heroines would include, Adele, Florence Welch, Amy Winehouse, Rihanna and Lilly Allen, among others.

Webflower Girls

My WebFlower WebGraphic project never saw the light of day. It was an intermediary project in between the SubVerse Poetry Tea Room and the Star Heart Cafe. I created many images and I am still using them in my stories, my greeting cards and a montage of them can be found on 'Kaleidoscope Girl,' a LornaJHart music video on YouTube. Above and below are some images from the WebFlower web pages I created at the time.

       

Manly and Feminine Virtues

The virtues are for everyone and my ideas for the feminine virtues and the manly virtues grew out of a picture of three girls I drew as a teenager and nothing really deeper than that.

The three girls became Patience, Kindness and Modesty and had their own Star Heart Dolls and cards.

Ins[pired by the girls I then worked on my virtuous three boys, they also have their own cards and Cross Line Dolls. The boys have the names of virtues sometimes used as boys name in their own right; Valiant, Earnest and Loyal.

 

Poems for Yin

I spent some of the late 1990s and early noughties trying to get to grips with what femininity was all about. It was also the time in my life when I became a mother and was also trying to get to grips with being the best mum I could be to my baby daughter. With hindsight maybe the best thing to do with femininity is just be it, if that's how you feel and maybe try not to analyse it too much. My 'Poems for Yin' are written at a time when I was trying to analyse femininity. I heard an Indian saying once, intended for both men and women, which states 'Walk in the feminine but be mindful of the masculine,' so maybe this subject is worthy of deeper thought.

SunDazed

SunDazed follows the  progress of Charlotte Brown, a gentle soul who is struggling with self discovery in a harsh and unforgiving busy city. Charlotte's journey is psychological, emotional and spiritual rather than physical but by the end of the story she is a lot more self-aware and confidant than she was at the beginning.



Heroines on Deviant Art

I have been meaning to put my heroine paintings up on DeviantArt for a while and have just got around to doing it. They are a mixture of literary heroines like Scarlet O'Hara and Tess of the D'Urbervilles, historical figures like Cleopatra, film heroines like Amelie and musical heroines Ella Fitzgerald and Tori Amos. The collection includes a very recent painting of Katniss Everdeen.

I have done another painting of Madeleine Usher to represent my 1970s reading for my 'A life in books' project. This represents the fact that it was Edgar Allan Poe's short story collection 'Tales of Mystery and Imagination' that really got me reading. Madeleine is not on my DeviantArt page which you can find here, but you can find it on my Pinterest paintings page which you can find here.

  

Wall of Women

This 'Femininity' collage sold for a hundred pounds at the Deep Space Art Show I organised in 2005. The second half-mask picture is a favourite of mine and I have used it in many of my creative endeavours in the real and virtual worlds.

Colouring Calm

I thought adult colouring books were a great idea, I bought myself one on typography. Inspired by this craze for colouring I adapted some of Amy's old drawings into pages of colouring art. One page is covered with interesting floral designs and the other is full of Amy's elegant ladies in evening dress. I tried colouring them in first in coloured pencil and then in coloured pen. I found colouring them in in pen much more enjoyable.

The Feminine Virtues

I drew an A3 picture of a blonde, a brunette and a red head ages ago, when I was a teenager. I recently thought of developing the girls a bit more and started to think about what virtues they might represent. These are the virtues I think best suit them, the brunette is Modesty, the blonde is Kindness and the red-head is Patience, I've called them the feminine virtues.