Googliscious

There are days when I love Google! I have a favourite picture I wanted to share with you, but realised I hadn't made a note of the artist or the sitter, and I thought you would want all the details, because look at it - it's lovely isn't it? I want to decorate a whole room in these colours!!  Love the blue combined with the mustard, and then imagine some dark wood furniture and lived-in white walls.  I also want her hair style!

Anyway, getting back to the task at hand, all I could remember was that it is Australian, so I simply put into the Google search engine "famous Australian portraits woman with scarf" and although the painting didn't show up in images there was one very similar portrait which I realised was by the same artist, Rupert Bunny, of the same person, Henry Handel Richardson, c.1920s.  Thanks Google!

These two paintings, by Rupert Bunny (1864-1947), are being held by the National Library of Australia.  Ethel Florence Richardson, who adopted the pen-name, Henry Handel Richardson was a novelist, famous for "The Getting of Wisdom" written in 1910.

And here's another happy find on Google today.  I've always been attracted to the portrait "Ruth" by Nora Heysen.  While searching for the image on Google I also found other paintings of Ruth, who was a favourite model of Nora's.  Nora Heysen, daughter of Sir Hans Heysen, was the first Australian woman to win the Archibald Prize for portraiture and was the first Australian woman appointed as an official war artist during WWII.

I love how we can find inspiration in one artform and use it to create something new and different.  I love being able to look at a picture, enjoy the colours and use them as a base for decorating a room, or designing a quilt, or to see a picture and hear the beginnings of a story, "she cut her plaits off and kept them in a box under her bed ... "

Where have you found inspiration today?

Are you going to harness it and make something of your own?

Bye for now, Trudy