Cup of Tea Tuesdays-Wednesday Edition

This artist is just my cup of tea!

I feel a kindred spirit with Nigel Peake, an Irish Architect who "grew up in the middle of nowhere" and is currently based in Edinburgh at the School of Architecture here.

His newest book In the Wilds 'chose me'.

I had gone down to a favourite shop of mine at 39 Candlemaker Row, Analogue Books, which has recently moved from its home of ten years on historic Victoria street. It is neraly impossible to walk out of Analogue empty handed as it is the kind of store it seems they have stocked just for you. I remember feeling so low this winter that I shook the shop girl (the owner one in the same) had insisting the store was a sanctuary that transported me back to Main st. where I had felt most at home.

Upon flipping to a random page, I was already certain this book would be coming home with me-I needn't see more. It is a rare and special happening when a book speaks so strongly to your senses and sensibilities such as this one did to me that day. Nature in a form I had never seem it take. I connected with the clean white pages, and linear nature scenes. Over 100 pages of hand drawn interpretations of rural life in pencil, ink and shades of pastel watercolour.

Peake created this collection by memory; his muse was three months in the Irish countryside the winter of 2009.

Everything in his book seems so familial to me-the fields, the pine cones, the cross-sections of timber, the rustic structures, the jumble he titles 'The corner of the yard'. This book is everything I miss about the way of life of my youth. It makes me want to call my Dad in Canada, it makes me want to meet this Nigel Peake person.

His other subjects/books have included Sheds, Maps and Strom-inspired by a week in a cabin in Norway.

One can purchase his lovely little book on his website www.nigelpeake.com or check out his blog, which happens to be a little less wordy than mine!

I leave with this,

"I cannot identify the name of every bird song, type of tree, or field condition,

but I do have an appreciation and the inherent joy

of the things around me." Nigel Peake

edinburgh x erin

Take heed