‘Mermaid’ – Kathleen Jennings – the bid is at $150

I draw in everyone else’s books, where I can, and when I can’t, I tell my own stories, stacking as many little enchantments together as I can — in fact, my first short story collection, Kindling, came out this year.

I’ve also just finished a creative-writing PhD at the University of Queensland, researching methods of creative observation.

I think the most hopeful books I’ve read are the ones that make me want to get up and walk around and do things. The genre doesn’t matter so much — Diana Wynne Jones’s books, or some Dickens equally make me feel that productive restlessness, a need to go do something about whatever it is.

I grew up in Western Queensland on a cattle property. It was a beautiful landscape: silvery grass and silver-gilt light and trees like iron bars, and I read so many stories through it. In fact, although I haunted it with alarming things, the first chapter of my Australian Gothic novella Flyaway is very much an ode to that place.

‘I love the way Brisbane can feel like living inside a Tiffany lampshade — all endless hot glowing colours.’

Asked what the most beautiful thing is that she has ever seen, Kathleen sighed.

‘Oh, such a hard question!

‘Something that has never left my mind is one of many places in Dartmoor. After scrambling through woods, you come to a shallow, tree-shadowed stream. There’s a steep rise on the other side, with an ancient stone stile. On either side is an immense old tree, and the light falls on them so that one is the colour of charcoal and the other the colour of bone.

Observation Journal

‘What I love most about being an artist is climbing into the worlds of books, and running around drawing on the walls,’ she said.

‘With making the kite, I am sure I distressed Isobelle because I kept delaying the start. This was because I had SO MANY ideas and techniques I wanted to try, and fairly limited time.

Compressing the time further meant I had to choose a technique I had materials for and practice in.
After overthinking it much too long, I started a page of quick and scribbly sketches in my notebook, finding shapes that felt like the prompt (ideas of hope and flight) and fit the outline of a kite. The mermaid used a classic whiplash shape that featured in a few of my ideas, and which lends itself well to ideas of flight and weightlessness — and also the friends I was with liked that one best (good art direction is always invaluable)’ Kathleen said firmly.

The technique, although paint, is adapted from my silhouette work — use a strong shape that would read clearly in outline, cut into it with white for the background.

Asked if she had any memories associated with kites, Kathleen said, ‘A few years ago, I had the opportunity to do some kite illustrations for the delightful Story Bank museum in Maryborough (home of PL Travers who wrote Mary Poppins).’

You can sense what a dreamy imaginative child she must have been, and she confesses to wishing for doors to enchanted worlds.

‘Right now, I’m working on a number of illustrations for authors on projects yet to be disclosed. But I’m also working on some ornamental paper-cut silhouette illustrations for my next novel, coming out next year, and on the second draft of the book after that,’ Kathleen said.

‘I’ve been reading a lot of mid-century mysteries, so now I’m trying to interleave them with at least a few fantasy and gothic tales — stories in the genres I work in!

‘To me, art can be many things. An expression, an impression. Things that cause you to feel, or come out of feelings, or are keenly observed, and so forth.

Kathleen said she strives to capture movement and a sense of story — possibility, hope, curiosity, questions, or anything not quite answered, something for the viewer or reader to fill in

About Kathleen Jennings

by Adelaide Stolba