“I’m Making a Cake”

New drawing I finished a while ago, and never posted here, apologies in particular to Mary!!!
This will, of course, feature in next year’s calendar.

Row – “I’m making a cake.”
Laura – “Will it look like Mary?”
“Maybe a part of Mary…”
Hilary – “A body part?”
“Maybe…”
Lucy – “Oh god, it’s going to be a massive lady garden, isn’t it?!”

Of course it was nothing of the sort: it was with a suitably mature confection that we celebrated Mary’s entry into the final year of her 40s. Row had baked not one but two cakes: a preposterous pair of pink-frosted ones, each topped with the cheekiest cherry ever to grace a sponge cake and surrounded by luscious pink-licorice laces. They were a stunning pair.

Mary has been known to occasionally flash her sponge cakes for comic effect (amongst friends) so it was probably inevitable that for her birthday swim she swam with them flying free. But first she tried the birthday cakes for size.

It was February, freezing, windy, and the rain had abated to drizzle. So we naturally insisted that Mary lie on the cold wet concrete to pose with cakes in situ. Which she did with style, the morning being all about Mary!

This is a day which happened: here’s the sketchbook notes I made. There were so many possibilities that could have become a picture, but I wanted to convey all if it, so in the end I piled everything into the one picture, hoping it would all fit together. I think it did.

On a technical level too, this got me out of an awkward problem. I wanted the cakes to feature, and the best image of the cakes was Mary lying on the ground with the cakes ‘in situ’. We stood around her and laughed, as you would. However, this was never going to translate into a picture alone – there are so many issues with this, not least that our view was downwards in a different orientation to every other image in the picture, and the fact that a picture of one woman lying on the ground, mostly naked with people standing around her is always going to be an unsettling image regardless of how many birthday cakes are involved, so I had to find a way to convey the event in a way that would not come across as unsettling. The solution was to make Mary very large in the view, and the standing people very small, and to splice in the various other scenes so that it fitted as a composition, conveying the silliness and glory of the morning in a swirl of colour and balloons. I hope you enjoy it.

Here are some details – click on them to see each one bigger.