Roundup: June 2025
I often find myself believing that the version of me who will exist in the near future will somehow have her life together in a way that I absolutely do not. She’ll have her tax accounts up to date each month instead of hastily and stressfully doing all of it in December. She’ll have cancelled the duplicate Apple TV+ subscription. She’ll have a new painting made each week. She’ll have replied to her emails, organised the workshops she’s planned and apply to the big scary exhibitions all while cooking every meal from scratch, having a pristine home and giving her undivided attention to her baby. This future Ellie is yet to materialise. Instead I’m still past Ellie stuck in the body of future Ellie whose back kind of hurts most of the time.
It’s the belief in this magical version of me that has made me promise, on multiple occasions, insane things like, ‘I’ll definitely write blog posts regularly’, which I think everyone but me knows at the time is absolutely not true (my unwavering and completely unearned faith in Future Ellie is the thing that keeps me going).
Instead of overwhelming myself with something fully fledged, I thought it might be nice to do a little check in when I have the time where we can have a look at what I’ve been making as well as a little round up of what I’ve been reading, listening to, watching etc. I’d love to say that I’ll do this monthly, but unless magical Future Ellie really does appear, that’s probably not going to happen.
I hope you enjoy it!
Making:
The rumours are true: I finished a painting this month! With a Tabby, (2025), Oil on Panel. Set aside currently with plans to exhibit at The Base’s Festival of Arts and Crafts this September (though if anyone wishes to give her a home sooner, I won’t fight you!). This piece was a long process of experimentation and is the introduction to what I hope may become a new series. I’ve been toying around with the inclusion of botanical features in my portraits for many years now in some form or another but have found myself pushing this lately to be less of a feature and more of a partner to the portrait.
I’m working, slowly, on three other pieces concurrently, all of which are exploring full blooming backgrounds. I’ve been thinking a lot about the women I paint, often seeming stoic, knowing, calm and then the wildness of the nature they’re set in. I don’t fully know where I’m going with these ideas at the moment but I’m hopeful that they’re going somewhere!
One of these three works-in-progress is this year’s self portrait. As I spoke about in an Instagram post about this piece, I’ve always struggled a little with self portraits. I’m not sure how good for my psyche it is to stare at myself for so long! I do try to make one self-portrait a year with the hope that one day, in many many years, I can exhibit them all together and see both how I have grown and changed but also how my work has evolved throughout what I hope is a long career.
Side Note: the problem with making a self portrait every year that you do not sell is that eventually your studio fills up with paintings of yourself and you look really really vain…
I’ve been finding self portraits increasingly tricky with each passing year. When I first started out, I was in my early twenties and exclusively made self portraits; a combination of a lack of resources and an abundance of hubris. Cut to last year and I actually gave up and didn’t complete one (it didn’t help that I waited until I was 36 weeks pregnant to start it and was too tired and grumpy to fix the many, many, mistakes I’d made). I haven’t quite given up on this year’s, but it’s definitely been a real labour of love so far (labour pun unintended).
It felt right that 2025’s portrait would feature Freddie as he’s really been the main character this year (bumping me down to a dismal third place, after the cat) but it turns out that painting him has been even harder than painting me. My husband suggested that I’m a little too close to it – mothers rarely see their children the way the rest of the world does. As much I would like to argue with this, I distinctly remember truly believing that Freddie was the most gorgeous newborn on earth. I can vividly recall holding him in the hospital and marvelling over his every feature. His ear! How could my body have made an ear that perfect? And I knew, I knew, that every mother thought that their baby was the cutest baby, we’d made jokes about it whilst pregnant and about how we’d be different, so imagine my shock when I ended up with the ACTUAL cutest baby. Months later, after the oxytocin had worn off, I looked back at the pictures I had taken of Freddie in his first days and he did not look quite how I had remembered. He was still beautiful, of course, but, you know, also a weird scrunchy newborn who kind of looked like a shrunken down old man.
Time has been so limited since becoming a parent that every piece I make feels like a rush to the finish line of an arbitrary deadline. It is an almost military-like effort to make time to paint and so the fact that this piece isn’t coming easily to me feels extra frustrating. I’m trying to remember that enjoying the process is the whole point. A painting isn’t a race and there was a time, not so very long ago, that being able to pour over the smallest details for hours upon hours was my wildest dream. So I’m trying to embrace slowing down, just a little.
Reading:
This has been a fairly productive reading month for me. So far this month I have read:
Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Toshikazu Kawaguchi – a cosy time travelling, ghost-featuring story which is about neither time travelling nor ghosts. It took me a while to get into this – I can struggle a little with translated works as I’m hyper aware that I’m not reading them in their intended cadence and I find myself overthinking the word choices but eventually my mind settled down and I got into it. By the end, I was having a really good time!
The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read, Philippa Perry – the first and only parenting book I’ve read. It promises early on that it’ll likely make you upset and annoyed at certain points and it definitely delivered! While I didn’t agree with everything in it, I did find myself agreeing with most of it and I’ve already found it’s helped me in my day-to-day parenting. Plus, it was pretty satisfying to have some of my parenting instincts and routines validated!
Madonna in a Fur Coat, Sabahattin Ali – I’m not ashamed to admit that I read this one based on the recommendation of a twitter thread (okay, I’m a little ashamed) but it was so worth it. A layered and emotional story which, while the ending didn’t hit me quite as hard as promised (perhaps my anticipation was too high) definitely struck a cord.
Ghosts, Dolly Alderton – another book I read by recommendation from a stranger (this time a podcast host). This one took me some time to get into. I found myself getting a bit irritated with what felt like a sort of not like other girls mentality where the female characters were either made fun of for being single or made fun of for being married or mothers. To be fair, the men were made fun of to an equal extent so maybe I just wasn’t up for the level of snark this book dealt. That said, by the end I had settled into the narrative and there was definitely something akin to character development in a handful of the characters by the end.
And books I have not yet finished this month:
Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk – a totally bizarre literary thriller that I’ve found myself struggling to put down. Quite possibly the most eccentric narrator I’ve encountered in many many years. I’ve got a feeling that I’ve worked out the central mystery, but I’ve also got a nagging sense that that’s exactly what it wants me to think.
*between writing and publishing this, I finished this book and my guess was correct, which was a bit of a shame.
Yearbook, Seth Rogan – this is a bizarre choice for me but hear me out. I never would have thought that the first celebrity memoir I’d ever read would be Seth Rogan’s. But then, one night, I was sifting through Audible looking for something breezy to listen to in the dark whilst I fed Freddie at whatever time of night or early morning he demands and I found it about halfway down the recommended titles in the Memoir section. I had recently finished watching The Studio which I loved and so something inside of me drove me to click ‘download’. And you know what? It’s fine! It’s vaguely amusing! I’m actually having an enjoyable time when sat in a dark room, a fussy baby latched to me and that, my friends, is a win.
Watching:
I’ve not had much time to watch anything this month but Prime’s Overcompensating was fun background – as was the tonally similar Adults on Disney.
I think I technically finished the last episode of The Studio early this month which was absolutely the best show I’ve seen this year (yes, that includes Severance which is, like, good but I’m not sure I’m on board with the level of hype).
I did binge Ginny & Georgia this month, again, mostly in the background, again, mostly fine. I’m barred from saying anything else until one of my best friends has caught up with it (though, is there really that much to say?).
Listening:
Music:
Fiona Apple’s I Want You To Love Me (and, really, the entirety of her album ‘Fetch the Bolt Cutters’) is rarely not in my most-played lists but it has been on repeat recently. ‘Time is elastic’ and ‘a sound is still a sound around no one’ are both lines which I’ve been trying to work into a painting since I first heard them more than five years ago and I still haven’t quite managed to work it out.
Also, ABBA Greatest Hits. Freddie and I sing along to ABBA most mornings (well, I sing, he watches me with a level of incredulity that feels a bit offensive). I don’t trust people who don’t like ABBA; I think the Venn Diagram of people who hate ABBA and like defending Reform policies ‘just as devils advocate’ is probably just a circle. They probably hate cats too.
Podcasts:
Normal Gossip has dominated my podcast listening hours this month (and last). Much to my devastation, their latest season ended last week which coincided with me finishing the entirety of their backlog of episodes and now I am left gossip-less and podcastly bereft.
Old faithfuls Too Scary; Didn’t Watch and Overdue are carrying me through this tough time.
Cooking:
Scrambled egg has become a sudden and unexpected staple in our house. Now that Freddie needs multiple solid meals a day (and I somehow didn’t have the complete personality transplant that I had expected to have upon giving birth which would have seen me become both organised and a great chef) eggs have been an absolute saviour. Eggs are the kind of food that I often have an aversion to whenever I think a little too hard about what they actually are (along with most meat) but the speed with which I can get an impatient baby fed a vaguely healthy meal has given them a full reputational rebrand. The food of champions!
Scrambled in a frying pan on high heat and served the way all the best restaurants do it: saltless and in a sticky-bottomed sectional rubber plate with some hastily-found veg.
Note: most of this will be consumed after having been picked up off the floor multiple times. Prudent to have mopped the floor beforehand.
Until next time (or maybe never).
