{"id":30603,"date":"2024-09-26T08:00:52","date_gmt":"2024-09-26T08:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/?p=30603"},"modified":"2024-09-25T16:36:38","modified_gmt":"2024-09-25T16:36:38","slug":"adrift-on-a-painted-sea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/2024\/09\/26\/adrift-on-a-painted-sea\/","title":{"rendered":"Adrift on a Painted Sea"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"
\nBy Sue Bird<\/strong> and Tim Bird<\/strong> (Avery Hill Publishing)
\nISBN: 978-1-910395-82-0 (TPB)<\/p>\n

A child – every child\u2019s – late life obsession to understand their parents and find similarities and differences in the lives each generation has led. What we remember and how we frame such recollections afflicts all of us. It also becomes increasingly important as we get older, a truism that washes all through this elegiac and ruminatory collation where comics storyteller Tim Bird details his response to finding the lost (more actually forgotten and mis-recalled) paintings of his recently deceased mother Sue.
\n\"\"
\nContemporary found facts just don\u2019t jibe with his own childhood memories and he cannot resist finding what the truth actually is…<\/p>\n

What Tim irrefutably knows is that when not running a house, being a wife and rearing two kids, Sue Bird was a talented and compulsive artist, who from childhood created for the sheer joy of it. She loved the sea, shores and marine life, nature studies and still life painting. As a kid she even won competitions and her artworks toured in shows.<\/p>\n

Or did they?<\/p>\n

Mum created passionately and privately, and never tried to sell her work. After her death during the Covid pandemic, Tim uncovers some paintings and drawings – and a few scraps of newspapers squirreled away. Whilst still coming to terms with the awful restrictions that made her passing so cruel and unfair, he is increasingly gripped with his own passion: a hunger to know what\u2019s what and what happened…
\n\"\"
\nUsing the recovered bounty of her dozens of paintings and by talking to anyone still alive who knew her, Tim reevaluates his own past and relationship with Sue Bird, using her artworks as markers and chapter posts for a new sort of artistic statement. Moreover, as he seeks to unravel and reconfigure his fudged and muddy impressions of their times together, other shared milestone moments re-emerge: Northumberland beaches no one else enjoyed, listening to the Shipping Forecast and just sharing a drive to make things…
\n\"\"
\nUsing his comics as a skeleton and her paintings as meat on those bones, Bird applies his reshaped consciousness to the past and as his quest brings him closer to his own young family, engineers those feelings and discoveries into a visual eulogy to her and the power of memory, loss, and – always and forever – family.
\n\u00a9 Tim Bird 2024.<\/p>\n

Win\u2019s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Because Some Cannot Be Forgotten\u2026 9\/10<\/strong><\/p>\n

Adrift on a Painted Sea <\/strong>is published on 1st<\/sup> October 2024 and is available for pre-order now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Sue Bird and Tim Bird (Avery Hill Publishing) ISBN: 978-1-910395-82-0 (TPB) A child – every child\u2019s – late life obsession to understand their parents and find similarities and differences in the lives each generation has led. What we remember and how we frame such recollections afflicts all of us. It also becomes increasingly important … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Adrift on a Painted Sea”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[81,42,104,216],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art-books","category-best-of-british","category-graphic-autobiography","category-lifestyle"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4AFj-7XB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30603"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30603\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30608,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30603\/revisions\/30608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}