Welcome to Summer

20th June 2014: In honour of British summer-time starting tomorrow, we've asked serial blogger, Craig McCann to share his associations and thoughts about the season we all love -  Summertime.

As the Ella Fitzgerald ‘Summertime’ song starts :-

“Summertime, and the livin' is easy. Fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high.”

"As the second of my invited posts, this season is all about the feeling of warmth and countryside abundance. Expressing this perfectly are bright paintings by Brian Sweet and Alison Clements 

For me, a child of the seventies and eighties, summer makes me think of long hot, seamlessly-everlasting school holidays. Also spending long days watching the Banana Splits show on TV and drinking fizzy drinks from the ‘Alpine Man’, who delivered them in bottles from the back of a wagon and gave you pennies for the returned empties !

Back then, apart from a fortnightly trip to the beach, the ‘great outdoors’ didn’t seem to figure too largely in our awareness of the world. As an adult I appreciate it daily, therefore it’s great to see stunning illustrations, positively radiating heat and the buzz of nature.

The modern idea of daylight saving was first proposed in 1895 by George Vernon Hudson. British Summer Time was first established by the Summer time Act of 1916, after a campaign by builder William Willett. His original proposal was to move the clocks forward by 80 minutes, in 20-minute weekly steps on Sundays in April and by the reverse procedure in September. Allowing us to have more sunlight so that evenings have more daylight and the mornings have less. Typically clocks are adjusted forward one hour near the start of spring and are adjusted backward in the autumn.

Summertime also meant ‘fun’. It meant jellies and ice cream, being at the beach even more, deckchairs, holiday vacations, sunbathing, swimming and buzzing, sweet smelling garden flowers.

 

I love Morag Lloyds’ ariel views of these sunny warm islands. They have a wonderful textile and patchwork quality to them. More of the beach themes here.

 

These fun and quirky collages by Jane Robbins, take me back to exploring rock-pools at the beach and the seabirds and sea-holly-foliaged sand dunes in Jenny Tylden Wrights’ work, mark the long sunny evening skies in rich ambers and rosey reds.

Finally, a couple more child-centered illustrations from Alex T Smith, Angela Rozelaar and myself. Reminding me of riding bikes or falling asleep in the long grasses, having adventures in blow up boats and all the sun-filled colourful clothes and warm busy prints that always appeared at this time of year.

 

I hope this post has evoked a few memories of Summer for you, why not share them with us and leave a comment."

Yellow House is delighted to welcome in Summer-time which is interestingly a time of year when our artists and designers are busy working on their Christmas-themes deisgns - it's always a bit odd designing snowflakes and wintery animals in the heat of June!