Let Them Eat Cake - It's Summer!

I love to paint cakes! Cakes are so pretty and painting them does not add inches to the waistline!

These paintings all feature cakes and most were painted for the Westcliff Art Trail I exhibited in during May.

The two large signs painted on cupboard doors feature cakes, teacups,lilacs, and roses as well as words - all of these elements are inspiring to me not only for their visual impact but also because of the memories and meanings they evoke to me personally.

Teacups - well - Connie Parkinson is truly the Queen of Roses and Teacups and I can't help but swoon every time I look at her beautiful paintings! I have a growing collection of teacups of my own - several which belonged to my Mother and her Mother, and a few years ago, I made an altered book titled Granny's Teacups. This book was very personal to me, at the time my Mother was very poorly in Canada and I had not long returned from spending time with her there. As she was unable to return home after that, I brought back her small collection of treasured teacups and these inspired me to make my book about both my mother and my grandmother and the impact they had on me and what is important to me.

Granny's Teacups made me think and reminisce about happy times spent at my Grandparent's Lakeside Home at Adams Lake in British Columbia, Canada, and these memories were the inspiration behind the entire collection of cakes and flower inspired paintings that I painted for the Art Trail.

One memory still vivid in my mind after at least 37 years is an afternoon I spent with my Grandparent's lovely next door neighbour Ina.

Ina was kind and glamorous and very friendly and one day she was decorating cupcakes for the Summer Fair Cake Competition. I was mesmerised with watching her make the most exquisite flowers, bows, loops, and trellis designs on these tiny little cakes in pleated paper wrappers.

I can still picture them to this day and thus my love of them and their pretty forms, and so this is why I love to paint them - that and the fact that I am not, or never will be a Domestic Goddess able to make them myself!

I will leave that to my friend Donna - she makes the most gorgeous cupcakes and is in high demand - thus she has started her own business entitled Let Them Eat Cake!