Clare Gaylard Glass 

A weekend of baking, two birthday cakes (already gone) and here: three for charity and one for us that didn't quite work. If I am going to engage with a project I like it to be sizeable, I put that down to coming from a family of nine, never knowingly undercatered. 

'As I walked out one evening,

Walking down Bristol Street

The crowds upon the pavement,

Were fields of harvest wheat.'

I walked out this afternoon, without a camera, the fields were full of harvest wheat. I learned the Auden poem by heart many years ago and it is more full of beauty and complexity than many feature length films. Photo to follow if I remember to take my camera before the harvesters come.

Grayson Perry's 'All in the Best Possible Taste', Amazing, though it's a brave person that would have him round to theirs for a visit. Above: The Agony in the Car Park

Picasso's Vollard Suite is showing at the British Museum. Lots of fluid etchings with his minotaur alter ego showing a good deal of ambivalence towards the females depicted. here is mine, behaving.

I once saw an old film of Picasso painting onto a backlit screen. This permitted you to see how he mapped out his work. He never started wth the salient points but used a series of abstract lines that slowly resolved themselves into a figurative work.

I've been following artist Marina Bychkova for some years, a consummate artist who creates remarkable ball-jointed, porcelain dolls. www.theenchanteddoll.com

Yesterday was my birthday. Sweet and Sour, macaroons from Laduree and 'Savage Beauty' from Alexander McQueen with its beautiful, dark, memento mori 3D front cover.

Another reason why random stacks of vases and blue&white china might present themselves as a visual conceit. Pottery Jungle in Singapore. I took these photos on a sweltering day, the children were shown how to use a potters wheel and we all got to peer into the Dragon Kiln set into the hillside. One side of the hill was littered with discarded, unglazed ceramics and every walkway and shelter was filled with china. Monkeys ran around on the rooftops and we worried constantly about Dengue mosquitos and bone fever.

The stallholder let us have an extra one free due to the time and concentration our eight year old put into choosing her miniature; 'Already a woman' he commented approvingly. My triumph was leaving a fleamarket having only spent 2 euros on my own purchase, the long deco Cartier panthere.

We took the kids to Mont St Michel in France for their first time and they were suitably blown away, insisting we come back again at night and high tide. As kids we used to approach it by walking across the bay, enchanted by the fact that the tide came in 'Faster than a man on a galloping horse' and intrigued to see if our parents had the tide times right. Reaching the dark, caverous cathedral at the top and looking out at the endless sea around gives you a glorious concentration of man-made and natural elements.

We were lucky to get some bright, sharp and sunny days in France (Brittany) this Easter. We stayed in Dinard and had masses of coast and cold, clear spring colours everywhere. We took mostly photographs and left mostly footprints but there is a bag of irresistable shells and crab armoury waiting in the garden that needs to be examined once the sea smells have weathered away some more.

Its a mighty blog leap from December to the week before Easter, life got in the way, I'll choose to think of it as moving gently from Winter to Spring and its fine to be back in my studio with windows open. Over Christmas we caught the 'Treasures of Heaven' exhibition which was a splendid, surreal collection of reliquaries and artefacts, general favourites were the ornate hand and foot reliquaries. I loved the stunning miniature shrines and the clever nod to the continued urge to develop shrines and relics for the cult heroes and tragic figures of recent times.

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This long run of unseasonably good weather has brought everything out at once. This is our first summer of seeing the things we planted come through. In Asia the plantlife was robust and flaunting, so this subtle, delicate abundance is a continuing pleasure. 

We were in France over Easter and I enjoyed all the washed out pastel shades, gilding, patisseries and of course the Easter Eggs. I'm fascinated by the obsessive miniaturism of Faberge eggs so I have been making some of my own, but I haven't managed to dig out my gold leaf yet, see above..

In France we visit Maison Laduree, pre-revolutionary inventors of the double macaroon and purveyors of cakes to the 'Marie Antoinette' movie by Sophia Coppola, Norte Dame, Abbaye de Fountrevaud (run by nuns, burial place of Eleanor of Aquitane), Chateau Usse, the inspiration for Perrault's 'Sleeping Beauty' and Rouen where we find the cathederal replete with obscure female saints holding the objects of their martyrdom and a lyrical bit of side street graffit that all leans strongly towards 'Death and the Maiden'. The sun shone constantly, the food was magnificent there was plenty to celebrate.

http://aiweiwei.tate.org.uk/content/717786429001

Well the link above is not a great video for the content but for a parent it has amusement value. The children DID love the exhibition and did want to make a video, then bailed when we pressed play, and then tried to press the button to cut me off mid-flow.. So off camera I am seizing then holding a small hand away from the off switch while I try to keep my flow.

I took the children up as high as the weather would permit in St Paul's Cathedral, past the glorious monuments and mosaics and into the Whispering Gallery but the guard kept SHOUTING at people which defeated the purpose so we went higher for some silence to the Stone Gallery which gave us these long views over an iced London. The windows at Fortnum and Mason gave us some amazing Trompe L'oeil examples of Old Masters and clever, subversive (well to the eye) paintings that had been made in relief to trick the eye. The camera did not comply.

I have always liked De La Tour babies, all the more since having my own. Brave and kind of him of him to leave aside the halos and garlands in favour of a tight, white parcel with a squashed red face.

Well not yet, but the 'Coldest British Winter Ever' has just started again. My second season of snow in well over a decade of African and Asian winters, so the fear of navigating it still weighs less in the balance than the amazement of it.

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My Birthday, amongst other things a visit to the Grace Kelly exhibition at the V&A and a real carpet bag that is more Mary Poppins. The carpet bag is a labour of love from the owner of 'Campaign' a treasure-chest of a place in Peasenhall. The carpet is Axeminster and the design was brought back from the Crusades The metal frame was made on a Victorian press and I like the jewel like colours and the craftsmanship.