THE M&Ms LOVING, ANCIENT, ALIEN BOTANOLOGIST

Halloween is my favorite day of the year! All saints, pumpkins, ghosts, vampires, witches - what's not to like??????? I think werewolves are also included. Because Halloween is not officially celebrated here in Cyprus, I first learnt about it when I was a child and saw E.T. - the film about the M&Ms loving, ancient, alien botanologist, where Halloween takes center stage. E.T. gets stranded on Earth, falls in love with M&Ms chocolate and befriends a troubled human boy called Eliot. The rest, as they say, is history.

Now Halloween is celebrated in Cyprus with parties and jack-o-lanterns, and All Saints is of course part of the liturgical calendar. A few shops have been decorated, and Fairy Cakes made a Halloween fairy cake, with a chocolate bat on top. I miss England, where everything was decorated in orange, black and all things spooky!!!!

The Halloween festival is very old, and you can read all about it in Merriam-Webster online. There is a lovely little article on Halloween today!

Happy Halloween everyone - and don't forget to take beauty always with you! 💖💝🎃🎃🎃💄💋👠💄
#Halloween #cupcakes #vampires #witches #pumpkins #AllSaints #ET#ETthealien #TheLipstickPapers #beauty #spooky #Cyprus

PAINTED THE AMAZING MERMAIDS

The moment I saw this painting, of course I recognized it as a lovely example of Pre-Raphaelite art- the long, tall figures, the attention to detail, the matte face color, the long fabrics, the minute drawing of female blonde hair 😀 Myself and the Pre-Raphaelites go back a long time! The first time I heard of them was when I read Rosamunde Pilcher's novel The Shell Seekers. Then I discovered John William Waterhouse, who painted the amazing mermaids. During my English Literature degree, I saw Pre-Raphaelite pictures of Ophelia. A book about Jane Morris, the famous Pre-Raphaelite model, was the first book I read for my PhD. Cornwall, where I was at the time, has a long tradition with Pre-Raphaelite art!

So it is with understandable pride that I am posing here with this painting by Jacques Wagrez. I didn't know there were French Pre-Raphs to be honest. The painting is at CVAR, the cultural foundation I visited last Saturday, and shows Ekaterini Cornaro (Αικατερίνη Κορνάρο) Queen of Cyprus in medieval times.

I was dismayed when the expert guest on a BBC Radio 4 program about the naming of art movements had no idea who coined the term Pre-Raphaelite. Reluctantly he said it might have been Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He also called the Pre-Raphaelite movement as a historicist mish-mash, not a spiritual movement but a group of enthusiastic young men developing a brand.😡

Anyway! The Pre-Raphs indeed appeared at an age where art entered the market place as a commodity. (Yet wasn't it often so, even in the Renaissance?).

Have a good time for mid-week! Xxx <3 <3 <3
P.S. The not very well informed expert guest was right: the term was indeed coined by Rossetti, founder and leader of the movement.

#PreRaphaelites #JaneMorris #RosamundePilcher #Cornwall #Cyprus#JacquesWagrez #Ophelia #JohnWaterhouse #mermaids

BRIDAL CULTURE

When you have wedding gowns from 1800 to the present day, which are the most beautiful? Easy! The VICTORIAN wedding gowns, of course!!! Today I went to the most amazing exhibition in Nicosia, at Dr Rita Severis's Centre of Visual Arts and Research! After the Victorians, my favorite wedding gowns were from the 60s and early 70s. These were periods where fashion was at its coolest. Even after all these years, the 60s and 70s wedding gowns were full of that air of freshness, adventure and braveness that was the spirit of the age!

The exhibition was called Here Come the Brides, and it featured wedding gowns from the 19th to the 21st centuries. The gowns belonged to both Greek and Turkish Cypriots and were all amazingly beautiful. The silk, tulle, lace and other materials, although old, were still lustrous and eye catching. The work was exquisite. Also, the gowns were set against a background of antique items, such as furniture, drawings, embroidery, trunks and other items original from the 19th to the 21st centuries.

As was expected, I was awed and impressed. I took many photos, not only of the gowns, but also of other priceless exhibits (stay tuned for more details).

However, the brides exhibition was also kind of eerie. You can't help but think about the brevity and peculiarity of human life - many of those women who wore the gowns lived, loved and died and are now only memories. The wedding gown captured one day in their youth, long gone now. The mannequins were absolutely beautiful and absolutely scary at the same time.

Which made this exhibition all the more fantastic!!! 💖💝💋❤️👠💄😀💝
#TheLipstickPapers #HereCometheBrides #Weddinggown #art #culture#Cyprus #Nicosia #Victorians #beauty

BET-TEA BOOP

One of my most prized possessions is the Betty Boop tea-set which you can see here! I bought it 18 years ago from London for £30. The shop was a weird place, in central London, with memorabilia from movies and cartoons. Remember that we are talking about the pre-Internet era, where to find any of these things you had to go out into the real world and locate them physically. Thank goodness for the World Wide Web!

I love Betty Boop, and have a small collection of figurines too. Two come from my beloved Exeter, England, while a third is from Limassol here in Cyprus. The Betties are not easy to find, which makes them all the more unique!

Betty Boop appeared in 1930, at first as a caricature of the actress Helen Kane. Now she is a ⭐️ in her own right. For feminists, Betty Boop is quite subversive - she's a housewife without a husband and thus questions set female roles.

I love the figurines, but my favorite remains the tea set. I have not seen it anywhere else, and it will always take me back to a sunny day in London, in a weird shop run by two odd guys, who seemed to have come out of a cartoon themselves.

Have a great evening! Nothing beats that Friday feeling! 💖💝💄💋❤️
#TheLipstickPapers #BettyBoop #London #tea #teaset #Fridayfeeling#Exeter

ONE RING TO RULE THEM ALL

When I came back to Cyprus from my undergraduate studies, I was reading The Lord of the Rings and The Dragonbone Chair. "What books are these?" People asked. I said, "fantasy". People just stared. Nobody knew what fantasy and the genre of the fantastic was. Now I get asked, "what's your new novel"? (By friends, sadly I'm not famous). I answer, "fantasy". The answer is a big smile. Everyone knows fantasy now. Here I am recovering from writer's block and going back to handwritten work!!!

Having writer's block made me scared, coz the other one I had lasted for a decade. Eventually, I realized what was to blame! It was that I wrote everything directly on the screen. I am a pen and paper person, it seems. No screen for me!

My directly on screen record is something like this. I completed one novel I had started on paper on screen: that was my second volume of Sleight of Hand. Then, I wrote one full novel on screen (The Doll's Tale). However, the Doll needed three major revisions, which took me about five months in total. As for two novels I started after that, I felt I could not go on. Writing directly on screen made me lose a sense of what happened in the novel. So it was back to pen and paper!

Of course, there may be other reasons why we have a writer's block. Life's difficulties often get the better of us and affect our inspiration. However, the new novel is going well, which is excellent news. It's a fantasy young adult novel, as yet untitled. It's no Lord of the Rings. But it's exciting!!!

I will keep you posted! 💖💝💋💄❤️
#TheLordoftheRings #writing #books #TheLipstickPapers