The Black Ink Colouring Book: our Novel art book

YOUR NOVEL ART WORK

This book is the art-companion companion to the novel "The Black Inked Pearl", which tells a version of the age-old myth of a girl rejecting her lover only to find he is the only one she wants. It is also a colouring book with images for YOU to colour in using YOUR imagination. On some pages it builds on the traditional form of colouring - inside firm lines - on others it calls, more daringly, on the modern technology of blurred and rubbed colouring,

The images are by the distinguished silk-artist Rachel Backshall who also illustrated other Ruth Finnegan books ("Oh Kate! Your first counting book", "The Magic Adventure, Kris and Kate build a boat", and "Pearl of the seas"). Inside the book are other images from her original silk paintings, converted to black and white for your imaginative colours.

And there is more - think COLOUR SECRETS: What are these colours that we see and try to copy? How are they made? How did they start and what (if anything) do they mean? Are colours perhaps only a trick of the light or of the way our eyes see, not really of any independent existence? But to us as people, as artists, they are real enough, something with which we engage every day. Learn in this book about the importance of colour for us as human beings living our lives in this world: the active uses and meanings of colours and how we engage with them. So here's to great, mindful, colouring.

AWARD WINNING AUTHOR: Ruth Finnegan has won many accolades including a Readers Favourite 2024 SILVER AWARD and a Literary Titan Gold Award. These are bestowed on books that are found to be perfect in their delivery of original content, utilizing fresh themes to convey innovative ideas, and which deftly use elegant prose to transform words into expertly written literature.

Ruth Finnegan (born 1933), Emeritus Professor of the Open University is an anthropologist and novelist with broad interdisciplinary interests, especially in classical studies, literature, sociolinguistics, modes of thought, cultural history and, recently, spiritual paranormal experience or altered consciousness. Ruth Finnegan was born on the last day of 1933 in Derry, Northern Ireland, the eldest child of Dr Thomas Finnegan, Professor of Classics and President of Magee College (later, under his leadership Magee University College) and Agnes Finnegan née Campbell, teacher and writer. Largely brought up in Derry, she spent most of the war years in Donegal, 13 months of it in a small cottage in a 'gentle' (faerie) wood, an experience vividly described in her mother's entrancing 'Reaching for the Fruit' and her own semi-autobiographical novel, 'Black Inked Pearl'. This had a lasting influence on her life.In order to avoid an upbringing tainted by Ulster religious divisions, on their return to Derry in 1945 her parents sent her to a Quaker school in York (the Mount) where the experience of memorising and repeating daily 'texts' from the Bible and other literature, shaped much of her future writing, most directly in her monograph Why do we quote? and her novel Black Inked Pearl. This was followed by four joyous years (1952-56) at Somerville College Oxford, again reflected in the novel, in the delightful study of classics (a degree that then combined literature, history and philosophy), ending, to her amazement, with one of the best classics firsts of her year. After two years teaching (and repaying her student debt) at the leading public school Malvern Girls College (now Malvern St James) she decided to return to the intellectual life but this time, much though she would always love the Greek and Roman cultures, to follow her instinct, honed partly by her anti-colonialist and broadly left-wing stance, to widen her study to include learning about other cultures . She chose to focus on Africa, and completed first the postgraduate Oxford Diploma and B.Litt in Anthropology, then fieldwork (1960-61, 1963-4) on story telling among the Limba speakers of Northern Sierra Leone (her manuscript field notes are deposited in the archives of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London); digitised versions of audio taped Limba story-telling and (minimally) music are available on. She completed her D.Phil in 1963, supported by Nuffield College, under the celebrated anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard. Immediately after her marriage in 1963 to David John Murray, grandson of Sir James Murray, the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, she accompanied her husband to the University College of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland in the then Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and from there to the more democratic if conflict-ridden setting of the University of Ibadan, Nigeria (1965-69) where their three daughters were born. From there she and her husband were recruited as founding members of the academic staff of the Open University where, apart from three years at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji and Ruthm 1989, and in the wonderful setting of the University of Texas at Austin.