Something Old

This is a fairly old painting of a fairly old toy as well as a flower and a bottle which must be long gone now. I started collecting wind-up toys when I had a college art class assignment to illustrate a mechanical toy, its component parts and its motion all in one illustration. I liked my picture (which is not this one) a lot, and when I come across it, I'll be sure to post it here. My subject was a little hopping sparrow, which fortunately I was able to reassemble. One of my classmates had a toucan, which I simply had to have, and thus began my collection. I was particularly drawn to their lithographed surfaces. I stopped collecting toys after I had children because at that point quite rightly my toys were their toys. I do still have some somewhere put away, unwound and getting older, rather wastefully now that I think about it.