My Bed Is My Boat...

I'm always asked where my inspiration comes from. It comes from everywhere.

What I see, experience and memories from my childhood. Some of my current artworks are Pirates and Pirate maps. When I was decorating my son's bedroom I remembered how I loved Robert Louis Stevenson as a child. Here is one of my favourite poems and it is one I read to my boys when they were small. I always had a similar way of seeing the world and was a bit of a dreamer too.

My Bed is a Boat

by Robert Louis Stevenson

My bed is like a little boat

Nurse helps me in when I embark;

She girds me in my sailor's coat

And starts me in the dark.

At night I go on board and say

Good-night to all my friends on shore;

I shut my eyes and sail away

And see and hear no more.

And sometimes things to bed I take,

As prudent sailors have to do;

Perhaps a slice of wedding-cake,

Perhaps a toy or two.

All night across the dark we steer;

But when the day returns at last,

Safe in my room beside the pier,

I find my vessel fast.

From "A Child's Garden of Verses" (1885)

By Robert Louis Stevenson

Picture from "Pottery Barn" in the US.

As a child of Scottish parents, Robert Louis Stevenson was well known to me. Not only was he a famous author, but he was also a poet. A Child’s Garden of Verses is a book of poetry for children. Stevenson dedicated the poems to his nurse Cummy (Alison Cunningham), who cared for him during his many childhood illnesses. As a very sick child (most biographies state he had TB as a child), he dreamed of his bed being a boat that would take him away. Considering that Stevenson spent many years in his bed, it is a very personal poem.

Another beautiful poem is "The Land of Nod" where only children can visit when they are asleep. In "Pirate Story" the garden becomes the setting for pirate adventures.

Here is some fascinating information which will give you a background to the inspiration for my artworks. It is from http://www.robert-louis-stevenson.org/ (the official Robert Louis Stevenson site in Scotland)

A fortuitous turning-point in Stevenson’s life occurred when on holiday in Scotland in the summer of 1881. The cold rainy weather forced the family to amuse themselves indoors, and one day Stevenson and his twelve-year-old stepson, Llyod (Fanny’s son by her first marriage), drew, coloured and annotated the map of an imaginary "Treasure Island". The map stimulated Stevenson’s imagination and, "On a chill September morning, by the cheek of a brisk fire" he began to write a story based on it as an entertainment for the rest of the family.

Treasure Island (published in book form in 1883) marks the beginning of his popularity and his career as a profitable writer, it was his first volume-length fictional narrative, and the first of his writings "for children"(or rather, the first of writings manipulating the genres associated with children). Later works that fit into this category are A Child's Garden of Verses (1885), The Black Arrow (1883), Kidnapped (1886) and its continuation Catriona (1893).


This is my Pirate Map artwork and I can imagine Stevenson sitting down with children and designing one. My boys have this artwork in their rooms as the fascination with pirates, secret lands and treasure still remains today.