What a question! Every cell in our bodies and every experience in life makes us unique.
I am like an old rock. Created by the gift of genes donated by my parents and then shaped by my life experience. Every day I am shaped by the previous day and every day before it. My pleasures and harms altering the way I bend towards the next day. Every person on earth is affected in the same way making us both unique compared to each other and indeed unique compared to ourselves of the past. I would suggest we continue to evolve in unique ways until our last breath. When just like that our uniqueness is altered by the love and memories we left behind. Unique again depending how every person recalls us, both good and bad.
Coming Home was an eloquent and beautiful homage to family and place. Something Irish people do with skill and sensitivity.
Not so, the good people of Essex which is where my heritage and sense of place are rooted.
I came away from the gig enlightened and entranced by the music and the words and very humbled that I have no such ability to show such gratitude and respect to my forbears and place of my upbringing.
Some of the footling about this week with my hybrid photography/printmaking was definitely inspired by the gig.
The green abstract shape in the Tulip picture could be absent forbears or future descendants. Just placing me, represented as quick-to-fade tulips. Frozen in time as just a piece of the family jigsaw. Which of course is exactly what I am. Just a grain of sand in one family’s story.
Sand Dunes
All of my forbears, both close and distant are in another realm, my only purpose on Mothers Day is to celebrate that I am a mother and grandmother to some fabulous humans and remember that there were a whole stack of family members before me. Nothing really regrettable about that. It is the natural way of a family tree.
I just can’t write amazing words and music to celebrate them. I blame my genes.
Yesterday was the perfect Spring Day so we set off to a perfect beach for a long meandering dog walk. The beach and surrounding estate were sold over winter.
Sold for an undisclosed sum. The asking price was £30 million
It is alleged that the previous owner had wanted to turn the area into a millionaires play ground. If that is true,that would have been rather sad. Bantham is a spectacular place enjoyed inhabited and visited by regular humans since the Bronze Age.
What makes you laugh?
Now it has to be said that I laugh at most normal things, but the idea of a natural paradise being turned into an unnatural paradise also seems to be so laughable that I can quite see why local people protested with enough vigor to stop such a scheme. I hope the new owners don’t give them cause to protest again. For now all seems peaceful. We paid our £5 parking fee, had the beach mostly to ourselves and the dogs made themselves giddy and exhausted with play and paddling.
I took some deliberately bad photographs to reprocess into Hybrid images and was once again surprised and puzzled by my results. Just two of my chosen images worked. Jenkins Boathouse turned out pleasingly vibrant.
In my hierarchy of work needs there are 3 stages. Procrastination, diligent effort and footling about.
Procrastination delays essential diligence and footling fills the gaps when the diligence cannot be undertaken.
Figs in Space is the product of footling at the end of the day. I had had a really busy day of admin and meetings. I also need to get ready for an exhibition which starts next week. My diligence in framing and mounting artwork had come to a stop because,unusually for this modern era the mounting kits I had ordered had been delayed in the delivery chain.
I was footling about with many pictures of figs.
The title Figs in Space came to me because my three-year-old son used to shout or use those words constantly after watching the Muppets. Figs in Space was a war cry, the equivalent of adult swearing and sometimes just used as words of exasperation when his three-year-old world was not going in the direction he needed.
In truth I was using the last of my creative energy on figs because the admin tasks of the day had drained me. Although the meeting was very positive and possibly the cause of my late spike of diligence which had finished me off.
The parcel of mounts arrived just as the sun set. It remains on the floor unopened. Figs in Space was my last work of the day. Even if it was just footling about.
If I had the answer to this I would almost certainly be far too busy to live a normal life. Explaining the ‘something’ to most people would take a lot of time and effort.
Better to concentrate on the things that I don’t understand and give myself a little mental upgrade. Most of my contemporary understanding arrives accidentally at my door. I often wish I had understood something better years ago. But am always grateful that late enlightenment has arrived. Pondering helps.
I thought I had the measure of yesterday. About 5 hours of admin for two organisations that I work for. Some dog walking and some domestica. Serendipity however made those things happen alongside some lovely pondering. My early dog walk gave me a rare moment on the most popular beach nearby. For once it was deserted and I could get one of my ‘bad’ photographs to play around with later in the day.
The sun was up, the dogs were happy and I could perch on the drying rocks contemplating my day. But I was not alone, just at the point where the high tide had turned last night, there was a gathering of memorial flowers and some ashes. Someone else had not quite left the beach.
Just a small bunch of yellow roses signifying all the love and sorrow of an unknown person’s death. Somewhere in this Hybrid Printmaking image, of a spring morning at the tidal pool, these flowers create a little bit of the texture that makes this picture what it is.
The infinite Magnolia Blooms of St Mary’s, Barnes.
There is a memorial bench set under this magnificent Magnolia in the graveyard of St Mary’s. I don’t think my parents ever set foot in Barnes but this would be the perfect spot to have scattered their ashes.
Red Hot Magnolia
Growing a blooming Magnolia was a red hot topic in their marriage. My mum loved them and my dad didn’t seem to be able to ever grow one that bloomed. The thick clay soul/soil of North East Essex was not kind to Magnolias, or at least our small corner was not kind.
When they died their last attempt at growing a blooming Magnolia was beginning to show promise, buds appeared, but dropped off before they could open. Many years later I was stalking my parents old home on a property website and observed the tree looking very healthy in the garden. Maybe it blooms I thought. The house was for sale again recently, the Magnolia was gone. Replaced by a climbing frame.
And so the birthday weekend moved on from Comedy to Culture. Yesterday’s birthday boy moved on to more serious pursuits and we , his tiny familial audience perused the coffee shops and Charity shops of Barnes while he rehearsed.
In St Mary’s Churchyard. Barnes.
Not just about human culture, the dogs were treated to some most excellent canine abstract art.
Dog piss patination.
Not the only culture the dogs got to experience. The wonderfully friendly people of St Mary’s and Barnes Music Festival encouraged us to bring the dogs into the church for the concert. I cannot imagine what was going on in their heads while watching one of their favourite humans waving his baton and creating beautiful sounds from other humans. They were, at times, spellbound, watching intently and turning their heads to try and make sense of what was happening in front of them.
Blog #1234, what a fabulous number. I had better make this blog worthy.
We went out, out last night to a nightclub in Reading for Comedy. The Comedy was a bit hit and miss, but we were not sitting in the front row, which is always a blessing. In fact in a surreal twist the only place we could find to sit was a snug area with sofas. Or should I call it the snog area, which it would almost certainly have been when I was last out, out in Reading.
The sofa area did not protect us from being the butt of one comedian’s jokes.
Sample sentence below.
By resting our butts on the sofa the comedian made us the butt of his jokes.
The audience was divided, in his witty mind, into the under 30’s, the Waitrose set. Waitrose is a posh supermarket, and the elderly, on the sofas.
A crude and inaccurate stereotype as I was the only one over 60, we sometimes shop in Waitrose and 50% of the sofa sitters were under 30.
The Elderly sofa area is reflected in a glitterball.
But we were not about to disagree with a Comedian. That path is where danger lies, I have been there before and my indignant research on my work computer the next night, got me locked out of the work system while I was doing an on-call shift. I had to make the call of shame to the overnight I.T man who really didn’t care that my words were probably commonplace for psychiatrists and psychologists. I used that as my excuse for the research.
Should you wish to try this at your own workplace, look up Coprophagia and Coprophilia.
We were out to celebrate my brother-in-laws slightly over 50 birthday. It is also my dad’s birthday and he would have been 95 were he still in this realm.
The last time I was ‘out, out’ in the Reading area I would have probably been risking some paternal crossness for being away from Essex for the weekend and he didn’t know where I was or who I was with.
I pondered this in between comedian sets, in fact one comedian was so bad I pondered it during the set. I just couldn’t quite remember my last Reading encounter. And this is where the older human brain is the joyous thing it is. The minute I woke up this morning the name South Hill Arts Centre floated to the top of my pointless, pondering pile.
So where is no longer a mystery but the who remains somewhat less clear, I can narrow it down, it would have been a musician that I had met at a live music gig at Braintree College of Further Education. I await my older human brain to fish the name of my companion from my squishy cerebral cortex, sometime in the next few days.
So there we are, 95 year old Dad in another realm. All the info you needed a very long time ago.
Keeping on track for being ready for an art exhibition ahead of time should be easy. The tasks are well known and never change once the creative process has been completed. The jobs I am talking about are the ones successful artists never have to bother with because with great success comes a team who swoop up the mistresspiece and do all the tasks that get the work from Studio to Gallery.
I laboured for two hours yesterday framing a tiny piece of work. The job became compelling. I shut off the reality that there are three more identical tiny pieces of work to be framed. I shut off the cacophony of mental litter that came with a new endeavour I have signed up for.
Now I am not saying that I wouldn’t embrace being a very successful artist with a team behind me doing the non creative stuff. But there is some calming magic in doing something hard for me, that others could do better and quicker. Because somewhere in all that concentration I had a creative brainwave for the future. On track you might say.
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