Since I transitioned from a career in Medical Imaging that could never have been a balanced work/life experience to the life of a work from home artist, a state of equilibrium exists most of the time. Our move to a seaside suburb of a city was a deliberate attempt at making life more balanced.To throw a little spice into the mix I also do admin for a tennis club. Prior to that I did admin for a large group of Artists. That involved far too much driving and artists can be very slippery fish to manage. The tennis club is just a short walk away and the view of the office is enchanting.
As it happens some slippery fish also play tennis but not in quite the same proportions as the art group. Beyond the unpredictable admin of a tennis club my work/ life balance pivots on a fulcrum of domestic admin v creativity. The balance changes on a daily basis.
I don’t believe I have ever made a sacrifice in life.
I have, however,often given up something I valued for the sake of other considerations.
Surely that is just part of normal life and does not deserve the grandiose title of sacrifice.
This morning I got out of a comfy bed to let Hugo out for a wee. An entirely practical consideration in my opinion. I chose to do that.
I am wary of people who say they sacrificed something. The word is just all a bit too ‘drama queen’ for my liking.
But yesterday some light pruning occurred in our yard. Old blooms cut off to allow new blooms to flourish. That is about as sacrificial as it gets in our house. Anything else is a choice.
The early distractions of yesterday, a misplaced work i.d and fob, a jumper delivered to a friend and the purchase of some dull, but essential art stuff all fitted quite easily into the early part of the day while the domestic goddesses, Madams Dishwasher and Washing machine did the hard graft.
All should have been set for late morning artiness but fate had other plans.
Yesterday was planned to be an art day with a side serving of domestica turned out to be quite a different type of day. Starting with a scene of domestic bliss, pale linens blowing in sunlight.
Our Springtime Yard
Moments later the springtime yard was draped in pale linens as the high (20 foot) washing line broke.
My Dad (born 1931) and my grandad ( born 1888) were very practical men and regularly mended high washing lines so I knew it wasn’t a job beyond me. I had even bought a spare washing line, when we moved into this house, for just such a moment. Planned , preventative maintenance was my thought at the time but I procrastinated and found myself in an ‘ emergency’ situation.
Nothing in my recall of stringing a high washing line involved the macrame nightmare that I created yesterday. Two hours later the washing was once again drying in the sun. All the colours of a domestic victory dancing in my mind, projected onto the twice washed linens.
Linens in the style of Tamara de Lempicka
Would I have been better off using YouTube for instruction rather than relying on intergenerational knowledge?
I don’t think so, and I am a big user of YouTube to fix things. But those ‘How to’ videos are so slick.
Learning from my dad and grandad taught me the art and tolerance of non-slick but effective repairing. My Grandad dealt with washing-line macrame by deep puffing on his pipe and a quiet walk around his garden with his arms held behind his back. My dad would retreat into his shed emerging with the macrame tamed into calm coils of new washing line ready to be strung up.
I have neither a shed or a pipe habit but I have tolerance and tenacity which in my own way beat the macrame.
What’s one small improvement you can make in your life?
If I could eliminate non-productive distraction from my life I would have an extra hour or two every day. My problem with being certain that I want less distraction is that I never know if distraction is an entirely bad thing. Distraction only happens because something interrupts me and I am too nosey to let it pass, usually because my interest in what I am doing is wavering a bit.*
*I am able to be super focussed and single minded. In the right conditions I can turn my ears off.
To be pedantic, I only want the right amount of dull and pointless distraction removed from my life. The joyous life-enhancing distraction is always welcome.
There has been way too much of this in our yard. Warm walls and gentle rain has brought out a parade of young snails on a Monday morning. My early morning cup of tea ,with birdsong, was somewhat ruined by watching dark snails of all sizes make their way up my crisp white walls.
Time to redirect the snail population off my white walls and into the snug, bijoux, terracotta paradise that is my composting system. Which means collecting them in a pot and moving them myself.
Oh the loveliness of concatination, and having friends in High Places. This shot from a TV shows my friend Jenny, standing on the outside walkway of the lighthouse on Plymouth Hoe. A T.V crew getting a much better view of the goings on at the Hoe yesterday than I did. She watched the T.V in case she was on, and she snapped this pic.
She and I were chattering because I was suspicious that I had also caught her up a lighthouse in one of my meddled photographs. ( A sentence I never expected to write)
It is lovely when serendipity and concatination come together.
Then on my way home nature got all serendipitous. Look at this beautiful pansy making the most of a difficult location. Now just as I went to the Hoe and saw nothing yesterday,my pansy growing is not the most successful, slugs believe I am their artisan food producer. But leave a pansy out of my direct control and they manage very nicely just growing away in a drain.
Just a waterfall in the English countryside, below a pond.
With a glass shute that humans and cows can walk under.
And a message.
If people, or cows for that matter, for just one minute, allowed Modern Art to get into their heads rather than allowing it to flow over their heads, the world would be a very different place for them.
Or maybe significantly different. Not so likely for the cows.
5 minutes is all it takes at Delamore Arts. Staying longer is even more interesting.
I do. Quite a few years ago I narrowly avoided running over a political leader, he was a lucky man that I was concentrating. I was in bits he had stepped out in front of me from between two parked cars. He shrugged his shoulders in his expensive camel coat, gave me a small hand flap of thanks and went on his way. This seemingly minor moment in my life when I absolutely did the right thing always haunts me when I consider the damage he has done to our country. This morning is no different.
Moving swiftly on, our first rose bloom ever on our defensive planting scheme bloomed and drooped. We plucked her tiny head from her damaged stem and popped it in a shot glass.
She is a very thorny rose who has been purchased specifically to ramble over our garage roof to deter the neighbourhood cats from getting into our yard and having a shit. Which is exactly the word I used when I nearly ran over the politician. At the time I said it because I was frightened. Now, well…
Beltane , Mayday, caught me out yesterday. It was a day filled to the brim. Not another thing could have been squeezed into any second of the waking day. So much so that the blog was brief and largely unexplained.
I combined two exercises from Paint Like Turner to create a painting of our local tidal pool.
The first big takeaway was that watercolour painting 250 years ago was not done on paper that was anywhere near white. So the process took about 24 hours as I dyed paper with cold tea.
The process and the result.
Then dried the papers in hot bright sunlight, which bleached out the colour a bit. I think I quite like painting on imperfect slightly beige paper. In real life the image has a warmth about it which I quite like.
Then to read the instructions and dig around in my paint store for the suggested colours or as close as I had.
I was working from one of my favourite, very atmospheric photographs of the pool.
At this point I should point out that this is the pool on an excellent day.
And this once again is the painting. Very curious to create art from firm instructions.
I need to sort this horizon out before actually attaching the mount.
I was quite thrilled that the painting more or less has a Turner colour palate as demonstrated by the biography I am also powering through.
But the painting is nothing like a Turner in reality and much more like my photograph.
Which rather neatly brings me to the end of the day. Which was spent with a huge glass of Pimms , celebrating a friend’s success in the London Marathon. 26 miles of determination and endeavour.
This photograph has the colour palate of the sun going down through a glass of Pimms.
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