How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success?
I failed to write an early blog today, hopefully this apparent failure will set me up for later success, now, as I gather my words. Blogging at a snails pace I believe. There are many reasons I should have got my printing on the go more than a month before the exhibition opens. Today is a case in point. Real life still goes on, cars and vans need servicing and M.O.T’s. Life admin needs attending to and dogs need walking. Then the sun popped up in the studio and printing embellishment needed to be embellished.
Some embellishment is just a bit of type writing and a little bit of twinkle.
My mother would be ashamed, she was a very accomplished typist. Speed and accuracy. I am slow and inaccurate. Good enough in the digital world of a laptop but truly I have sausage fingers on my old typewriter. Sometimes I forget the gap between words. Either a whole mistress piece goes in the bin or I have to hope that people are charmed by my typos.
You’re writing your autobiography. What’s your opening sentence?
The sun was shining.
Just about everything in life feels more tolerable if the sun is shining. I was born in mid-November in the north of the Northern Hemisphere, so my first three months were spent being sun-deprived. Since that dreary start in life, I have been a gatherer or snatcher of sunshine moments. Two days ago sunshine at 5 pm was such a huge treat, I celebrated with an ice cream despite an outdoor temperature of 5 degrees. My dad was an enthusiastic gatherer of good weather. On mixed weather days, he was jubilant if he had achieved something in the sunny bits.
” Well” he would say, in a happy way. ” I think we have had the best of the day”
Subconsciously I must have adopted his way of thinking. Using sunshine moments wisely is a bit of an imperative, especially in the Winter months when they are in short supply. My early morning dog walk yesterday featured sunshine and a lifeboat.
Yesterday bought me face to face with a very old ponder. When I was 16, in rural Essex, I discovered the joy of gathering in a pub on a Friday night with my friends. For a natter and a catch-up, before we headed off to the giddy excitement of rural or semi-rural nightclubs or live music events at the local college. Alcohol was not involved because public transport didn’t exist much beyond 8pm. We gathered at a pub called the Green Man. Sometimes we discussed men,mostly the real-world sort but occasionally and without Google or a vast library of reference books we pondered where all the Green Women were.
Yesterday I started singing, with a community choir, a contemporary collection of songs called The Green Man. Composed not five minutes from my current home and inspired by the same landscape that inspired my Green Androdgyny
I have spent an extremely small percentage of my life pondering the folklore of the Green Man. Puzzled that the human face of the arrival of spring is male. Last year I created an androdgynous Green person for a Spring exhibition. I have been down a green- man -google- rabbit- hole researching the whole Green Man tradition and am both older and wiser and yet not wiser. If there is a female version of the green man she is less well known, has a more awkward name and not surprisingly has a more active role in creating Spring. Sheela Na Gig is represented as a woman with disproportionately large genitals. Almost essential given that in other portrayals she is actually giving birth to trees and bushes that already have a full compliment of leaves and fruit. Splayed branches out first. Deeply uncomfortable with a high risk of tears, either meaning of the words and probably both at the same time.
March the Ist rewarded the Bobbers with a great swim yesterday morning. The sun came up. The water was at 10 degrees and the air temperature was 5 degrees. Nothing significantly different from January and February. But swimming on the first day of meteorological Spring felt buzzy. We were buzzy. As a group we have completed our third winter of regular sea swimming. When we started a photo like this was unthinkable. Each separate household kept themselves about two meters apart and our swim was our half hour of permissible outdoor exercise during a Covid lockdown. Our group of 12 to 14 swimmers stretched out on the promenade for almost 20 metres depending on who lived with whom. Even sticking to the rules there was always a small element of anxiety about our early bobbing sessions. That anxiety was heightened when we were approached by the police. We shouldn’t have worried, the police were concerned for our safety. There was a voyeur on the loose. Hidden in clear sight, or in his case enhanced clear sight. A man was taking his half hour exercise by cycling along the promenade in fluorescent clothing. Fitness was not his goal however. He sought stimulation of an entirely different sort. His gimlet eyes searched for the hidden curves of damp bottoms or boobs as swimmers struggled in or out of their clothes.
Another winter was marked by an Atlantic Seal called Spearmint who joined the swimmers of Firestone Bay rather too enthusiastically for her own good.
She swam with us so often she almost needed her own Bobbers sweatshirt.
Maybe that’s the reason this year’s winter swimming has felt, at times, like a chore. The only memorable thinge is how much storms have negatively affected our Bobbing plans.
Winter 21/22 Year of the Perv
Winter 22/23 Year of the Seal
Winter 23/24 Year of the Storms
I painted Storm Agnes, the first one of the season. She really whipped into Firestone Bay with a malign fury. The others didn’t inspire me quite so much. No paintings.
Carlos Acosta came to Plymouth. The ticket was a Christmas gift from a friend. Seeing him dance live with a wonderful partner, Laura Rodrigueiz in a show he had choreographed to show what his body is still capable of at 50 coupled with her amazing fluidity was a wonderful experience.
I’ve always enjoyed my jobs. The art one of the last few years does not bring with it a reliable income but that is the only downside. The job that brought a reliable income had a few more downsides. But both have been enriching experiences. Before my ‘proper’ job I worked from the age of 14-20 in a series of low paid, part-time jobs that could be fitted around education. Nostalgia and the elixir of youth make those jobs and time with minimal responsibility seem like the twinkly moments of employment. I fitted so much variety into those six years. Always at the bottom of the pile of employees, the ‘Saturday’ girls or boys got all the dreadful jobs on any day of the week.
Menial jobs were good for me. I find it easy to spot people who have never done minimum-wage jobs. Just as privileged people who have never been in that position can probably ‘spot’ me. Finding pleasure, and enjoyment, even in the tough, and at times gritty, low-paid jobs was a great lesson to learn.
This morning I had to hunt for an old sketch to send to a friend. The easy solution was to look in my Paintings/Art file of digital images.
This file is 10 years old in 2024, I am hopeless at keeping this archive up to date. This morning I put the two most recent paintings into the file. I also had a little scroll through an imperfect record of my creative output of the last ten years.
Once again I have mentally promised myself to be more diligent with my archiving over the next 10 years.And for now I must be more diligent in actually producing some actual art. Less pondering, more art .
After days of rain we discovered this furry blockade in the hallway. The sun was up and no one would be leaving the house without the dogs. We needed bread and the dogs needed daylight without getting wet.
Lola had a route planned, appropriate provisions were bought.
And some comfy rocks were found for some winter basking.
A good start to the day and so far very minimal pondering. Just dogs, coffee and a view.
9 years ago I was exhibiting at a private art gallery space. Brixton East, in Brixton. I was part of the hanging team and was lucky enough to be in the building before the artists delivered their work. The gallery was in a sympathetically restored furniture factory. For a blissful half hour it was just me and a young Hugo enjoying the texture of the old building.
All my favourite urban textures and contrasts were there, but also quirky placements of contemporary things.
And gentle reminders of the former use of the space. A poker-work chair seat pattern.
Borrowed light into a dark space.
Soon enough the space was full of the chatter of artists and later the art lovers poured in.
My painting in the gold spotlight. Momentarily I can say a proud moment. A fab moment in one of my favourite buildings.
But only a couple of years later I exhibited in the same space. I was not in the hanging team. A classic contemporary artist joke occurred. My abstract art was hung upside down, the curator could not be persuaded to rehang it. Ordinarily I would not be too precious. Art being in the eye of the beholder and all that. But on this occasion, my art was painted on a door, the exhibition was about homelessness. The door handle would have been at knee level. A whole new level of artyfarty bollocks would have needed to be written to make that right. The art gods were not with me this second time in the building. One of my unframed pieces was stolen by a gallery/shoplifter. Everything is forgivable in a building that I love.
I am not normally someone that has frequent lottery winning fantasies but when the owner put this gorgeous space up for sale I would have done anything to be able to buy it. A lottery win would have been my only chance. But something lovely has happened. The building has been renamed and is now a beautiful wedding venue.
Without pondering today I would never have researched and discovered that one of my favourite buildings has had a happy ending of its own. Without me winning the lottery. Something new to follow on Instagram. In a perfect @theoldmortuary world 100 Barrington would serve coffee and cake when not doing weddings, and in that imaginary world, a somewhat older Hugo would slouch under a chair and watch the world go by.
This weekend has brought me a rich archive of Facebook time hop memories. Some of them were serendipitous. Yesterday we met some London friends at a country park and walked miles in mud and bright sunlight. 11 years ago they had sent us this message.
Their family now has two dogs but everything else is as it was, we laughed all day. Below is baby Hugo and baby Monty on the same day.
Another doggy memory features a baby Lola and our friend Steph.
Every picture tells a story, and the story of early 2016 is not one for an upbeat sunny blog. But there is so much love in and around this photo and we all needed it.
February wouldn’t be February if art wasn’t starting to wake up for the year.
The point of this Sunday ponder is to just enjoy these moments. Social Media isn’t for everyone but this weekend I have really enjoyed the reminiscences delivered to my phone over the last two days. The one below was a chilly family outing to Oxford Street. The gorgeous piece of Street Art perked us right up on a rainy day.
Maybe the take away from these February memories is that there is always so much to look forward to with ten months of possibilities to anticipate. Just like a tree waiting to grow leaves in the sunshine.
A little extra from yesterday. An accidental dam in floodwater.
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