photo: recent sketchbook pages
Hello Everyone,
I hope you are well and have had a good week. I have been especially busy but this has not distracted me from enjoying the changing light. Over the past several days I have noted just how the dawn sun creeps or flashes into our flat, earlier and earlier. It is very welcome. It feels like something extra. This feels like a luxury when the sun comes in to light up my book page, in the morning.
My mood has brightened a little. I realise now (as I do again and again, and then I forget and have to learn all over again) I must focus on the present. Painting many tiny landscapes - as I have done over the past several days - has been a joy because I am kept in the present and yet also I immerse myself into each small world.
Eventually, I had hoped, I might feel the need to stitch again. These things, as nebulous as this might seem to others, cannot be predicted or planned. The way I stitch and the reasons I make my embroidery portraits means I either can or I cannot. For a while I could not. And I at least I recognised this and took a break.
I will not know how long this renewal will last, or if I will continue to make many new pieces or just a few until it is time to take a break once again.
Here are two new pieces, both stitched using just black thread on linen - which is my favourite way to stitch as it allows me to work in a flowing pattern of shapes and details without too much hesitation or interruption. I do not like to think too much when I am stitching.
I am offering them in my update later.
Photo: A family portrait (March ‘24)
Photo: Untitled - March ‘24
Strange Dreams and Expectations
I had a strange dream, which is not strange at all. You, like me, have strange dreams all the time. It is the nature of dreaming and other people’s strange dreams can be so loaded with personal meanings, or banalities.
Often I dream of starting a new job with a group of people and I am singled out to carry out a task which seems particularly odd. In my most recent dream, I was not given a chair in a meeting but was instead led outside to where a huddle of old furniture was waiting for me to archive and interpret in some way. So I opened the drawers and found the most intricately detailed objects that had once belonged to strangers, with so much to say about periods of culture. The dead things had life. And I had to put my hand into the dust and dirt of these things to find beauty in each crumb. There seemed no earthly reason why I must be cataloguing things in this way or why it was important work, and I was left with the feeling I was missing a vital detail in my job description.
Photo: sketchbook pages from 2019
This reminded me of the time, years ago, when I was working as an office temp. It was a brief experience because I quickly realised how I just could not ‘get’ office life. Most of the time I worked as a filing clerk. For one particular job, in a big open plan office, I was given my own desk and computer, which felt a bit like a step up. It was my job to take out all the coding from a piece of text and just be left with readable English. I could not understand why I was given this task (surely the text existed elsewhere). But here I was, working out what this symbol was doing and erasing all the code as necessary. My job was also to make tea and coffee for everyone in the office, twice a day, and this took up so much of my time. It soon dawned on me that what I had actually been hired to do was not the code erasure at all. I was a glorified, or otherwise, tea lady. Everyone in the office was very friendly (I made it a priority to get to know their tea quirks etc). Whenever I asked someone what they thought about the work I was doing and how much I was expected to do, and what might be coming next, they gave me the most evasive replies. One day I decided not to show up again and phoned the agency to tell them I had got another job, but I honestly had nothing else to do for a while. I sat at home and wrote poems and realised quickly enough that writing poems can also be a little like taking the code out of text.
Photo: sketchbook pages from 2018
When I paint and draw, I often find myself editing and working toward what is necessary. And this is very subjective, of course, moving into a more metaphysical visual language. There will always be superfluous details wanting attention. Too many focal points, for example, can weaken the whole picture. I can be ruthless at times. Over years of working visually I have come to recognise my own little flourishes (like extra apostrophes or ///) and I make decisions accordingly. I guess it is all about having an eye for your own work, developed over time. When a beginner artist gets frustrated with their art, it might be that they have simply not worked out how to edit it, with confidence. As hard as it might seem, they need to be a tea lady for a while and just be present in the world and show up to tackle their own nonsense with the hope it will make sense one day. And the nonsense never really goes away, you just get a little better at seeing it. Though I never get everything perfectly edited, of course. There’s no reason why anything I do should be perfect - but ideas on perfection are for another time.
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Shop Updates
My next update is today, Sunday 10th March at 7pm UK time - a small mix of new artwork.
Then - I will not be updating this coming Wednesday (I often update on Wednesdays) as I am busy with new spring landscape lucky dip orders (many thanks).
My next update will then be: Sunday 17th March at 7pm (a mix of new work)
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Write a poem a day in March - update: I have managed to write something each day. Quite often nothing more than a dreadful shopping list waffle, but it is something. These things take time and eventually, I hope, there will be a few fine feathers amongst the weeds. I am grateful to those of you who have made poet suggestions and/or told me you are inspired to write poems.
A Few Small Stories
He got woken up by a blackbird singing and now he’s grumpy, a woman says. She is one of a small group of people waiting outside the bookshop, which is still one of the first places to open in the morning (besides coffee places). I realise quickly she is referring to her dog, a white wiry dog sprawled at her feet. He makes a low whining sound, as if he does not like being spoken about. How does she know a blackbird is the reason for his grumpiness? I can only presume it’s a dog owner thing. Our old spaniel, a man says, our old spaniel used to be afraid of birds. There is something enigmatic about this statement, though again, not being a dog person, I can only imagine. The woman nods and shakes her head, that’s so sad, she says, so sad-funny I mean. The dog at her feet lifts his head and flops down again.
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I love your story, I love everything about your story! A woman says to another woman. They are standing in the early morning rain, not minding, no umbrellas. They embrace. Then they part. I am none the wiser. No, I was not meant to hear that one, I tell myself, making my way past an assortment of deserted restaurants. It seems the really glitzy restaurant that opened at the end of last year has stopped trying to sell us porridge, ten quid a bowl. Their doors will be open later for cocktails and other stories.
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My daughter and I are on the bus, coming home from visiting a neighbouring town. We have enjoyed our change of scenery. A young couple sits in front of us. The girl carries a small chihuahua type dog. The little fair dog is trembling. A man asks them if the dog is nervous and the girl pets the dog and says yes. The dog is called Chips. Yes he does like eating chips. He is friendly enough and soon people on the bus start petting Chips and he does actually stop trembling. He seems happily distracted. My daughter and I sit hoping we are not invited to pet the dog as I am frankly a little afraid and my daughter is very afraid. Chips yawns. Soon enough they leave the bus and I look out of the window to see Chips merrily prancing down the street.
Photo: Sketchbook pages from 2022 - (note to self: paint more cowslips, paint more bunnies).
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Thank you always for reading here, for your kind comments and likes. If you would like to support my writing by buying me a coffee this is very welcome, thank you.
I love reading your stories and especially enjoyed the dog stories. I am not a “dog person” but have had a couple of dogs over the years that I adored, though not had any animals for the last 8 years. I find that I now cant pet an animal unless I can was my hands immediately after, and I know this offends a lot of my pet owner friends. We have possums that often play on our patio at night, last week I think there was a fight between the possums and the next morning I saw one on the beams of the patio, it stayed all day but was gone the day after, I hope it is still alive.
Love your collaged cups. Is your sketchbook as tiny as your artwork? Enjoyed your stories x