Non Volatile Memory Required

Returning to the subject of my being forgetful, I had to laugh at myself last Saturday. I have recently embarked on an interesting and inspiring correspondence with a charming man I met at an exhibition in Brick Lane. We have a shared interest in Poetry - though his is much more developed than my own infant endeavours – and I am enjoying being introduced to writers new to me.

As my own interests have mainly centred around human relationships, and in particular the love between a man and a woman, he recommended a number of texts I should read on the subject. Such is my renewed enthusiasm and eagerness to re-engage with this theme in my work, that I abandoned his letter half way through, and immediately logged onto Amazon to order said texts, after which I returned to read the rest. As I looked at his list again, it dawned on me that one of the books, Erich Fromm’s “The Art of Loving", I had read not more than two weeks previously, it having been recommended to me by a visitor to my stand at the latest Untitled Artfair. This little book was my bedtime reading for several nights and I read it from cover to cover, finding it both enlightening and stimulating .... So how had I managed to forget the title less than 14 days later? If that wasn't frustrating enough, it seems it’s not possible to cancel an order once placed with Amazon (even within 5 minutes of submitting it), and the returns policy involves you reselling the book (which I don’t want to get into), so if anyone would like my brand new spare copy, please email me your address and it will be yours by return.

I have been concerned for some time that my powers of recall are poor, but it is deeply worrying that my memory now equals that of a goldfish. Is this because my brain cells are jumping ship at an alarming rate, or is this a temporary condition arising because I have, for the last three years, been in a permanent state of stress and anxiety? In this space of time, I have morphed from "Superwoman", juggling husband, children, home, work, property development, social life, and corporate wife duties, to a ditzy, frayed round the edges, easily flustered, dinner burning, kitchen flooding, scatterbrain. My organisational skills have vanished into thin air, and I flit from task to task, half-finishing things and forgetting from one minute to the next what I’m supposed to be doing. I think this is why I keep losing things too. Carrying rubbish in one hand and an article I’m putting away in the other, the rubbish ends up in a cupboard or drawer, and presumably all those lost items are now in some landfill.

The night I met my new Poet friend, he asked if I’d read any of the work of Carol Ann Duffy, our new Poet Laureate. I think I must have said I hadn’t as I didn’t recall at all the fact that I had in my possession four of her books. Opening one of the boxes of my books this weekend that have been in storage for the last two and a half years, I found her Selected Poems, The World’s Wife, Feminine Gospels, and Rapture. Now I’m not pretending I had read them all, but I had obviously dipped into them, because several pages were marked and annotated. I was of course delighted to find them but at the same time frustrated that I hadn’t remembered I’d got them. I would have so loved to have impressed him with my literary knowledge. I also have the same problem in the book club I belong to which meets seven or eight times a year. I have often been amazed and embarrassed that when we talk about the other stuff (fiction) we've been reading, I can’t even remember what I’d been reading the previous week, let alone the month before. And these all worthy, acclaimed books. I'm going to have to start writing down all my reads in a notebook with a little synopsis to remind me. The only good thing about this is that with being on an economy drive in the current recession, I can save myself lots of money by re-reading the hundreds of books I have without remembering the plots or the endings.

I would like to understand what is going on in my brain though, and why I seem to have no ability to digest and retain the texts I spend hours reading and enjoying. Should I be worried? Or, despite the dreaded snagging dragging on for what seems an eternity, will things improve now that tranquility is slowly descending on Brookwood House and I can begin to reclaim my life, and my cerebral territory. I really think they need to, as I am beginning to suspect my naughty children are taking advantage of my diminished mental state and having a little laugh at the tricks they can now play on me. I let them have their fun; it probably comes as a welcome relief from the intense “Mother on a Mission” they grew up with, and I secretly quite like my children reversing roles and taking charge of me now and again. (If only I could go to them with my laundry and requests for loans.)

For whatever reason, my RAM is undoubtedly running low and I wish some brilliant scientist would come up with a way of implanting a few extra Gigabytes into the human brain (surely only a matter of time). I know a lot of ex Superwomen who would be queueing up for it. But in my case it has to be Non-Volatile memory. Apparently Volatile memory requires power to maintain stored information, and as my batteries are also running low at the moment, implants of a different kind might also be required, . . . . but that’s a whole other story.

It's a Small world

Or, it appears at this particular moment, it’s a small art world. Following on from the quote in my previous piece about what will sell, I have been pondering the matter of size for a while. Small is beautiful, so the old saying goes, and for some time now, fellow artists, prospective buyers and gallery owners have been telling me I need to make smaller work. Only last week, a London gallerist who is interested in exhibiting my paintings told me that “size matters” when it comes to what flies off the walls, and that an associate of his will only exhibit work that can fit in the back of a car. (You can imagine how this jangled with my sensibilities as an artist, but one has to acknowledge market criteria if one is trying to sell one’s work.) Whilst I understand that the number of people who have the budget and the space for large pieces is limited, I was quite surprised by this (thinking there must be loads of big white walls in the penthouse flats and dockland apartments of London), and not a little disconcerted, because I now find it very difficult to work on a small scale.

Over the last five years, as my confidence as a painter has grown, so has the size of my canvases. As my work has got larger, I have enjoyed the freedom of movement that a big canvas gives me. During the making process, I feel my paintings in a rhythmical sense and want to make the paint dance freely and expansively across the canvas. In fact I would dearly love to dance across the canvas myself like one of Yves Klein’s naked Anthropometry models covered in paint. This will come as no surprise to my children who were quite used to seeing their slightly crazy mother dancing round the house naked to loud music (most definitely one of the best ways to lift one’s spirits) when they were growing up. My own mother always says it was impossible to keep clothes on me as a toddler, and even now as a woman of “a certain age”, I still find it liberating and exhilarating to shed my clothes and dance around the room like a 19 year old. (The heating has to be on or the sun out of course – never have been able to stand the cold.) This love of dance and movement was why I embraced so joyfully the idea of “border crossings” in the Crimson Project, bringing together other artforms and combining them. I liked giving painting a broader context, liked involving the audience more with use of poetry in them, presenting something they could relate to. I felt I could achieve this more with big paintings. They seem to breathe more, are more alive, taking up space and reaching out to the audience, inviting them in and giving their eyes a generous landscape to roam in.

If I had the good fortune to find a regular flow of clients with big walls to fill, I would let my canvases get bigger and bigger, but in the current climate buyers are thin on the ground and I shall, for now, have to take the advice of those that know what sells and try to think small.

The challenge is then to still make a big statement with my small paintings, like a loud noise from a small instrument, a bright light from a small lamp, a bold concept from a small acorn of an idea. That’s the plan anyway .... I’ll let you know how I get on . . . .

Watch this small space.

Confucius say

I read recently in that wonderful little paper The Week, that there is a drive in China to restore the teachings of Confucius to the heart of their cultural life because President Hu Jintao “seems to believe that China’s rampant consumerism has left an ethical vacuum and that a return to Confucian values of honour and decency could fill it.”

I’m all for honour and decency, and look at the fine mess rampant consumerism has got we Westerners into, but I have to take issue with some of his pearls of wisdom. For instance, don’t you just love this:

Women and people of low birth are very hard to deal with. If you are friendly with them, they get out of hand, and if you keep your distance, they resent it.

Ha! No wonder Mao condemned him, and women hard to deal with? Since when?

And this one puzzles me:

I detest purple replacing vermilion.

Now they don’t say in what context he made this statement so I shall have to do a little research, but I have always found Purple to be a most pleasing colour: seductive and sensuous, luxurious and enchanting, rich and glorious, a colour full of power and opulence, a colour for basking lovers . . . .

Ah . . . That would be it then. According to The Week, he deplored innovation, scorned the idea of progress, and hoped for a society where learning, study and ceremony would be put before pleasure and power. This might explain also the bit about women being difficult. Perhaps his wife got stroppy when he refused to visit her bedchamber after she’d replaced his favourite red silk sheets with vulgar violet ones.

You see, even one of the worlds greatest thinkers could be undone by the vagaries of colour preference.

(I don’t know if Confucius did have a wife, but if he did maybe she was herself of low birth and he had trouble persuading the in-laws to keep their distance.)

One final offering from the great man:

The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.

Now, I’m very interested in this from an artistic point of view. Whether to paint what one wants and feels driven to express, or to paint what will sell. My husband and I have very different views on this and I have had cause in the past to give him a verbal lashing for suggesting that I “knock out” multiples of some of my more popular work that I could have sold several times over. Visits to my own bedchamber were curtailed till he saw the error of his thinking, and now my husband bows to my superiority on the artistic front, but agrees wholeheartedly with Confucius ... that women are indeed difficult to deal with ....

And artists even more difficult.

The Friday Feeling

I love Fridays.
Fridays are full of possibilities
And Promise
Like the last day of Term.

Something new beckoning

And Sunny Summer Fridays
Are an intoxicating joy
Like pure alcohol rushing through the veins
And softening the hard edges of the world.

Ah but the bitter sweet twist of Fridays

You want to hang onto the Friday feeling
As long as you can
But you wish to make the hours of that day
As short as you can.

Hail Friday, Queen of Days.

Red Mists

Another passion that has driven me over the last 25 years has been the search to find or build my perfect home. A typical Cancerian, the greater part of my energies have been channelled into this endeavour, and I seem to have spent more time on house-moves, refurbishing, decorating, renovating and building than any psychiatrist would deem safe for one’s mental health and sanity. And indeed, this last project at Brookwood House very nearly saw the men in white coats coming for me. The very mention of “the builders” is enough to send my stress levels soaring through my newly tiled roof . . .

What has this to do with painting you ask? Well it has a lot to do with not painting – the only reds I saw during this period were of the “mist” kind which materialised on increasingly frequent occasions towards the end, and the only art I managed was the art of making myself invisible in the goldfish bowl that became my home while work progressed (or sometimes did not). And how does one make oneself invisible? I did it by employing the Horse/Ostrich method. By becoming like a blinkered horse, keeping my eyes focussed on my various tasks throughout the day, and adopting the mentality of an ostrich by burying my head in plans and interior design magazines, I couldn’t see them, so of course they couldn’t see me. Except when I had a cup of tea in my hand. I always knew they could see me then, and thus, also perfected the art of tea-making for the five thousand.

But at long last it has come to an end and the frustration of not being able to paint has been replaced by . . . the frustration of not being able to paint. No, I am not repeating myself. When I embarked on this build I was in full flow creatively, having just completed my Masters Degree and having found something very real I wanted to say in my painting. I was suddenly plunged into a world of unending chaos, noise, dust (skyloads of it), mud (oceans of it) and misunderstandings (the latter of which always seemed to lay the cost on my bottom line), and I am finding it hard now to recapture that creative zeal and confidence. So for the time being I am just playing and trusting that something good will happen. As C G Jung said, “The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect, but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.”

And Rosy loves paint ......

Hmmmmm .... Joining the Blogosphere

... Is this a good idea? My friends Rob, Jo and Wing think it is, and they know all about these things, so who am I to argue? Especially nowadays as I begin to realise I don’t know as much as I thought I did. Or maybe I did once and I’ve just forgotten everything. I forget a lot these days, which is bad when I’m not somewhere I ought to be, or the dogs are sitting patiently at the kennels wondering if I’m ever coming back for them, or the postman gives me a funny look cos I’ve still got the blob of Sudacrem on that pesky spot . . . but is very good when I forget how old I am, or that I’m not supposed to be eating cream doughnuts today, or that I shall exceed my overdraft limit if I buy that gorgeous must have dress (I especially like forgetting about the overdraft).

I digress ...

What is all this blogging malarkey about anyway? I’ve never read anybody’s blog so I don’t really know what I’m supposed to be doing. In my entire life, I’ve never kept a diary, or had a pen pal, or been in the habit of corresponding much with friends, so this is going to be entirely new territory for me. I have been accused of liking the sound of my own voice though (that was a mean jealous friend of course and doesn't really count) so perhaps I shall strike up a happy relationship with my Blog Space and be able to fantasize that millions of cyberspace surfers are hanging on my every word.

I’m not sure I shall have much, original or notable, in the way of artistic expression, but I have amassed a fine collection of books on the subject, and maybe as a starting point, till I get into the swing of things and don’t feel so afraid of voicing my own opinions (those that I can still remember), I can share some of the thoughts and ramblings of those authors and artists I have found interesting and inspiring. If you’ve looked at my website you will see that I am preoccupied with the subject of Love, all kinds of it, good, bad, toxic, crazy, maternal, romantic, religious. In my painting, I’ve only explored the romantic/sexual aspect of love so far, but found that included the good, the bad, the toxic and the crazy anyway.

So then, a little snippet about Love, or to be more precise, Passion, from Jeanette Winterson, “Somewhere between fear and sex passion is. Passion is not so much an emotion as a destiny. What choice have I in the face of this wind but to put up sail and rest my oars?” (From The Passion, 1987)

I do love the idea of coursing headlong into love affairs with my sails billowing with passion and my compass reading My Destiny!