Not So Subliminal

I have, after a shamefully long procrastination, photographed the first paintings of my new series which will soon be uploaded to my website and Facebook, tweeted to my followers on Twitter after much prompting from friends there, posted to Posterous and pinned onto my newly formed board on Pinterest, if I can work out how to do that. Oh, and now there’s my new Google+ page too. What took me so long? Wasn’t that painful was it? Why do I always fanny about so? Talk about letting the grass grow under one’s feet – a whole meadow has established itself under mine whilst my peers have been wowing me with their abundance of work. Anyway, nuff of that, I am three quarters the way through the series and it has been an interesting exercise. Part of the reason it stalled for so long was because I hadn’t thought the concept through well enough and a much valued crit of the first three from a fellow artist, @iantalbot , stopped me in my tracks and made me question what exactly I was trying to say. Unfortunately I had no ready answers and was confusing a number of issues and ideas I was interested in. My interest in textile design and colour as form influences my work a great deal and those early three were a mere dip into that, my love of words, and my obsession with everything that has been written about colour. In an over simplistic and lazy conclusion, I had grabbed some favourite excerpts and used the text as an accompaniment to some equally shallowly thought through gestural marks on the canvas. Dear reader, I am not intentionally lazy or unwilling to put more thought into things, more to the point, I was constraining my thoughts on the subject instead of allowing them to flow in all directions and taking some time to play and experiment with where it took me. If I go back to my college days, it was always through repeated experimentation and playing that the best ideas surfaced, whereas with this series, I was trying to bypass this tried and tested method of working and get straight to the finished concept. Alas, they were dismissed kindly, but firmly by Ian as not really working and not really making any kind of statement. Bless him for making me face up to what I already knew.

The project had started as an extension of my I’m Talking To You painted text series, which layered random and not so random, or subconsciously suppressed thoughts; the resultant undecipherable words being a metaphor for those things we keep to ourselves, hidden for one reason or another.  (See http://tiny.cc/xffuy ) This idea of having to read between the lines of what people say and what is really going on in their minds in certain situations, the misinterpretation and confusion this can lead to when it’s as though they are talking in a different language, inspired the idea to use a different alphabet as an expression of this ambiguity and to evoke more curiosity from the viewer. I was still enjoying very much working with text as art, but needed to move forward and develop a different concept or perspective on this notion or hidden or forbidden thoughts.

I love the decorative element of calligraphy and especially Chinese and Japanese, so I was satisfying another interest in choosing to use a loose graphic interpretation of some of their symbols for the imagery. This continued a format I was still happy with, and my now established style of combining abstract forms and text. One of the features of my work is the use of various consistencies of extended paint so that with some layers I have only limited control and can enjoy that element of surprise, the accidental, or unplanned component of how a selected colour breaks away from the boundaries of my own gestures and strokes and creates its own shapes and lines on the canvas, adding to the abstract forms of my own creation. So here, I had the joy of working with some beautiful symbols, but also the new experiences of not being able to lay them down automatically as I do with my own alphabet so that there was the anxiety and risk of botching it, and then the pleasure of creating unique abstract forms that I wouldn’t see until the paint had found its own limits on the surface and drawn its own negative spaces in which I was then able to work in a more controlled way. My love of pattern never leaves me.

  

I had been discussing previously with a psychotherapist friend, the subject of subliminal imagery and text used in art and particularly advertising. In fact the latest in the I’m Talking To You paintings is made from a short poem I wrote on the subject called Head Noise:

Head Noise

Subliminal intrusion

Unchallenged, unseen

Slips in

Nestles between the synapses

Releasing a subtle whisper

With the power to roar.

He told me how the theory that ‘sex sells’ is used shamelessly in subliminal marketing campaigns and showed me several examples, one of the earliest being the shaping of the Coca Cola bottle like the hourglass curves of a woman. There were many more less innocent examples but I won’t go into that here. What I did see though was the use of the word sexhidden discreetly in many of them, so that although it wasn’t discernable at a glance, or even a careful study in some cases, the brain is programmed to pick it up subliminally.

“Aha!” I joked, reflecting on the lean year I had in 2010 with sales, “that’s where I’ve been going wrong, I haven’t been putting enough Sex into my work.”

Of course, sex is used overtly these days to sell almost everything, but the subliminal perspective struck a chord because of the work I had been doing with suppressed thoughts, and with this in mind I painted the word Sex into the last layer of text in this new series, not just as an element of humour, but as a serious questioning of the issue. (I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I had also been inclined by the secret hope that it would indeed prove the theory and I would be able to make a contribution to the mortgage this year.)

I have called the series Not So Subliminal because I made no attempt to disguise the word, but was making a very open statement about this exploitation of unwitting consumers. Within a few days of putting the first four on my wall at home, a visiting friend who has reservations about a lot of my work said she loved them – one in particular. I was so delighted I gifted it to her, not just because of her genuinely enthusiastic response but because she had recently been very kind to me in a difficult situation.

But . . .  she didn’t spot the ‘Sex’ word.

Or did she? I haven’t until now revealed to anyone what I have done with these paintings, and although they haven’t been exhibited publicly yet, nobody coming to the house has said, “Ooooh, look, I can see the word ‘Sex’ in there. Even in our highly “sexed-up” society, are we still too embarrassed to remark on it when we perceive something sexual in an image in case it reveals something not quite ‘decent’ about us?

As I release them into cyberspace, I’m interested now to see what kind of reaction they get, and I shall be even more eager when they’re exhibited to see if somebody’s wallet opens at the subliminal prompting of one of the marketing world’s most potent tools.

Sexting off,

Rosy, August 2011

Blogless in Brookwood

Oh the shame of being blogless and workless. Up until recently I loved logging on to Twitter, enjoying a daily dose of banter, laughing out loud at the friendly spats, dipping into the posts of fellow artists’ work and keeping up to date with Twitfriends who have become real friends. But then I began to avoid it in the same way I have avoided polite reminders to update my website. This is because I feel embarrassed about the lack of work coming out of my own yard.

It has taken a jolt from a fellow artist on Twitter, @annleekeefer to finally tug my head from the sand. When I mentioned my current exhibition, the very talented Anna Lee posted a link to the ‘Latest Work’ page on my website, and tweeted very kindly, “Needless to say I am quite excitilated at the idea of new work from you.” (She has her own wonderful vocabulary) Another, @lizspurgeon asked where I was exhibiting and said she was looking forward to seeing new work. Not having completed any new works for the best part of a year, my reaction to these comments was a mixture of surprise that any new work from me should excite anticipation at all, and more, an overwhelming sense of letting the side down. On Twitter, I am in the company of a number of prolific artists, who no doubt are just as busy as I in their private lives if not more so, and for all I know, may have other jobs to support their ‘Real’ work, so you can understand why I am a not a little red-faced when I receive such interest in what I’m doing, or should I say, not doing.

In my defence, it has been a strange year for me. I have encountered some unexpected pitfalls and challenges, and a few tricky hurdles on the track, as well as spending quite a lot of time away exhibiting, but nonetheless, I have spent far too much of the spare time I have had thinking about “what to paint” and “what to write”, instead of striking out with the brush or the pen and seeing what transpires. Or indeed, developing some of the many ideas from my notebooks. This is not new, as those who know me can confirm. For whatever reason, I prioritize my work wrongly, always putting it behind other responsibilities instead of before until I am in an eleventh hour situation. Either this is out of a sense of duty or as an excuse to avoid my ongoing fear of failure, but this is how it is. Nobody is demanding I attend to other things first, so it is up to me to change things. I am taking steps to do this, but that is for another blog.

In the meantime, another prompt I had this time came from something pinned up on my studio wall, a great excerpt from a letter by Sol de Witt to his friend Eva Hesse, which epitomizes the blocked mindset I find myself in from time to time. For those creatives out there, who suffer the same periodic ‘blocks’, let me share it with you:

“You seem the same as always, and being you, hate every minute of it. Don’t! Learn to say ‘Fuck You’ to the world once in a while. You have every right to. Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder, wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, gasping, confusing, itching, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, rumbling, rambling, fumbling tumbling ,scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning, horse-shitting, hair splitting, nit-picking, piss-trickling, nose-sticking, ass-gouging, eyeball-poking, finger-pointing, alleyway-sneaking, long waiting, small stepping, evil-eyeing, back-scratching, searching, perching, besmirching, grinding grinding grinding away at yourself. Stop it and just DO.”

Many before me have referenced this letter, it’s a common problem with artists, and Le Witt’s beseeching to just get on with it was absolutely right. Inactivity, inertia, creates an ever-decreasing circle. It is the very striking out that gets the creative juices flowing. John Anster in a translation of Faust from 1835, wrote:

"Then indecision brings its own delays, 
 And days are lost lamenting over lost days. 
 Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute; 
 What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it; 
 Boldness has genius, power and magic in it."

The last two lines, which I have quoted in a previous blog, I had always thought written by Goethe, as did, it seems, W. H. Murray, who quoted the last two lines in The Scottish Himalaya Expedition, 1951 talking about the importance of acting:

'But when I said that nothing had been done I erred in one important matter. We had definitely committed ourselves and were halfway out of our ruts. We had put down our passage money - booked a sailing to Bombay. This may sound too simple, but is great in consequence. Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets:

“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”

He is not alone, these lines have a power of their own, and coming across them again, along with Anne Lee’s inspiring work ethic and generous recommendation of my work, has propelled me back into the studio. Quite why I need this pushing to get back to work, I fail to understand for I am at my happiest when I am painting or writing. Hopefully action of another kind I'm about to embark on will soon remedy this.

As I'll soon be leaving Brookwood and my lovely work space, and with no guarantee that I'll be lucky enough to get another studio like this in my new home, I'm determined to make the most of my time left here. In an effort to combat this anxiety I have about making work, Anster/Goethe’s and Sol Le Witt’s advice will now be
 fixed to my bedside table and be the last thing I see before sleep, and the first thing I see when I wake. Well, that and my photo of @iantalbot.

A new Acquaintance, (Or several)

Ah... it’s nice to be back at the Blog. I’ve missed babbling on to my imaginary audience. That much touted female skill of multi-tasking appears to have deserted me completely these days, and I find now that I can only concentrate on one of my many interests at a time, so as the opening date of my last exhibition loomed, I had to step back from the keyboard and give painting my undivided attention. Much as I love painting, and it was great to see the new work come together, I also love playing with words and I’ve been dying to put fingers to the keys again.

So, new series of paintings made, neglected household chores attended to, friends and family visited, letters, emails, phone calls and texts replied to, and a bit of fun had in amongst all of that, I thought I could just sit right down and write myself a new Blog, only to find instead that I was staring at the blank page with absolutely nothing to say. Even scraping the barrel fetched up nothing more than a few lines of feeble uninspired drivel.

Reflecting on this drought of ideas or commentary, I realised I needed to get out more. I have spent far far too much time at home lately, and for me, the best Blogs, Articles and Sketches, are those observations of life played out in the everyday; not just in the home, but in the workplace, on the street, on the stage, in the park and leisure centre, in gallery or concert hall, school and college, or even, as a fellow Blogger, @Andytoots found last week, at the checkout of his local supermarket.

As it happened though, my firm determination to redress my reclusion was hindered somewhat by a new distraction, which has over the last few weeks kept me tied to the house and almost glued to my laptop: the discovery of the wonderful world of Twitter. My lovely friend @GillyLiz encouraged me to sign up earlier this year, but up until a few weeks ago I had no idea how to engage with it. My first few Tweets were embarrassingly dull (I dare say some might argue all my subsequent ones have been too) and I gave it up as a bad job, not knowing who to follow, how to attract followers myself and what the point of it was anyway.

During one of my unsuccessful attempts at returning to the Blog after the exhibition finished, I wandered, fed up and frustrated into Twitter again, and found that Gill had introduced me to some of her Twitter friends. On my Home page I had Hellos from various strangers waiting for me. These kind and charming people extended the virtual hand of friendship and in turn introduced me to their followers so that in the space of a few weeks I was happily exchanging mini messages with a host of people up and down the country, across the Atlantic, in various capital cities, and from the far shores of South Africa and New Zealand. People from all walks of life, professions, political views and religious persuasions, and with an array of diverse interests.

As I struggled to find my writing Mojo again, this sharing of Tweets has enabled me at least to engage in a little self expression, and even more excitingly, is introducing me to myriad new things across the board of art and culture, from recommendations of books, music and films, to striking up a dialogue and exchanging information with fellow artists working in many different fields.

One of the most interesting of these introductions has been to @elephantbird and his inspirational campaign to help protect the Madagascan rainforest. An artist himself, he has embarked on his Collective Egg project inspired by the Largest Egg known to science, that of the Elephant Bird, now extinct. Tim Grosvenor, aka, Elephantbird, is proposing that artists from the Twitter world make their contributions to a Collective Giant Egg Event around the theme of protecting our natural world and especially the rain forests. Through his Twitter dialogue with artists, which I can now follow, I am enjoying a window onto a whole new world of artwork, posted up on his Giant Egg Event “Posterous” page, and from the artists’ Twitter pages, links to their individual websites. It’s a great way to view the work of the army of artists out there working away in their studios across the world: people, whom without this cyber interaction, I would never have heard of, or had the pleasure of seeing their amazing, inspiring art.

Creative matters aside, I have also laughed more in the last three weeks than I have for a long time. There is an abundance of clever wit and entertaining humour cascading down the timeline throughout the day, as well as partisan views on all number of things expressed in such colourful language and fearless abandon that they have had me laughing out loud and chuckling hours later as it comes back to me. No place for political overcorrectness here.

I have seen large sums of money raised for charity by people contributing online to their Followers’ causes, as with @diaryofaledger ’s Tweetathon for his local voluntary emergency service, BASICS. I have experienced first hand the amazing community spirit of Twitter in the form of help with an IT problem, where a Twitter friend @domcoke connected remotely to my computer and sorted it for me, and a writer, @FatmanSlimming offering to do a critique of my own attempts at blogging. People post all sorts of queries and cries for help that are answered generously by their followers.

I have been moved and humbled by the kindness of @sarahezekiel, an MND sufferer and campaigner, who reached out with support when a dear friend of mine was recently diagnosed with this cruel disease, and @twowitwowoo a breast cancer survivor who shines with a happy spirit and sense of fun, and campaigns relentlessly to raise awareness and offer support to others.

And not least, I have been reassured by the collective conscience of Twitter when it rises up and defends victims of bigotry, injustice and intolerance, as witnessed in the recent backlash against Jan Moir’s vile attack on Stephen Gately in the Daily Mail. As Dan Snow, the historian and TV presenter said on the Andrew Marr show last Sunday, it was an incredible demonstration of democracy in action.

It is indeed a remarkable facility and social medium; a fantastic way to connect people from the four corners of the world. Which is all very well and wonderful, but is also very addictive, and I have found myself Twittering whole days away instead of engaging with the real world and doing what I’m supposed to be doing. Although I believe I have joined something valuable, rewarding and enlightening, I realise that if I am going to have anything at all to contribute to the Twitter Community, I must remember to also engage with my real life, and more importantly, I MUST GET OUT MORE and make some small observations of my own.

Haha . . . as a little Postscript, I want to give a special mention to the lovely @keithy73 who keeps us endlessly amused with his antics in the kitchen and down the pub, and his running commentary on the cricket. He is also very generous with his pay packet on a Friday and sends me virtual glasses of champagne which always put sparkle into the start of my weekend.

A Gift

Talking about "Superwomen", as I was a few Blogs back, I am reading a book at the moment called Eye Rhymes, Sylvia Plath’s Art of the Visual. Having bought several collections of her poetry and a publication of her journals, I got one of those “You may also like” messages from Amazon suggesting it. It gives a fascinating insight into Plath's prolific creativity and by all accounts she was an extraordinarily gifted young artist, seriously devoted to the visual arts from a very early age, moving “between art-making and writing constantly, integrating their elements with ease and pleasure.”

Reading through the excerpts of her diaries it’s hard not to feel envious of her absolute conviction of her own talents as both an artist and a writer. She seems never to have been in any doubt of her success either as one or the other. They say one should have the courage of ones convictions (whoever They are) but I am often lacking in both when it comes to my art. I have just put the finishing touches to a new painting. It’s a bit of a breakaway from my usual style and format and a few days ago I was feeling relatively pleased with it and looking forward to hanging it in my new gallery. Then yesterday the doubt crept in and I began to add in elements of previous paintings as a sort of safety net, lacking the courage to do something different and take a risk. By the end of play today I’m trying to decide whether or not it is a great painting or a “crock of shite” as one of my daughter’s student friends from up North used to say. (Always made me laugh – I love people who speak their mind.) Such is the measure of my conviction, and I would do well to remind myself when I step into the studio of what Rothko & Gottlieb said in 1943 in a joint statement:

“To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take risks.”

This belief has served me well previously. When embarking on my final MA project my tutors were not convinced that I could bring together painting and poetry, reminding me I was a painter, not a writer and asking me what I wanted to be assessed on. Our theory modules had been centred around the very idea of crossing artistic borders, so I was slightly confused at their reluctance to encourage me in embracing this concept. I came home from my presentation totally deflated, sick to the stomach with disappointment, and went to sleep worrying about what the hell I was going to produce. The next morning brought a new determination to plough on with my idea and to fly in the face of their advice. In the end, the external assessor told me it was a remarkable achievement and my exhibition was received well by its audience. But there was no critical feedback at all from the college (which I could never quite believe) so to this day I have no idea what my tutors thought of my work or how they felt it could be improved upon or developed. I got my Masters with Merit and almost all of the series I produced has been sold, but to this day, because I did not get the approval of the academics, there is a seed of doubt about its value, and I continue to question my abilities, always feeling slightly uncomfortable when people credit me with talent or having a gift. Indeed, I am acquainted with artists whose work I can objectively observe as not being superior in any way to mine, yet whose conviction in their ability and the value of their work leaves me breathless with envy. They are doing well and I am convinced that part of their success is that belief in themselves and their art. It generates an excitement in their audience which makes them want to have a share in it.

Do I then need to cultivate some of Plath’s certitude, and adopt Lewis Hyde’s philosophy that “a work of art is a gift, not a commodity”? He believes that as an artist works, intuition or inspiration comes as a gift: an idea pops into his head, a colour falls into place on the canvas, and that this gift is then passed on in the outer life of the creation, to the work after it has left its maker’s hands. In his book, "The Gift – How the creative spirit transforms the world", he contends “That art that matters to us – which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience – that work is received by us as a gift is received. Even if we have paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us which has nothing to do with the price.”

Maybe Plath was aware of this too. In one of her Journals, she questions how much of her brain is wilfully her own? How much is not a rubber stamp of what she has read, and heard and lived. Did she see these experiences as a gift which through her own practice and creativity evolved into a new entity that she could pass on as a gift to others?

As I vacillate about the value of my own creativity, I am reminded of that other great writer Goethe who said, "Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it." And so, as I sign off, I am taking a deep breath and stepping boldly up to my next canvas, trusting that Goethe is right.

And it is with boldness and conviction that I shall hang yesterday’s finished painting.

Another Level

For as long as I can remember, that is up to a few years ago, I have had dreams in which I am flying. Not the kind of Superman flying, up with the clouds whizzing along at great speed, more a kind of balletic floating above the ground. Sometimes, I am in a wide open park, my legs at right angles to my body spinning like an upside down helicopter, or at other times, more elegantly, dancing across a sandy beach at the shoreline, my feet not quite touching the ground. Frequently I have been indoors, floating repeatedly, just by willing it, from the floor to the ceiling. This is usually accompanied by feelings of exhilaration and I love it when it happens. In my poem Listening to Lilac, I describe skimming the surface of a coastline. This is not just something from my imagination, but a memory of a dream, or many like like it.

Dreams are so real aren’t they? I have often contemplated the idea that we travel to a parallel world when we sleep and our dreams are a window into our activities there. Of course this notion only amuses me when the dreams are pleasant and I’m engaged in some exciting adventure, or enjoying a sell out exhibition in Cork Street and being hailed by Charles Saatchi as the next big thing, or being seduced by some gorgeous bronzed Adonis. It’s quite different when something terrifying or disturbing is happening to me and it's always a huge relief to land back in reality where I can gratefully embrace my very ordinary life. Worryingly, on a number of occasions I have dreamed of burying a body (or once bundling one into the boot of a car) and wake up alarmed and deeply anxious that it might have really happened, or it’s a premonition of some future atrocity I’m going to commit. I have always been racked with guilt if I even swat a fly or kill a wasp, imagining as a child that giant cousins of the murdered creatures would come back to eat me, so the mystery buried body haunts me irrationally even in my rational conscious mind.

Some of my dreams have been so vivid and the storylines so riveting that for a few minutes after waking, I have lain there unsuccessfully willing myself back to my astral film set, and being dismayed that almost immediately it starts to unravel and fade from memory. I’m convinced they’d make brilliant dramas if only I could capture and document them. Sadly my waking mind never seems able to come up with anything anywhere near as compelling. I’m sure this is true for most of us, unlike the brilliant Max Ernst whose dreams were a rich source of inspiration. One of the founding members of the Surrealists, he first experienced hallucinations as a child and claimed when he became an artist that he was able to fix them as a faithful images in his conscious mind, like a camera, and transform them into works of art.

Believing as Freud and The Surrealists did that dreams are a disguised expression of unconscious wish, I have been wondering why for a long period I haven’t been flying in my dreams, and what has changed in my psyche to clip my wings, metaphorically speaking. A quick Google search of flying in dreams revealed that they are

“. . . very often a precursor for lucid dreaming, a dream state in which we are aware we are dreaming and can manipulate the outcome of the dream and is a sign that something is generally going right in our lives! Freely flying as high or as low as you wish using your arms or feet for direction, often with the ability to do acrobatics in the air is an indication that you feel really good about something in your life, feeling very proud of an achievement at work or at home, and life is good. We feel on top of the world and are soaring to great heights in our minds when we fly.” (www.mysticalblaze.com)

Ha! Well three years of frustration on the work and home front and not being in control of my own life might well explain it then, and I can now look forward to discarding my shackles and once again gliding serenely and effortlessly through my subconscious sojourns.

I like the idea of being able to choose our dreams before sleeping, like selecting a movie on Sky and replacing the actors with whichever character we wished to play in whatever scenario we needed to act out. In one of the aforementioned epic dramas I get involved in when I’m sleeping, I find it hard to believe that they have only lasted for a few seconds, or do they say it's just a few minutes? But then I also have my own notions about time and our existence in it. The first time I read Jesus’ statement “Before Abraham was, I am” it was like a light bulb going on. I had some instinctive realisation, though I couldn’t articulate it, that there was some truth in this, that time was relative to our perception of it, or our existence in it, almost like circles within circles, and it was possible to move in and out of time zones or planes. I understood this as his being outside of time as we knew it, that for him there was no past or future only an ever-present existence. This is just a feeling, not very well expressed. I haven’t the brain for understanding mathematics and physics (Grade 6 in both); it’s more a deep-rooted suspicion that we exist on different levels and it is maybe through our dreams that we see glimpses of our other selves and travel through different time zones. Pure nonsense of course, but I like to play with random thoughts and hypotheses.

Now, just to satisfy my curiosity, I’m going to Google the meaning of burying bodies in one’s dreams and hope I’m not too disturbed by what I find.

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!