Tag: Lifestyle
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Long and Winding Road
“Living is easy with eyes closed Misunderstanding all you see It’s getting hard to be someone but it all works out It doesn’t matter much to me” (Strawberry Field Forever- the Beatles) Funny how on this long and winding road, life goes along. Just three years ago I was running a successful on-line magazine, travelling,…
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Alas Poor Robin
I go and sit back amongst the roses, relaxing, slowing my breath and breathing deeply of their scent as my heart beat slows again. Then, rivalling the musical trill of the blackbird, I hear the lovely liquid notes of a serenading robin. It is all the thanks I need.
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Trust?
At a time of elections politicians ask us to put our trust in them. They all lie about what they will do after the election in the hope of winning our vote, this being of course why the percentage of people voting goes down and down. It’s a dangerous game they play, stoking the disillusionment…
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Blast from the Past
Their generation made the opportunities for me, their votes changed the country for the better, making me the first in the family to have a University education, enabling an NHS to save my life several times over. They would be despairing of a political class that allows health and defence to crumble whilst engaging in…
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Valley of the Shadow
I went in to have my biopsies take under general anaesthetic. “Ha” said the anaesthetist, “you’re the artist aren’t you, we’ve seen you before”. I said “that’s right – I’ve had four operations recently, I get a fifth free…” Mirth all around. I’m still laughing… I am working on another in the ‘Andreas Daisies’ series.…
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The Wrong Shoes, eh Gromit?
It stands erect, ringed in red and white. The dark wilderness of its base set aside from the billowing white up swelling of the chalk cliffs behind it. Thrusting upwards in public warning, its tip glazed and different to its shaft, it stands out by day attracting the attention of thousands who come to gaze…
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Aftershocks Continue
Once more I experience that feeling of dread, but not as intensely this time, just a frisson of fear. Now too I have a programme of work stretching ahead with both camera and the studio which will sustain me, distract me and give me a range of creative problems to worry about. Life is taking…
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Art Student to Artist
“the shock of the outside world will have been a douche of cold water, as it was for me when I sobered up. Surviving this shower to establish a practice and a studio is sometimes impossible, and the shower can become a bleak torrent when competing against finding employment, marriage etc.. “
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Aftershocks
Making art is a performance, and like any performance it seeks an audience. Performing on canvas can be just a terrifying as walking on stage – rather more detached from the audience reaction, but I have experienced those newspaper reviews that disparage the artist with an incomprehension on the part of the critic about the…
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Traumatized
No memory, or at least only a vague memory, of coming around after the operation, which lasted well over 4 hours. “Are you alright” he asks anxiously, as I had apparently complained of chest pains in recovery. Probably due to the tight strap they had wrapped around me during the operation. He says the removal…
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What do you paint?
Classic question, isn’t it? Everyone’s response when you say you paint, occasionally bitten off halfway through when the questioner realises the foolishness of asking. “I do flower paintings” is my standard riposte to this question. An answer as misleading as the question is unanswerable verbally. How to describe in succinct words my use of colour…
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Shock to the System
Three days in, half a dozen works have been sold from the exhibition. Three days in which I have been shocked by the state of management in the hospital – observed over a weekend and showing that, certainly as far as this hospital is concerned there is an awful lot wrong with management of cleaning,…
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