Thursday 23 January
Why?
I grew up with the propaganda of Hollywood and Ealing, naively expected the end of hostilities to be just that, so I was surprised to discover it wasn’t anything like as clean as portrayed. Not that I should have been – I guess I hadn’t thought about it.
Monday 27 January
I think my meeting with Rebecca Beinart today has led me to some early childhood memories of times in Bavaria, especially in Buchloe so they must be really early, more feelings than memories and remembering objects and spaces, like the main room of my grandparents apartment (it might only have had two rooms), the cooking range, the bench seat at the dining table, a bed, the communal basement with its cages for family possessions, the lines in the square where people beat carpets, watching a stag beetle crawl in the dust, the grey colour of the apartment buildings, fresh semeln fetched by my Opa for breakfast…
Monday 3 February
These memories led me to start a small sketch of what little memory I have of the apartment blocks basement – or an attempt to gather its atmosphere. I’ve spent a number of hours working on the drawing (using the app Sketchbook Mobile on my phone – so the image really is quite small) over a couple of evenings – the last into the early hours – time does almost fly when I’m involved in a drawing. It still needs working on, but I like the idea of trying to grasp these early memories and somehow fit them into place, a further layer, even if I don’t yet know how.
