I am persevering with the speech recognition but I realise that my Belfast accent is challenging it somewhat. I have found if I want it to type correctly I need to don the persona of a BBC newsreader circa 1960.
Well Christmas is over for another year, one of the highlights were sledging under the stars on Christmas day and Boxing day with my children and crazy dog Otis, the lowlights, I managed to get my husband completely the wrong present which led to a competitive battle as to who have been more disappointed over the years (doesn’t make for family harmony).
One area he does score top marks in though is that every year he buys me an art book, (he reckons he has at least another 30 years (books) left in him). This year it was a book on drawings by Rachel Whiteread. Rachel to me looks comfortingly like an old school sculptor. Understated practical clothes and no nonsense hairdo and a love of form, space and all things solid, no Gucci suits or cross dressing frills for this artist. She lost me a little in the Turbine Hall but perhaps it was more I who had lost myself. Her drawings are beautiful in their simplicity and I feel a real affinity with her approach. Like her I tend to use materials wholly inappropriate for drawing and we share a love of varnish in places it probably shouldn’t be. As such I can’t wait to get in the studio again and unearth all those little experiments than I had undervalued.
As my own critic I suppose I am at times ludicrously harsh on myself and most of my work never sees the light of day. On that painful Saatchi tv programme one young artist said she never looked at any other artists work as she felt it would make her own work boringly predictable. Tracey Emin replied that it is precisely because you do not look at other artists’ work your work is boringly predictable. An interesting dialogue but for me seeing another artist confidently present their work gives me the courage to trust in mine. In 2011 I want to be an artist who is truthful in what I aim to produce, unshakeable in my commitment to produce it and comfortable in the direction I’m taking. I’m getting closer I think.
Please excuse the rundown estates, sorry that you have wrecked, rundown mistakes, but I am using speech recognition two write this post right. To save my wrists from getting worse I am trying to teach my computer to recognise my voice. As you can see successor’s is intermittent.
My village is buried in snow and with it my sense of motivation and direction. I Trust the new year will see my artistic mole show returned.
With the help of my typing computer I would like to wish you all a very merry Christmas and a peaceful new year. If there is more snow we will have a tacky less and alcohol free Christmas as in the test school van the man will not get down our road. I will finish with a well known song sung by me to our computer.
How’s yourself a merry little Christmas
Make their yuletide gay
Sunday all our troubles will be miles away
So how few herself a merry little Christmas day!
What happened there? One minute I was all motivated and the next Christmas demands kicked in and my mind was swamped. The whole education crisis and the direct effect it will have on my children has also distracted me from work, coupled with the rising debt in our bank account which is threatening to take us into disaster. Somehow I totally lost focus in who I was, what I was doing and why I was doing it.
In the last week though circumstances have helped pull me back into focus. Some paid work which has been really difficult to pin down has finally come off for next year, a curator has put forward my name to two potential exhibiting opportunities and the council had finally got back to us to arrange a meeting for a the proposed exhibition at Salisbury.
I attended the meeting today with Laurence and my daughter Maeve (I had no choice but to bring her – a long story ). More machinations (I don’t think the usage of that word is correct but I like it any way so I’ll leave it in) over the proposal but basically, all being well, the project will now take place in March 2012.
A big sigh of relief from us all as this timescale is much more manageable and will allow ample time to raise funding and put on a much higher caliber event. Now it’s just down to me to apply for more opportunities, something I’ve shied away from recently – and finish latexing my ceiling (not a job I relish).
