Holidays!
A downside of a split family is negotiating childcare while the kids are off school. Two and a half working days each week: Either put the children into childcare while I work, which more or less annihilates my income for the day; Or just stuff the work and enjoy the children. Whichever way, it’s a time of low earning and high expenditure.
I took the kids away for the first week of the hols, which happened also to be the sunniest week. Yippee! Lots of beaches, a couple of theme parks, and some splashy rocky scrambling in the river Dart.
In return, I got a whole week without the children at all. The sensible thing to do with the time would have been to work and make up some of the financial shortfall. The decadent thing to do would have been to take another whole week holiday, this time with my new partner. I did the decadent thing, and it was brilliant.
It’s 18 years since I last had more than a day doing my own thing – hill walking, sketching, painting, swimming, surfing, playing music, camping, more sketching and painting, and then a bit more hill walking. Fantastic.
It’s also 18 years since I last went on holiday with another artist. I’ve only actually had 5 holidays before with one or more artists, and they’ve all been brilliant. This 6th “holiday with an artist” was absoloutely as brilliant as the others.
Sketching and painting didn’t happen as much as hoped, mainly due to the wet weather. However, I’m pleased with what I did. I seemed to be drawn to the rocky places this time.
Piet Mondrian laboured to impart a sense of the spiritual. For him there was an underlying “invisible” fabric to the cosmos. As with many modernists, his was a vision that united science and religion, so the underlying fabric was Cartesian in nature – full of straight lines and right angles, squares and rectangles, predictable, rule-bound – but also filled with passionate colour. He found his vision reflected in the New Religion of Theosophy, to which he apparently devoted himself.
I have a similar vision of an underlying invisible fabric. However, for me it’s a lawless fabric, one of constant flow, often chaotic, and utterly unpredictable. It has no reason or explanation, and the very idea of a “Religion” runs counter to its nature. We’re all swept away by it, helpless, desperate to overlay a Mondrian-style gridlike explanation onto it, find a coherent set of ideas that can tame the spiritual wildness. However, for me, any such set of ideas is ultimately doomed as an inadequate and feeble grasping for a security which simply isn’t there.
I’m drawn to the rocks, as the gaps and cracks between them represent points of passage – gateways, thresholds – between the underworld and the overworld. Doorways between the invisible cosmic fabric and familiar waking “reality”. Sources of inspiration, places that the spirits come and go. Each rift and cleft a little sacred place. Each pile of rocks a natural temple in the wilderness.
