Threads

I’ve tried to write a post about five times and failed. 

The goalposts seem to be moving by the hour and I can’t keep up.

I’m sure I will be able to write about this at some point, but not now.

So instead of that I will tell you what I am doing to keep myself level.

Since last week I have brought much of my studio home. Paper, pencils, paint, lino and cutters… sundry materials… just in case. 

So I am making. I’m waiting for the Lino ink to arrive in the post though, before I can print. But I have three blocks ready to go.

I also responded to the news of more isolation by reaching out to my neighbours. We have lived in this house for over 35 years. We know long-standing neighbours, but not the newer ones. I posted a note through the doors of the ten closest houses, either side, over the road, just the ones we can wave to really. I gave them my phone number. Within a couple of days 8/10 had replied, and we now have a neighbourhood WhatsApp group. It feels reassuring to know who is around us. We’ve had offers of shopping etc already. Lovely kind people.

When Boris announced he was “closing” schools, I did what any teacher would do (and, how ever much I try to deny it, I am still a teacher of sorts). I offered art parcels for children, including guided activities. Then as an afterthought, wrote at the bottom of my message: 

(Or for bored adults, hahahaha!)

Wind on a few days and I seem to be running a WhatsApp Art Club! I have delivered parcels to six households, paper, pencils, charcoal, chalk, a note with instructions/guidance. They are saying thank you to me, but I don’t think they realise what a huge part they are playing, and will continue to play, in me retaining and maintaining my mental health. 

My family have a bit of a list of things to be done while housebound. This ranges from DIY and chores, to dafter things like board games, jigsaws, and yes, I might even get them drawing too if things get really bad!

My own list contains the need to isolate myself further, as I would usually by going to the studio. This is really and truly vital for my mental health. Uninterrupted time on my own to think clearly, and make, and write.

So in the time I wait for Lino printing ink, I write, and read. I know that I will have a long time ahead to do things, so I am picking at things as I get the urge.

I brought home all my songwriting notebooks to review. So now, I’m going to shut myself in the dining room and try to make some sense, and possibly come up with some writing good enough to send to the band… 

By the time we get out of this, I will almost certainly have new songs to show for it.

Sending out love to you all. Exxx

Obviously mood affects the work. In my case that is kind of the point. Cause and Effect.

But all those years I was in a job working for a salary, never did I feel so totally alone with my mental state. By which I mean that if I had an off day, there were other people around to pick up the slack for an hour, or two, or a few days… until it lifted and then I would do the same for someone else. 

In amongst all of the advantages of working by myself, for myself, there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent. Most of the time that’s ok. Most of the time I draw through it, write, sing, or in the extreme, stay at home with the heating on, wear soft clothes and wade through several series of Death in Paradise on Netflix. 

I’ve had a bad week I suppose. Maybe a couple of weeks. Where the physical has combined with the emotional to provide a deep trough that’s hard to see out of let alone climb out of. (Not with my knees!) I am waiting again to hear about a couple of funding streams, but can’t seem to motivate myself to DO anything much. The professional momentum is therefore compromised, and there is no one to pick up the slack. It’s on me.

Maybe it’s an age thing too? I’m 59 next month. This seems a too big number for how I feel really. I’ve got nothing sussed out as well as I anticipated I would by this grand age. I’m still fucking unpredictably peri-menopausal and it is doing my bloody head in. There are days when I have no capacity for anything else but managing this body.

I have had a few good bits. Some good gigs. A couple of Lino print workshops with Louise have provided making opportunities with a bit of brain wrestling of the technical kind, but not the conceptual kind. That’s been good. I’m going to do more I think. 

I’m having the soft clothes day today. I have a gig tonight that I’m working myself up to. It’ll be ok once I have had a shower, put my face on and got there.

I’ve also had news that my solo show is going up at The Custard Factory in Digbeth next week, until the end of April. This is such a boost to my mood I can’t tell you! 

I’m glad that I still can see the positives, sometimes it’s overwhelmingly hard work to keep that positive face on for professional purposes. It’s a hard slog to keep filling in the forms when it’s the last thing you feel like doing. It feels relentless, but on the good days (and there are many) I go like the clappers trying to get things in motion, so that I can coast a bit through the bad days. It seems to take less and less to knock me off the rails as I get older. 

But luckily, at the moment, it doesn’t take much to give me a little boost either.

Thanks to my “boosters”… xxx

The Lines Between Us

The connected conversations that rely on timelessness, by which I mean no interruptions, no deadlines, no need to be elsewhere unless hunger or sleep call.

I yearn for those conversations that rattle along easily with the occasional punctuation caused by pauses for thought. These are not conversations about offspring or shopping, or when the plumber is coming. I don’t know what they are about, or even actually, if the “about” is the important thing. When these conversations happen, they are calm and quiet and easy. Maybe easy is the wrong word, because sometimes they can be deeply emotional. We might cry and we might laugh. But the display of emotion and the expression of it is unselfconscious, it is loving, and is held firmly between us. The spreading of mascara and mucus is unheeded. A tissue is delved for, proffered, received gratefully but unthanked.

There is a barely regarded, unstated, understanding of humanity. There’s no requirement to fix anything, just the space and time in which to say it and be heard, and to hear it said. A nod, a smile, a hand reached out… or absurd snorting laughter.

I feel a yearning for this mutuality, this lightening interaction on heavy dark days. When in the midst of them we are warmed, understood, valued.

Afterwards I often discover myself deep in thought. I have been challenged in some way, not a threatening challenge, but one that charges me to consider the weight of what has passed. The consideration of one another is a requirement, a need… but it doesn’t weigh heavily because it holds love.

Today I consider… while I draw lines.

Now you know I love to work to music and with music… but some days are best served silent. Yesterday and today are such days.

I used to say to students “trust the process, something will happen to make a change”. It’s harder to say it to yourself, however experienced you are. The change never comes when you want it. Not for me anyway. It always comes after the frustration has set in, when the boredom has set up home, when the last three pieces of work (or more) are saying nothing to me. It is always when I feel exhausted and the lowest that the change happens, when I’m long past thinking it will. The last few drawings have had me beat. They’re too busy. The wrong colour. They don’t connect. They’ve come from the process but not the thought. They seemed empty. I can’t see a bloody thing. I might as well be drawing in fog. So I started drawing fog. Clouds and clouds of hand manoeuvred charcoal to start with.

Swooshing about making that silky noise. Then back to the watercolour and graphite. Unsatisfactory experiments, but satisfying play. So I kept on playing. I kept telling myself to trust it.

I’ve spoken before of my expensive paper habit…? Yes… well… the expensive paper has to be treated well if you need a soft surface that takes the paint and the graphite as required. A scratch or crease wrecks the finish. Unless…

Yes. Unless that is where the process is leading.

I listened to the Christmas episode of The Museum of Curiosity on radio 4 (it’s currently still available on iPlayer if you want to hear it). In this episode among other gems, J. K. Rowling talks about inspiration. Her metaphor is that she walks through the forest to the lake, and in the water lies the inspiration. The lake gives it to her if she trusts it. She doesn’t go fishing for it. Then, when the lake gives her something, she takes it to the shed and works on it. A good piece of writing is the perfect balance of lake and shed. Sometimes when she looks at something again she can see that it’s not spent enough time in the shed, or indeed, too much time in the shed. This metaphor struck me as pretty much perfect. I shall be borrowing it.

So these last few drawings, were definitely too much shed. All shed maybe.

What happened yesterday, in the silence, I was able to hear a small splash in the lake. The crease and the scratched surface were leading me out of the fog. Seemingly onto the rocks, but hey, I’m not chucking it back in the lake. Just give me a few weeks in the shed…

Do other artists find themselves obsessing over small things? I’ve been away from the studio for family and the festivities, so these things are milling around in my head, in my notebook, even in the occasional song lyric. I’ve been thinking about fog. The literal and the metaphorical. Brought about I think, by the general election and the effect it has had on my mood. The thick, pea-souper sort that keeps you trapped. As a child I remember the fog, and being trapped in a field for some reason… I walked the perimeter trying to find the gate, having lost all sense of direction. I felt frightened and sick. I am convinced I walked the perimeter twice, missing the gate to the lane. I think I was around ten or eleven. I was alone.

I left a drawing on my table, half done, probably. Fog. Amorphous shapes and shades and texture driven by the feel of the paper beneath my pencil. This still is about the same themes I think, but the sense of touch has become more elusive. Disconnected somehow. I can’t breath in it, it’s tight and smothering at the same time as drifting. I found myself holding my breath a little for fear of inhaling it.

And after a night of fitful sleep, waking several times in pain* that defied painkillers and cream and meditation and music… I find that the fog is nailed to me. I feel like I have a bed of nails. So this morning the drawing in my head is one of nailing fog. I won’t be in the studio until probably Tuesday or Wednesday. This vision may lose its potency by then. Or it may be desperate still to appear on the paper. By then I might feel better. By then I might have had some sleep and the obsessive nature of my thoughts will have subsided.

Or not.

Fog.

*I have Osteoarthritis that seems to have flared up over the last couple of days