FACES EVERYWHERE

I'm standing in the bathtub taking a shower,the hose pipe kind of shower. I look down and what do I see? A face. What do I do? Turn off the water, step out of the bath, find my camera, get back in the tub and shoot some pics. The first photo doesn't look quite like the face as I first saw it, there was less space between mouth and nose. So in the second picture I shorten that space. In the third picture I add some black in the eyes and around the head. Voilà! Another apparition!

IDEAS AND PIGEONS

Whenever I have artwork that must be finished within a definite time period, other ideas fly in like pigeons landing on a windowsill. If I ignore them they might fly away or just sit there gurgling. More often than not I postpone the urgent work and play with the pigeons. Here's the latest word-painting, just finished.

LOVE, COMPLICATED

Acrylic, gouache and paper on canvas. 16 x 12 inches. Natalie d'Arbeloff, July 2023

TEXTUS EXHIBITION OPENS

Because legendarily wonderful Torriano Meeting House space is so small, they had to restrict the opening to the exhibitors only. Therefore we couldn’t invite friends, families, admirers or otherwise on Saturday but the show is now open from 9th July to 3rd September, as previously announced.

Address: Torriano Meeting House, 99 Torriano Ave, London, NW5 2RX< TEXTUS EXHIBITION: Weekends, 11am-6pm and by appointment in the week.

Every Saturday afternoon there will be a workshop led by an artist or poet (one of which I’ll be doing with Kezzie Florin-Sefton. Date to be confirmed.

Sundays in August : Readings associated with the exhibition:

Sunday 6th August TEXTUS reading: between text and textile Sunday 13th August TEXTUS reading: between text and textile Sunday 20th August TEXTUS reading: between text and textile Sunday 27th August TEXTUS reading: between text and textile

I took a few photos at the private view but most of them vanished from my old camera, I don't know why or where. Here are those I still have.

APPARITION

Yesterday while washing my hands over the bathroom sink I noticed that the nail brush I always hang over a metallic (no longer magnetic) soap-holder looks just like a mouth with teeth bared. Of course I had to draw a face around it to accentuate this discovery. Unbelievably, I had never noticed it before. Here he is, made even more believable by the cast shadow which gives him a beard. You can't see it properly in this flat photo but in three-dimensional reality he is sticking his silver tongue out at me, probably for revealing him.

ASHES TO OCEAN

This morning my niece Selene Guerrieri with her husband GianLuca Martinelli and their two children, Mariam and Emanuel, will be sprinkling my sister Annie's ashes over a small part of the Atlantic ocean. This was Annie's wish, expressed many times to Selene, who has gone to infinite trouble to find the perfect spot for this ceremony in honour of her mother. It is on the coast of Brittany, in the Morbihan area near Nantes.
I cannot be there in the flesh but my spirit is with them. It's still difficult for me to believe that my sister really left this world on the 15th of October last year. I am convinced that her indomitable spirit is capable of persuading any cosmic Authority that her aller-retour ticket to earth is valid for all eternity. But perhaps she has chosen to stay wherever her restless non-material self now resides.