UPSTAIRS AND THE UNBEARABLE NECESSITY OF CHAOS

What attracted me to this top floor flat when I first saw it was that it had an upstairs: a small, awkward-shaped, added-on loft, the sloping ceiling high enough in the middle for me to stand upright but not for any taller people. A space obviously unsuitable for large artwork but I took it anyway. Kindly friends helped to lug my heavy etching press up the narrow staircase, I had a sink installed, built racks and shelves for my equipment, and for quite a while the place served me well enough for printmaking and graphics. 

Now, almost sixteen years later, it's become less of a studio and more of a chaotic storage dump. Mea culpa, yes, but I also blame the advent of the digital age. The Mac is downstairs: that explains everything, doesn't it? A computer, a graphic tablet and thou, my muse, and we can happily ignore all of that upstairs mess - the paints, the unfinished paintings, the broken frames, the stacks of paper, the smell of solvents, the greasy rags, the bits of wood, the bottles and jars and boxes and tins and tubes of art-stuff which, the less it is used, the more it accumulates in case it will be used at a later date. 

But wait. Lately I've been neglecting downstairs (less blogging, less computering in general, did you notice?) and cautiously venturing back upstairs to sit there and think. A few nights ago - late night is usually my decision time - I resolved to start clearing the chaos. But then I noticed that the mess was visually quite intriguing so I decided to start a new large painting instead.
You can see its present stage in the middle of the bottom row of these photos. The painting will incorporate, in as yet unpredictable fashion, fragments of the things I see upstairs, including parts of an old, unfinished painting of my parents when young (middle row). The canvas is almost my height, the ceiling not high enough for an easel and the room too narrow and crowded to allow some other support so I have to work in a variety of crouching positions. But now I need the chaos to stay as it is because it's my current inspiration. 

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TEN RANDOM QUESTIONS ABOUT LOVE

1. What is the question to which love is the answer?
2. Is love a feeling or an interaction?
3. Can love be felt without a love-object?
4. If it's an interaction, what's the minimum number of participants?
5. Does love of one's self feel the same as love of an other?
6. For love to persist, is a loving response required?
7. Why are love and happiness usually considered to be a pair?
8. Why are love and unhappiness so frequently seen together?
9. Can there be love without joy? Or joy without love?
10. What is this thing called love? 

Any answers? 

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THERE IS A SEASON TO UPDATE THE UPKEEP, TURN TURN TURN

Maybe it's because of the better weather but this time of year brings out my governmental instincts ie: cleaning up, clearing out, re-organising, making new lists, tearing up old lists, feeling guilty about having failed to do all the things on all the lists sooner, and so on. The local charity shop has received yet another huge bundle from me and my website, the online version of home, is also the focus of my beady-eyed resolve to IMPROVE THINGS BY GETTING RID OF STUFF AND ADDING MORE STUFF IN DIFFERENT PLACES. Elimination followed by accumulation. Turn turn turn. 

My ART pages in particular badly need a make-over. For the moment, I've added a portrait section. You can see some recent faces over there and maybe you'd like to bookmark the URL? I'll be updating it frequently. Thanking you. 

Back to my duties now. 

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WORDS AND PICTURES

Dylan, creator/editor of the brilliant tinywords, has chosen one of my poempictures as the cover of the latest issue of this international daily magazine of haiku and micropoetry. I am lost for words to say how delighted I am, so a simple thank you will have to do. 

Another reason to celebrate is that I've finally reached what seems to me to be a happy ending for a portrait I've been working on lately of Jehane Markham, a neighbour and fine poet/playwright. As The Jehane Markham Trio  she reads her work with a backing of two musicians - a subtle, original and hugely enjoyable blend of jazz and poetry. Rough Winds Productions was created with her partner, the actor Roger Lloyd Pack, "to support the search for pleasure and understanding in the poetic realm". You may remember I did a sketch of Roger reading The Wasteland  four years ago (scroll to April 13, 2006 ). He's performing it again on June 3rd at the Free Word Centre and Jehane will be presentingThe London Series with her trio. I'll be there for sure. 

Jehane sat for me for two hours and I made a good start then proceeded to wreck the painting slowly and surely in the next few weeks. There's no explanation for BUAPGSS (Buggering-Up-A-Perfectly-Good-Start Syndrome) but I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. Anyway, I gradually dragged the portrait out of the limbo it was threatening to remain in and did something I haven't done before: I painted words as a background to the face: her words, a poem that I like so much: Fear of Falling. Somehow it all came together then. What do you think? 

The poem is in her collection THIRTY POEMS  published by Rough Winds. The last five lines, hard to read in this photo, are:

if I'm not careful,
I'll fall right through,
knocked out by emerald knuckledusters,
the weight of water,
electric blue. 

Portrait of Jehane Markham with her poem 'Fear of Falling'. Acrylic on canvas. 50 cm x 40.5 cm. NdA  May 2010

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POST-ELECTION BLUES and a PORTRAIT PARTY

Very disappointed that the Lib Dems didn't get more votes after all the enthusiasm they generated during the campaign. Most of all I'm shocked by the outrageous excuses given for voters being turned away from many polling stations on election night: why isn't more fuss made about this in the media and everywhere? Supposedly, 'an inquiry is under way' but that just isn't good enough. If this were a third world country, there would be world-wide rumblings about ineptitude and conspiracies. But we're a civilised, sophisticated, efficient democracy, aren't we? 

PORTRAIT PARTY 

Some of us prefer art to politics and pay more attention to art than to reality and would rather play than work and can find hundreds of good reasons not to do the things we should be doing in favour of things that have no agenda other than fun. So when I saw on Walt's always fun-supporting blog a mention of Julia Kay's Portrait Party, of course I immediately had to go there and now I'm completely hooked. Here are my first three portraits of artist members of that vibrant ongoing all-day all-night party. I drew these digitally on a graphic tablet, using Artrage software for Wally and Blue Sky Day and Photoshop brushes for Allan. 

ELECTIONEERING

I responded to The Guardian's recent invitation for readers to send in alternative election posters but mine was not among those they chose to print in the G2 section last week. I'm not bothered since I have my own alternative audience right here, haven't I? So here is my take - a Photoshopped montage of bits and pieces borrowed from the internet - on the three-horse race currently taking place here in the not-so-united Queendom.
All politicians, as far as I'm concerned, are endlessly spinning on a carousel which never stops churning out platitudes, promises and palliatives. In the first TV debate between the three current contenders for the top spinning job, the mere fact that there were three of them instead of the usual two (Labour and Conservative) made it slightly more exciting. And when the interloper Nick Clegg began to sound and look like a real human being rather than an airbrushed sound-bitten parody of one, I thought, okay, maybe he'll jump off the merry-go-round and really be the 'something different' his party political message keeps repeating. Besides, he's got an emigré Russian grandmother, a Dutch mother, a Spanish wife, children with Spanish names, and he can speak more than one language. So I'll vote for him. 

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BLOGDAY ON BLAUGUSTINE

The real Blaugustine blog, of which this is only the somewhat blurred reflection, is seven today. So please pay us a visit over there and explore our seven year archive, if you haven't done so already.

SIGNS AND WONDERS?

If the ancients who saw archers, twins, lions, virgins and so forth in the random alignment of stars could have had our technology, what would they have made of this picture (from BBC news) of the volcanic ash cloud travelling across northern skies?

Depending on your point of view, it's either a Disney cartoon dragon, one of the monsters described in the Apocalypse or, well, um, a volcanic ash cloud moving across Europe and beyond.

EYJAFJALLAJÖKULL

Unless you live on Mars, and even then, you can't have missed seeing this intriguingly complicated word all over the news in the past few days. Apparently its correct pronunciation is something like AYA FYATIA JO KUTLL but I prefer looking at the word and trying out the many ways it could be enunciated. You can see some videos of the actual sound and fury behind that name here.  What I find both hypnotically fascinating and frightening is the way the volcano is slowly pushing a thick, smelly amorphous body out of its crater, shooting lethal glassy particles of shattered rock high up into the stratosphere like some gigantic cosmic fart. 

It's been sunny over here in the past few days, but there's a gritty greyish cast over the blue sky, as if it was overlaid with one of those finely dotted screens used in printing half-tone reproductions. I may be chicken but I'm reluctant to go out at all - I'd rather be chicken than having my lungs coated in Eyjafjallajökull's sinister effluvia, even though the experts are saying 'Don't Worry' as usual. 

The reason for my latest absence from blogging has not been The Ash Cloud but the very welcome presence of my 11 year-old grand-nephew who stayed with me for the past week while his father attended a medical congress in London. But The Cloud did seriously affect their departure back to Rome, with all flights cancelled and every other method of transport fully booked. They managed to catch the Eurostar to Paris, stayed overnight, then found that the current French rail strike, plus the vast number of people whose flights were cancelled meant that it was impossible to buy tickets. Someone advised them to get on a train to Milan without tickets and just hope for the best. That's what they did, along with hundreds of other people who had the same idea, fighting to climb on board. They sat on their luggage in an airless corridor, carriages bursting with exhausted and irritable passengers, stayed overnight in Milan then got another train to Rome, and home at last. No doubt their odyssey was easier than that of innumerable people with far more complicated journeys.

Makes you think about how easily all our habits and certainties can be overturned in the blink of an eye, not only with man-made disasters such as war, but with nature's own unpredictable, and predictable, mischief. 

Okay, this is not realistic. I tried to give the ash cloud a sort of intestinal look. I drew it with an amazing online sketching app called Harmony that the brilliant Walt, alias Crackskull Bob, has been brilliantly playing with. Beware! You'll be tempted to spend hours, days, weeks, months, fooling around with the options this clever software gives you.

EASTER

Those of you who are regulars here and who followed the God Interviews will know that I am a believer but also that where religion is concerned, I do it my way. I admit this sounds arrogant but I'm willing to be humbled anytime. The Catholic schools I attended gave me familiarity with Catholic tradition but never marked me as deeply as the sound of my father's voice praying quietly and passionately, alone behind his bedroom door. Possibly this was what shaped my conviction that a direct, open-hearted, self-stripping conversation with God is the only religion I can practice. 

Wherever it takes place - alone in a room or in a field, in a cathedral, a mosque, a synagogue, or on the street - that one-to-one dialogue between the human and the Divine is the essence of faith as I understand it. All the arguments pro and con religion are swept aside when that most intimate of connections takes place and - sorry for the cliché - you just know it's real. My culture has given Christian form to my belief and it's the basic teachings of Jesus which I find most inspiring, preferably without the Church's interpretations and adornments.

Many years ago, I did thirteen pared-down ink drawings on the life of Jesus. Here are five of them. Sad to say, I don't think I could do better now.