Oil paint for the ears, spring flowers for the sorrows

THERE ARE WHITE FLOWERS growing beautifully about this rusty old wheel at the front of our truck, but I haven't had a chance to go and look at them these last weeks because I have been painting. Painting at night, painting in the days, painting in the bits in between.
I am emerging gradually from underneath an elephant of exhaustion which is the result of two manic weeks of exhibition preparation. Up in that tree I knew not of the long hours of desperately focused painting that lay ahead. I have always been a last minute artist and I think really that I work well under pressure, even though I don't like it one bit. I like best to be able to set my drifty painting pace to meander around my days as they go, but when an outside deadline looms, I fear failure above all and morph into a new creature with an iron will to finish it, no matter how leaden my eyelids or how loud my inner screams.


I had two paintings to complete before the opening and both are, I think and hope, the best things I've done. And while I have painted like a thing possessed, Tui has made me the most lovely picture frames from found wood.
Along from where our house rests its wheels is a pile of moss and timber that was once a barn. The roof has caved in completely and all around nettles and brambles grow. There by the barn-that-was lie stacks of old pallets. Weathered by time and the sky, grey and holey. Perfect for a poverty stricken artist who cannot afford expensive framers. I bought cheap clip frames to provide the glass and the backing and had mounts cut. The rest was done by Tui with glue and staples and sandpaper. Here are the magnificent rustic results in progress and in all their gallery glory!

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Meanwhile springtime was passing me by; I sat bent over the table like my painted characters, moving my three-haired paintbrush over the neverending surface of wood.
These two latest works have music coming from them. If you lean close and listen, you'll hear strains of strange East-European melodies, for those are the musics that move me.
If you have not yet heard the exquisite harmony singing from Bulgaria, sung sometimes with the accompaniment of the goat-bagpipe, the gaida, I urge you to - there is nothing like it. I've recommended it before but A Harvest, A Shepherd, A Bride - Village Music of Bulgaria is a wonderful collection of songs which I think is how this painting would sound if you could for a moment swap your ears with your eyes and listen to it. Anyhow, the point is that the painting I worked on up in that tree studio became this below. I am very pleased with it, and I rarely say this. A new tiny paintbrush has led me to paint fine lines describing the shapes of faces and hands and feet with finely diluted oil paint. And these different-sized people fit happily into the odd shaped piece of wood, singing their Bulgarian harmonies, while the little fellow plays heartily on his gaida. I only managed to take one photo of this painting amid the recent chaos, but here it is... (that first word of the title means 'sing' or 'we sing' - unless any Bulgarian readers can tell me otherwise?)

пея : A Song To All Our Sorrows

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And next came the final piece. With just one week to go, and the most enormous piece of wood I have ever painted on in front of me, I began work on a clock to out-tick all previous clocks... With pencil in hand I spent late nights drawing a scene of Pied-Piperishness, an old bearded one-man-band with rats nestling in his beard, and children following. It took time, and the painting gradually took shape. I had read that the story of the Pied Piper was perhaps a remnant of a history of an exodus from Hamelin to collonize parts of Eastern Europe. And this combined with ideas about Jewish music (something that has always resonated old and true in me), and the ostracization of Jews through history formed an image. The pied piper in this case has become a one man band, partly because I like the idea of a character carrying all his instruments and chattels at once, and partly because I needed the roundess of drum for the clock face. The title I took from the well known W.B Yeats poem The Stolen Child that has been sung by various folk singers, and so tied in thoughts of childhood, and the taking-away that is done by music and imagination, and that is so very important, not just in childhood. Of course there is sadness there too, as there always is I think in my work.
I took photos of this one as I went which I share with you here.

So there it is, I am pleased with my work, though I became far too exhausted to be able to 'see' it properly by the end. The night before the opening of the exhibition I was still painting... and went to bed, finally putting the battery in the back of the clock, and setting it to twenty to eleven. On waking.. it still said twenty to eleven and there followed a morning of panic, re-drilling and just a little throwing of pliers. With just half an hour to spare we arrived and hung the clock in its place on the gallery wall. There it'll be for all to see, and perhaps to buy until the 10th of May. These rather nice photos of it below were taken for the Imagine Gallery website.

Come Away O Human Child From A World More Full Of Weeping
Than You Can Understand

Now I'm off to not paint for a few days and enjoy the wonderful springing springtime...

Of nature and technology and of being caught between

HELLO all ... I write with a tale of woe, of epic disaster that summarizes perfectly the precarious tightrope that I walk, strung between a happy rustic home-made wonkyness and useful yet bamboozling modern technology.
Earlier today with the sun in the sky, we went out for our usual walk, happily trip-trapping past our favourite fields, photographing mosses and sheep, checking on the horsebox and on a tree we planted last year and collecting slightly damp sticks with which to start the fire on our return.
So we came in the door and kicked off our shoes, scooped up some coal and knelt by the hearth to start sweeping out yesterday's ash... and as I did this, one of the darstardly kindling sticks that I had in my skirt swept my external hard drive onto the floor. And now it whirrs and clicks and will no longer reveal its contents to me.
This hard drive stores all of my work ... every painting I have ever done, photographs, my half begun animation, my website and those of others that I have made, all my print-ready work which is my means of making a living. I feel sick. And I know, I should have backed it up.
I have spent the afternoon phoning various "data recovery" places with horrifying results... most of them saying that it's possible that my data might not be recoverable, but if it is, it will cost me anywhere between £250 ($500) and £1200 ($2400) (-this last figure was quoted to me by a man with indeterminable accent apparently shouting at me from the middle of a busy inner city roundabout!) I am panicking and hoping and panicking and hoping. Perhaps I might get cheaper quotes tomorrow from companies who don't work on a sunday.
It really makes you realise how at the mercy of these machines and this "data" we are. What on earth is it anyway, if not a series of 0s and 1s? And amazingly it is these same 0s and 1s that enable me to show you my latest paintings or a picture of newly fallen snow on our rooftop, and enable you to buy a print of these paintings or tell me how they make you feel.

I am at a loss as to what to do really. I have a new painting sitting on my desk ready to be done, but this has taken the wind out of me and makes me feel like giving up. So I have decided to try to call on these same wonders of modern technology which have put me in this predicament to help me out of it.
Here below is a little donation button, which, it occurred to me, one or two of you might not mind pressing and donating even one tiny little pound to help me pay for this "data recovery".. and then when the nightmare is over and my work is (fingers crossed) back with me I'll send each and every one of those who donate something a little print of this as yet unbegun painting. How does that sound?



I leave you with some photographs from our unsuspecting walk of beautiful unaware orange moss on a wall; the newly born and completely oblivious Rowan bud that is the tree we planted last year; and lastly, some delightfully skipping, chewing sheep who are chewing and skipping without the slightest jot of a worry about my lost data.