Resolved

I started writing earlier but it was a confused rant about not feeling able to verbalise something. It was not published.

I’ve stepped back, had a word with myself and a blether with others and now I’m back.

Im feeling pulled in an artistic direction which I thought was alien to begin with. But I’ve taken a breathe. I’ve allowed myself to be interrupted and now I realise that I’m being navigated back to real process and action. Backwards is not regression, instead it is a positive. I’m re-working ideas which have held their strength and their value.

In MY day if I wanted to work through an idea or something I’d need to leave the studio, walk to the library, cross reference, photocopy it, if I had credit on my photocopy card, cut it to fit my sketchbook, stick it in my sketchbook, wait fir the glue to dry, close the sketchbook, put it in my bag, walk back to the studio, open the sketchbook and then start drawing out my thoughts.. I’m pretty sure that the walking to and from were a positive contributor to the work, the thought process and my well being. Now?? All done in front of a single computer and in a glazed automatonic state.

Hmm. I know what I’m doing tomorrow.

Out the box

Having written about my time served on the mac computers at Glasgow School of Art, I found myself standing in front of the blue box in the photograph. It holds decades of thoughts , feelings, opinions and even some confessions. It holds the scribbling of an artist in waiting, navigating student life with an open heart and sometimes a worried mind.

It can true that in our darkest times, we replay our finest moments. Could that be beneficial? Can we, when faced with harsh realities, fall back into the comfort of past achievements? Were those achievements a savings bank, from which we can withdraw when current funds of clarity are waning?

That was what I experienced today. Opening the blue box, I was faced with the story of a mind not yet broken, from a time of pure naivety and relentless ambition. Surely it cannot be true that these things are gone, but perhaps that they’ve been stored for another time. For now?

Were my 10,000 words a down payment? Am I now positioned such that they can head in a new direction and become the book I’d never really admitted they were?

I think the answer is yes.

Lost Particles

Prussian Blue, after the rain

I have no idea where this post is going, or even where it’s come from. I’m running the words Prussian Blue over and over in my mind today. I could tell you it’s the colour of my art dungarees but really, they’re a little brighter than that. I COULD tell you it’s the velveteen streaks in the sky just before the sun remembers to return. I could even tell you that it’s the colour of ink I used repeatedly in 1990/1 to create the darkest of my drawings, of sorrowful times. But it’s not those things.

Not today. Today, it’s the only colour that I can feel any sort of response to. It’s in my bones along with a few of my oldest memories. Memories of a child not yet moulded. Memories of the adult she aspired to be. But then again, I can’t tell when that was either. There is a faint tangible visual memory of a drawer full of paint tubes but I’ll probably never say where that was.

Prussian Blue has become one of my internal catch phrases. It’s neither sad or down. It’s neither pointless or futile. It beholds a richness of hope. Of drawings yet to come and words to be written another time. Prussian Blue is the one colour I’d choose, had I only one to keep.

 

Some of my strongest memories are smells. And some of those smells have colours.