Here Comes the Sun – A Love Letter to a Re-discovered Medium.

The modern sympathy with invalids is morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others. Oscar Wilde.

Before I re-start this poor neglected blog, I must first say that I am writing from a place of healing and wellness, but last November after a routine mammogram, I was eventually diagnosed with breast cancer. I am lucky in that it was picked up early and as these things go, it came with an excellent prognosis. In the scheme of things, it was not the end of the world and I mention it here only because of the stagnating impact it had on my creative flow and output.

Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change. Brene Brown

At the time, however tiny and eminently treatable it was, there were occasions, especially during the three weeks between biopsies and diagnosis, where mentally the ‘thing’ would shape-shift and grow out of all proportion to reality. Chronic sinusitis was already keeping me away from stone carving and now I had also, it seemed, become mute at the typewriter.

I was stuck, Stucker than I have ever been, until one grey afternoon when racing thoughts and racing heart threatened to overwhelm, something made me seek out a box of gouache paints and using toned paper I picked up an old familiar and very dear brush and began to paint a simple (yet unbelievably complex!) still life with flowers – and reader I lost myself for three whole exquisite hours!

That night I went to bed tired in a weary but good way, as if I’d used some long dormant muscle, and instead of the usual three a.m. horrors, found myself thinking of new subjects to paint and potential colour harmonies.

With each passage of human growth, we must shed a protective structure (like a hardy crustacean). We are left exposed and vulnerable – but also yeasty and embryonic again, capable of stretching in ways we hadn’t known before. Gail Sheehy

Slowly, the physical work with brush, paint and serious meditative looking/seeing, began to manifest in my brain pushing out negative thoughts and quite simply, my creativity, the quintessence of my artist’s being, moved back in! And then…colour exploded back into my life – I found myself staring moodily at leaves where the light stops and shade begins, at the pattern of my dog’s fur and inspecting the shine on coffee drips… There was (and still is) a burgeoning excitement at myriad possibilities of colour that for so long had inadvertently been missing from my life. And that’s the thing – there is a saying, ‘You don’t what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone.’ Well, it works the other way round too, in that you don’t know what you’ve been missing till it comes back into your life.

It is through weakness and vulnerability that most of us discover our soul.       Desmond Tutu

I became superstitious, hoarding the feeling, needing to paint every day in case this amazing good fortune should run out. I imposed on myself a regime of painting every type of material possible, from the organic to the synthetic, from soft fleshy fruit to hard shiny plastic, and everything else in between. This was calming and gradually I began to settle down. Each new experience called up struggles and triumphs from the past and sometimes, as in the past, I overworked things and forced to bin them – this was hard, but I would always get back on the horse the next day. I was determined to establish a new lexicon, an exciting vocabulary of colour harmonies before beginning what I considered to be the ‘real’ work.

Courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway. John Wayne

And if this all sounds easy, it wasn’t. Every single time I set out my paints, my stomach turned over and I would develop an urgent need to decalcify the kitchen taps… But the work paid off. Now it was as though I was catching up with myself, a circular feeling of being given another chance to do it better. Hand and eye synchronised, I became addicted to certain colours put together and stretched my capabilities. I began to paint what I really love with abandon – including tiny vintage chairs gleaned from Ebay, memories of drinking Rosé in the South of France with old friends and waterlilies painted at the lake’s edge en plein air… halcyon days.

Leap and the net will appear. John Burroughs

And now? I am about to start, not without trepidation, something I came across in the dusk by the waterlily lake. A shape under the trees hanging by a twisted rope, which made me jump out of my skin until I realised it was a makeshift scarecrow made of old coats and fishing bags. For a while I shelved this idea and let the doubts win, why would anyone paint this, much less find it interesting as a subject?

And finally, the other night, watching a string quartet playing the music of Hans Zimmer by candlelight, the eerie haunting music was overwhelmingly beautiful, but looking around everyone else looked so composed, less affected, while I was finding it unbearably beautiful. Instinctively I got out my sketchbook and somehow managed to draw the cellist in the dark – it was an incredible synchronous merging of sound and vision – forever cemented for me by the process of drawing.

And that’s when I knew. Even if I am the only person on the planet who feels such dread of scarecrows at dusk, and even If I make a complete hash of trying to express that feeling through paint, I owe it to myself to try.

As I write this – I have just booked an exhibition in Margate for next year! More follows.

Everything will be okay in the end…if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.     John Lennon

My Short Story ‘Bind’ Published by Litro Magazine.

Bind

In the late autumn of 1974, a young girl in a faded pink brushed-nylon nightie kneels on the floor of the family bathroom and is sick into the toilet bowl, of an avocado, Dudley Diplomat with a handle that to flush requires energetic kickstarting. She is becoming familiar with the shape and design of the toilet’s various features, including the underside of the seat’s hinge mechanism, because the same thing happens the next day and the day after that. I mention the nightie because it gets in the way of the vomit and the girl, in a bid not to antagonise her mother, sponges it down and hides it in the wardrobe. This makes her late for school.

This sickening happens at around the time the girl is due to buy her next packet of sanitary towels, a dreaded event which she puts off until the last minute because, unlike the literature that so often accompanies feminine products, it does not make her feel at all feminine, special or give the discreet protection it boasts. In truth, she is still fumbling with the basic mechanics of it all, trussing herself up in a sanitary belt, a sort of elasticated garter with flagellating straps and buckles that chafe. Tampons, stick-on pads and anything with wings have not been invented yet and even if they were, would certainly not be sold in the village shop. And it’s the village shop and the ritual humiliation of her monthly visits, a cause of real purgatory for this girl.

She has no choice. The nearest town with its beneficial anonymity is miles away. The shop, the social hub of the surrounding area, is run by a middle-aged couple who take turns patrolling the counter and just like the couples in those miniature, wooden weather houses, are never seen together. With their finely tuned radar for gossip, it is the shopkeepers who function as the lungs of the community, as they are ideally placed to re-circulate it. They miss nothing.

When the man is at the till, if the girl loiters and it becomes obvious that she has not come in to buy something innocuous like bread or cat food, the cringe of their mutual embarrassment forces her to buy something, anything other than what she has come in for, so that later she must return and repeat the whole sorry business. And even when the lady is safely installed behind the counter, the whole transaction is still excruciating, especially when other customers are within earshot.

“What can I get you young lady?”

The girl, stained with crimson shame, says in a small voice,

“A packet of Kotex please, with loops.”

And the shop lady with perfectly sound hearing says,

“Speak up dear I can’t hear you.”

“A PACKET OF KOTEX PLEASE, WITH LOOPS.”

“Ah, is it your monthlies? “

And the girl knows this to be a rhetorical question by the way in which the shop lady delivers it, in an over-enunciated, whispering sotto voce and sidelong look as she noisily wraps the tell-tale packet in swathes of unnecessary brown paper, as effective as a megaphone.

If only her mother would buy the bloody things, but her mother works twelve-hour shifts and cannot afford the time. Even when the girl is safely on the other side of the shop door with the massive, rustling packet squished under her arm it’s not over. At home, she creeps through the kitchen but only gets as far as the hall. Her older brothers have heard her come in and catching sight the packet, surround her with prurient curiosity. Having no socially acceptable language, to accommodate what is happening to their sister, they whoop their feral shrieks and resort to slang. Manhandling the package from her they chant mindlessly at the top of their breaking voices,

“She’s on the blob, she’s on the blob!”

Then they proceed to kick the packet back and forth between them, careful to keep it out of her reach above her head. The girl puts her hands over her ears.

So, at first, once she understands that she isn’t going to need the dreaded feminine products for a while she feels only relief. Later, once the full implications of the consequence of ‘walking out’ with the handsome boy from the next village (the one with wandering hands) begins to sink in, anxiety seeds in her belly, and quickens.

Four months on, she has developed a lifetime’s aversion to all things avocado and a constant nausea that gnaws in her belly and like hunger is only relieved by eating. Fear drives her to the local family doctor whose unexpected kindness is almost unbearable. He coughs politely before offering her a termination, but she, without a clue as to what this procedure might entail, is too ashamed to ask and so unable to consider it as a concrete possibility, her fate in the end is sealed by ignorance and she chooses the devil she knows.

At the point where her buttons and zips, part company, and her faded brushed-nylon nightie stretches to transparency across her fruiting body, she realises the time is ripe to tell her mother, and she spends all day working up the courage.

Her mother is a woman under siege who lives her life in one long, expectant pause in which she waits for the imminent disaster that she knows is coming, and against which she keeps her burgeoning cupboards stocked just in case. When she sits down of an evening to watch the news, she is always surprised perhaps even a little disappointed, if there hasn’t been a war or a natural disaster.

Tonight, as she rattles the poker in the fire grate and switches off the television, her daughter steels herself and watching her mother climb the stairs, calls out,

“Mum, there’s something I really need to tell you,”

Her mother slows down but remains facing forward, and without turning her head, says,

“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re going to say. I’ve got eyes. You could have waited.”

The girl stands at the bottom of the stairs picking the skin of her cuticle and keeps mum.  She watches her mother’s back disappear upstairs to bed. There is no break in the resigned footfall because, as her mother has always suspected, where her teenage daughter is concerned, it was only ever going to be a matter of time.

About Ruth Geldard

Ruth Geldard MA is an artist/writer with artwork in private and public collections and whose written contributions are in many art publications. Her fiction has received, the Sapphire Award for Excellence in Creative Narrative 2015, been shortlisted for the Fish prize 2019, Finalist for the London Independent Short Story competition 2020, and given an ‘honourable mention’ from Strands International Flash Fiction competition. Her art and writing lives crossover, and she lives in England, on the southeast coast, where she makes/writes/paints on rinse and repeat.

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Secret fractures – Art as Self-Harming

Why do I sometimes let my emotions get the better of me? For the same reason I let it rain last Tuesday. Robert Brault

Life had given me lemons – in the form of a bitter-sweet fracture, loss and hurt. For a while the drama of it, the relentless groundhog days of searching for meaning in a toxic mental soup, kept me from the hollow sadness of acceptance and being able to move on. Temporarily things literally fell apart; my work in progress, a fragile soapstone carving, split in two under my chisel. I understood this as a sign and superstitiously stopped working. But eventually a new idea nosed its’ way through my slough of despond, and so (as my daughters would say) I ‘grew a pair’ and strode back into the studio.

The great object of life is sensation – to feel we exist – even though in pain it is this ‘craving void’ that drives us to Gaming – to Battle – to Travel to intemperate but keenly felt pursuits of every description whose principle attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment. Lord Byron

A fresh piece of stone is always daunting, and impatient to lose myself in the process, I intended to race through the initial stages of stone removal that required hard graft. So, I got myself a bigger chisel because in my head a bigger chisel=speed, I decided to complete this initial phase in the shortest time possible – in a morning…

And reader I went for it – driven by a weird (and unnatural?) zeal. Nothing was going to stop me, ART would sort me out, distract and heal me. I pummelled that poor stone with my chisel desperate to get to that bit of the process where things slow down, into the still space where I know the magic will happen, between an idea beginning to take form and before becoming fully concrete, (I was going to say, set in stone…) Four hours later the studio a white-out, I emerged like Scott of the Antartic, dropping my chisel from exhaustion, but never mind, now I was ready to start the ‘real’ work of the carving tomorrow.

Where there is anger there is always pain underneath. Eckhart Tolle

But that night my thumb joint (on my left-handed hand) began to give a curious little click on movement and soon became so agonisingly inflamed and painful it locked itself straight. For the next few weeks, unable even to write, I lived on paracetamol and wore a splint. It turned out to be trigger thumb, a common repetitive strain type injury and the only non-medical treatment? To stop doing whatever had aggravated it in the first place. It took three months to be able to dress without yelping by then I was just about able to write, though still weeks away from carving.

The first rule of holes: when youre in one stop digging. Molly Ivans

During the interim, without carving, I was forced to distract myself so I opened a shop on Etsy, joined a gym and surfed the net for carving videos (and God some of them were truly awful) then one day I was stopped in my tracks by a master carver, I could tell this just by the way his hand was in constant dialogue with his chisel his wonderfully seductive and expressive videos on process, went some way to sating my stalled carving brain. It began to dawn on me just how blind and potentially dangerous my haste had been…

My online sculpture guru helped me to understand the necessity of not only approaching the stone quietly and to think about where and how I was placing the chisel, but in the same way that I approached the magic time in the middle of the process. He spoke with such reverence about the stone as if it were a living being, and far from being inviolate, was vulnerable to any undisciplined bashing that could cause secret fractures that then might sit in wait and derail your progress later i.e., bits could drop off…

 I have had just about all I can take of myself. S.N. Berman

Chastened, I realised that I had only been receptive to this enlightened thinking because of what had happened to my thumb, caused by vibrations from the heavier hammer and hasty chiselling – but mostly from my impatient recklessness. On reflection it seems that the stone has yet again taught me a vital lesson.

Being creative is not so much the desire to do something as the listening to that which wants to be done: the dictation of the materials. Anni Albers

I had gone into the studio and allowed impatience to overrule respect for the tools and the stone, demanding that art distract and heal me, as I believed it so often had done in the past, but then it was always as a side-effect or consequence of pure focused artistic intention – not via agitated childish demanding. There is of course a time for recklessness in the making of art but if I’ve learnt anything from thumb-gate it is that strong emotions carry a forceful charge that when picked up by tools and materials it has the power to amplify and bite back.

No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect. George Bernard Shaw

Stage one – In the beginning.

Follow my blog: ruthgeldard.wordpress.com to see what happened next and how the sculpture developed.

Art for Art’s Sake – The Real Value of Creative Passion.

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  Artist Steve Alexander in his studio.

On a recent visit to artist Steven Alexander’s home and studio, which houses his prolific collection of paintings, walking through the door was like stepping into a Vuillard interior only with more pattern. The walls, and even the ceilings, were covered with the evidence of a lifetime’s search for understanding. After the initial disorientating shock, the sheer numbers made it necessary to process the paintings as masses of abstract colour and tone while musical terms began to pop up in my head. There were bright arpeggios of colour running up and down the scale, swirling around quieter andante passages of subtler work that here and there bled into dark crescendos of wild colour and looser marks. Sometimes there would be the slow reveal of a little gem of a painting quietly announcing itself, glowing out of the Vuillard backdrop, in an effort to grab my attention.

Stephen talking about his paintings.

With so many paintings, (Steven has over 2,000) you might think it hard to keep track, but he knows exactly where to put his hand on every one, as he keeps a record of them in carefully annotated catalogues.

Steven only occasionally sells his work and has never attempted to make his living by it, people often ask him why. This got me thinking about how we value ‘art’. I often draw in public and although people are complimentary they almost always ask what I do with the drawings ‘afterwards’ and if I sell them. I try to explain that it is the live drawing process that impels me to keep on doing it not the end result.

In Steven’s garden.

But of course, we do what we have to, to get by, and I am not averse to selling work, but recognise the dangers inherent in the commercial process which can effectively blunt creative passion.

Steven’s house full of paintings, is not only an inspiring and immersive experience, but a testament to his own continuing creative passion. As I left, clutching a generous gift of his cards, I reflected on a recently found quote.

There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money either.                        Robert Graves

Outside the studio.

More by Luck Than Judgement? – The Challenges and Unexpected Delights of Judging Competitive Art.

Judges (from right): Willow Winston, Annabelle Losa and Ruth Geldard.

Staring at the phalanx of grey panels stretching wall-to-wall around the sizeable exhibition space, each covered in a dense, colourful mosaic of children’s artwork, was daunting to say the least. Around 570 works had been submitted from 32 schools with pupils ranging in age from 4 to 16, each age category was given its own theme. A huge undertaking, initiated by Margate Rotary Club, whose members made up a small army of volunteers, along with help from the Margate School who supplied the venue.

I had been asked to join artists Willow Winston and Annabelle Losa to judge the Thanet Schools Young Artist Festival. I was nervous, would the process go smoothly? What if we all had wildly different choices? But as we approached the first panel, all three as one, in synchronicity, pointed at the same particularly striking image! Such a brilliant collaborative feeling initiated trust. Of course, we didn’t always agree on everything, but in the main it was a tough, but enjoyable experience and together we discussed and debated with passion the many and varied criteria; adherence to and interpretation of theme, technical skill, use of colour, expression of feeling and so on. Exposure to such rich, stimulating images was inspiring, and soon we were each bringing our own descriptive insights, one person’s idea developing another’s until we were riffing off each other, linking the names of artists and movements to a particular work.  Heady stuff.

I can honestly say, we worked hard and with integrity, aware that every choice we made carried potential disappointment for the unchosen children, and even with the best of intentions, there is always a (small) element of luck, of things falling into place that might have fallen differently and made a different pattern, on another day…

Later with images of the children’s paintings still imprinted on my mind, I came across a Facebook post by Dan Thompson, who had written about his recent experience of the judging process. What he said resonated deeply, I recognised the agony of choices made and heavy sense of responsibility, especially when he said,

“We all had work we fought to include, and we all lost some things we loved, as we compromised to make our rooms the best we could.”

But unlike adult art competitions where only the selected art is shown, every entrant for The Thanet Schools Young Artist Festival will be displayed together with the highlighted winning entries in the exhibition, which will run from the 1^st to the 7^th of November 2021, at The Margate School. Well done to all involved, especially Brian Homewood aka Mr Motivator and his team from the Margate Rotary Club. Looking forward to the exhibition and to meeting the children.

Spaceships

3/5/2021

0 CommentsShort Fiction ~ Ruth Geldard
​
Honourable Mention, Strands International Flash Fiction Competition – 11 

Ursula was on form. Holding court in her inimitable way, Hannah noticed her pause, as she made certain of her audience’s attention,
“So, there I am,” here she paused again to turn her palms upwards in mock helplessness, “doing a bit of light-dusting in the bedroom…”
Her husband on cue, said,
“You don’t do light-dusting my love, not even weightless dusting.”
“Don’t interrupt. So, there I am, looking through my bedroom window and what do I see across the road?”
She sat back in her seat with a little rhetorical, shoulder shimmy. Everyone at their table, who had gathered in the intimate space of the wine bar to celebrate Hannah’s significant birthday, was looking at Ursula, all trying to work out what she might be going to say next.
Ursula turned her attention towards John, Hannah’s husband, who, catching her gaze shifted in his seat and picked up his beer. Ursula continued.
“You know the house opposite me, the one that’s been on the market for ages because they want a ridiculous amount of money for it? Well, the estate agent from Select Homes was standing right under the For Sale sign, with a whole family of Pakistanis!”
There was an immediate hush. Hannah opened her mouth to speak but noticed John clearing his throat to say something. She held her breath, curious to see how he would react and whether he would be able to suppress his natural inclination to avoid confrontation. He looked straight at Ursula and said,
“And?”
Hannah flushed this was a first. Ursula looked bewildered, as though John couldn’t possibly have understood her, because surely if he had, he would have agreed?
She said, “Well would you want a hoard of foreigners living right opposite you, I mean really? It would bring down house prices for a start, never mind the nuisance from cooking smells?”
John shrugged and said, “Wouldn’t bother me.”
The sheer unexpectedness of Ursula’s remarks and casual assumption, that they were of like mind, took Hannah’s breath away. Recent political events had opened a Pandora’s box of previously suppressed racial intolerance in Hannah’s small, seaside town, but to hear it from the mouths of friends was unthinkable.
The echo of Ursula’s hateful not-in-my-backyard comments became a righteous slow-burn inside Hannah threatening to flare, and the strain of holding back was almost too much, but not wanting to upstage her husband, she tamped it down.
Later, after the candles had been blown out and the cake cut, the talk turned to the safer subject of this year’s Oscars ceremony, comparison of the various films and much lightweight talk of celebrities and their dresses. But Hannah, still burning, said,
“It’s a shame there were no black prize winners though, did you see that incredible speech by that actress about the lack of diversity? Oh, what’s her name, she’s been in everything?” John helpfully supplied it but did not look at her.   
“She was so inspiring brought the house down.” Oh god, what was she thinking of? She was no match for Ursula, who looking at her quizzically, said,
“All this fuss about a few prizes, they should be able to give them to whoever they like simply on merit.”
“Yes, but as black Americans make up over ten percent of the population in the U.S.A., it would be reasonable to expect at least some representation, and of course on merit.”
“Why can’t they have their own Oscars, better all round for everyone?”
Hannah folded her arms, lowered her voice and said,
“Because that would be apartheid.”
Ursula drew a sharp breath, Hannah watched as she rearranged her face, softening her features into something syrupy, indulgent. If she was at all angry it didn’t show.   
“That’s so typical of you Hannah, always contrary, I think you secretly enjoy being on the side of the underdog.”
Hannah was lost, unable to make sense of the disconnect between Ursula’s words and her facial expression, she would never understand the rules of this game. She looked across at John, willing his support, but he was deep in conversation.
The remaining birthday cake was cut up and wrapped in carry-home parcels.  Hannah kissed everyone goodbye, when she got to Ursula, they managed to air-kiss without touching. Oh, the relief of stepping outside into the cold, de-toxifying night air. John caught her up and getting into step took her hand.
“All right?”
She didn’t answer just gave him a straight look.
“Well, I think that all went off okay didn’t it? It could have been worse…”
“In whose bloody universe? Our friends are racists for God’s sake! How could we not have realised?”
“I know! When she was talking, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”
A sudden gust snatched at the left-over balloon, someone had insisted she take home with her, it danced stupidly on its’ artificial string hideous, gift-shop gaudy in luminous pink and silver with that unrecognisable number…
John said,
“Don’t take everything so seriously…”
Hannah was weary, she knew from experience that having said his bit, John would not want to rock the boat.   
As they walked home the damned balloon began again to fidget, its’ annoying, urgent bumping suggesting a desire to escape. She didn’t want it anyway. It would only mope around half-mast between floor and ceiling, reminding her of birthdays past. She unwound the balloon’s string from her hand.
No longer earthbound the balloon soared off into the indigo sky, then slowed to linger over the church roof, as if struck by a sudden gravitational nostalgia, before picking up speed to smooch gargoyles and nuzzle chimney tops, before finally venturing off into unknown deep space shrinking to the size of one of those sherbet-filled, papery sweets, from her childhood, shaped like flying saucers, Spaceships? She remembered sating that unique, biting after-school hunger, walking home with friends, shoving Spaceships into their mouths with inky fingers, unified in the sole purpose of keeping them from dissolving for as long as possible. 
~

​Artist/writer Ruth Geldard has exhibited artwork throughout London including The Royal Academy. She has made written contributions to many Art Publications, worked in adult education, and has been an art materials demonstrator and contributed to art videos.  
She once painted a portrait of Timothy Spall’s mother, Sylvia, live on air, for Radio 4’s Home Truths.  
A 2018 Faber graduate, her short fiction has been shortlisted for the Fish Prize and published in various anthologies. She was awarded the sapphire Award for Excellence in Contemporary Narrative in 2015. Ruth was a finalist for The London Independent Story Prize and received an honourable mention for Spaceships in the International Flash Fiction Competition.
 Ruth is currently editing her novel Lemon Yellow. 

The Mirror Pond.

‘The Mirror Pond’ by Ruth Geldard

LISP 4th Quarter 2020 Official Selection, Short Story, ‘The Mirror Pond’ by Ruth Geldard

Click HERE to read the interview with Ruth Geldard

The Mirror Pond

The new pond waits. Young willow fronds lightly brush the surface. Freshly aerated water rushes by and throws itself, gurgling and churning, into the deep end. Faith, a duty-full daughter, the one who stayed behind when her siblings flew the nest, has been tasked with finding an appropriate gift for her parents’ wedding anniversary. After much research she settles on Ghost Koi carp, an ornamental fish.

At the aquatic centre, Faith watches as a man attempts to catch her chosen fish. It looks stressful for both species. Two ruler-sized carp now sit without moving at the bottom of a bucket. Faith keeps the water-level straight as she carries it to her car. As she lets off the handbrake, she unclenches her jaw.

The man’s fist smashes through the glassy surface of the water causing a pressure change in the tank. Having no ears, the fish perceive the violence of this intrusion as vibrations through their bodies. Instinctively they shoal away from the threat.

Faith and her parents stand by at the shallow end of the pond to wait out the necessary acclimatisation time. Her father angles the bucket and eases the ominously still fish into the water, they vanish instantly, their absence leaving a sense of anti-climax, like of a failed magic trick.

The fish cling as if magnetised by the pond floor. The shock of the net, wrenching them from their natural element, into air’s choking suffocation, stuns them, they lie low.

Faith’s parents wait every day by the pond for the fish to surface. After several weeks, her mother says,

“I think we’ve seen the last of them.”

Faith appalled, says,

“No, surely we would have seen bodies.”

Her mother says with resignation “I expect the heron took them.”

Faith regrets ever getting them.

The following spring, the part-time gardener sees a fish. This sighting galvanises Faith’s mother into sitting by the pond every afternoon, where she is rewarded with a flash a gold and the flick of a metallic tail.

The cautious fish stay at the bottom of the pond exploring their new underworld, except in areas where weeds grow thick and dark. With a plentiful supply of food, and no predators, the juvenile fish double in size.

The fish gradually reveal more of their eel-grey bodies illuminated with pale gilt tracery, which like hieroglyphics, sometimes you can see their trademark skull patterns. Their close proximity spawns affection, and Faith’s father charmed by his wife’s dedication, joins her pond-side. They name the fish Charles and Diana, although they can’t tell them apart.

The Carp revel in the fishy equilibrium of their manmade world soon associating the sound vibrations of the other species with food, they rise up from their silky green depths, lift their massive bulk from the water and display their markings to best effect, before slowly submerging with a lazy barrel-roll.

Sometimes Faith’s mother says, “What did we do before the fish?” and during the long winters the fish-feeding ritual is replaced with separation-anxiety.

The years unravel. The pond, accommodates grandchildren laugh at their reflections and take turns to accidently-on-purpose fall in. One winter, Faith’s father is diagnosed with an incurable disease, a proud man, he deals with the physical inequities with dignity and courage. The family close ranks and carry on, although they never speak of it, they understand what’s coming.

At first the fish are unaware of external change to their environment, but the following spring, feeding times are missed, and water quality suffers when the pump malfunctions. Only the part-time gardener, struggling with the untended garden, remembers to chuck food in occasionally.

That summer, Faith’s father is in-and-out of hospital, the family gather and disperse with increasing frequency. One evening he kisses his wife goodnight remarks on what a pleasant day it was, turns over and quietly dies.

The unfiltered, water weakens the fish, and forces them back to the bottom. Weeds choke the pond making the search for food dangerous. The willow, its growth unchecked, blacks-out the sun. Nobody comes, not even the part-time gardener who stays away out of respect for the dead.

After her father’s death Faith understands his role as the lungs of the family, it was he who had kept them in-the-loop, spurred them on and stirred them up. His absence is as unbearable as an empty library.

Years of austerity and hoping for the best, keep the widow’s eyes dry during the funeral. Afterwards, she quietly withdraws into herself, gets thinner and unable to sleep, marks the passage of the long night hours with the World Service. Faith and her mother, spend a lot of time together, going through her father’s things, but as winter approaches, even memories pricked by old photographs cannot make Faith’s mother cry.

Hoping to lift her mother’s spirits, Faith arranges for a mobile hairdresser to come from the town. When Faith arrives at the house, her mother is shrouded in a towel and hair cutting is underway. The hairdresser is talking,

“I was so sorry to hear about your husband’s passing, such a shame, he was very popular in the village by all accounts….”

She stops dead as Faith enters the room. Becoming visibly pale, unable to finish her sentence, she starts a new one asking if she and Faith have ever met before. Faith says she is sure they haven’t. The hairdresser finishes the job in silence which feels awkward. Afterwards, Faith’s mother offers the woman a cup of coffee, as she takes the cup, she says,

“I’m not sure how to say this…but I have a gift…I sometimes get messages from…er, from …from the other side.”

Irritation and embarrassment rise simultaneously in mother and daughter as the woman continues,

“When your daughter walked in, your husband…he just broke through he has a message for you.”

Faith making eye-contact with her mother, says,

“Are you okay with this Mum?”

Her mother flushes, but before she can answer, the woman is off again.

“He’s saying something about alcohol, it’s a bit jumbled…”

Faith’s mother stiffens she almost never dinks alcohol.

But Faith remembering, says,

“When Dad was ill, didn’t you sometimes have a tot of brandy with him, at bedtime?”

Recollection lights her mother’s face.

The hairdresser scenting vindication, continues,

“He wants you to have a tot every night just like you did with him, to help you sleep.”

Faith’s mother draws a sharp breath.

“There’s more.” Says the hairdresser, Faith was afraid there might be…

“You know that moment when you’re just about to drop off to sleep – do you ever feel something brush your forehead? Well, that’s him! Letting you know that he’s there and not to be afraid.”

Something extraordinary is happens to Faith’s mother, a small shiny tear describes the contour of her cheek. This is amazing, Faith has never seen her mother cry. As the hairdresser-come-medium leaves, she says,

“One last thing, he is really upset about the state of the pond, he says there’s something bad in there.”

Faith standing at the edge of the pond pokes about with a stick in the opaque, blackish-green water, that smells of drains. The stick is useless, it’s ridiculous what does she expect to find? She has forgotten how big the pond is and how deep the deep end. And how did that bloody hairdresser get through her motherlike that? Her mother almost never talks about herself and when Faith attempts a personal question, she fidgets, and says something like,

“Changing the subject, did you ever plant those seedlings I gave you?”

And Faith vows never to go there again, but she always does.

Realising how overgrown the pond has become, Faith asks the gardener to clean it out and have a proper look…just in case.

A week later, Faith finds an answerphone message from her mother, something about the way she sucks in her breath between sentences, makes Faith pay attention.

“That awful woman was right, there was something in the pond! One of the fish must have tangled itself in the weeds at the bottom. It had been dead a while… it’s made an awful mess of the pond…”

The surviving fish goes to ground, instinct keeps him there. The water is foul he must conserve his energy so he slips into a state of suspended animation that lasts through till spring. When he wakes up, he knows he has been born again into a new world where he is king. All around gurgles brook-clear water rippling through the weeds in a ceaseless dance. Sunlight rains kaleidoscopically down. Best of all he can sense food and with his whole body he rises to the surface.

Sitting together by the side of the pond the two women wait for the fish, Faith’s mother is knitting again, and Faith watches her tender head, bent in concentration, as her lips follow the pattern; 2nd row: [K4. P2. K4. P1. K1. P1. K4. P2. K4.] repeat to end, her ball of wool slips unnoticed into the grass.

Creative Vampires – Art as Relaxation and other Old Chestnuts.

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Sample of the Pink Stone – bubble experiment (top) and procrastination head (Caen stone left and right views)

Lying in bed would be an altogether supreme experience if only one had a coloured pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling. G. K. Chesterton

There has been much talk of exercising, baking, gardening or making art to process our way through lockdown. There has been a veritable crafts bonanza, from crochet tutorials to forming eco flowerpots out of toilet rolls, I am half expecting a 1970s macrame revival.  Talking to my daughter about the pseudo creative pressures in lockdown she bemoaned also, the way the media keeps instructing us (the Swedish way) in how to be cosy…it all begins to feel as though these activities are another form of busyness, designed to distract.   

Art is the only way to run away without leaving home. Twyla Tharp

After a lifetime of dancing to creativity’s mysterious siren call, trying to negotiate or at times bargain with, in a vain attempt to unravel the enigmatic conundrum at its heart, I worry that it’s not being taken seriously enough, While I know well that any manual repetitive process has the beneficial quality of inducing concentration and focus, thereby distracting and allowing a breather from disturbing external reality, these processes are the precursor, they set up an environment that might encourage the flow. And flow is what it is about, that having spent a lifetime trying to access, negotiate its elusive mysterious properties and begin to understand its mysteries, I know about flow. It is the forerunner to creativity and can only be approached obliquely, from the side, or be crept up on and taken by surprise. To illustrate this, here is my story of the Pink Stone.

The artist’s world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep. Paul Strand

It arrived in the post, a massive sugary pink, doorstopper of a stone, I could barely pick it up. Awe inspiring but what can you do with awe? Especially awe that doesn’t translate into a meaningful idea. So, I took/dragged the stone to the sculpture studio run by *Donna Flemming. (See below)  I only knew that I wanted classical figures, but with huge expectation and not a little bravura, did not stop to consider what might best suit the stone, instead I went at it with my chisel trying to dominate, but as I tried to impose my will, the beautiful, semi-translucent stone, resisted me from the start.

It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way. Rollo may

Looking back, I had set myself up for a perfectly necessary lesson. In haste I roughed out a figure and while embarking on a second, a tranche of stone like a large slice of coconut ice, sheared off. When something like this happens in the workshop, silence falls, chisels stop in mid-air and people hold their breath, mindful of the gravity of the situation, while using humour to cover what is unavoidably a gobsmackingly humiliating experience.

The stone always lets us know we are not in control, and now it was saying (accompanied by that awful claxon noise on quiz shows when someone gets the answer wrong) forget it, you’re going about this the wrong way.  Chastened, I took the evidence of my failed endeavour home, plonked it on the worktop in the kitchen and moved on, making in quick succession smaller, less pretentious works, although I couldn’t seem to finish anything.

Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor. Dr Alexis Carrel

But readers, every time I passed the pink sone, it kept looking at me, whispering alluring things, but on a frequency I couldn’t decipher. At about this time I hit a proper dry spell – creatively speaking a barren dessert. Now as an old-timer, I’ve been here before but when the creative well dries up it has uncanny knack of convincing you, that this time, is the one you won’t be coming back from. There was only one thing for it – cleaning with intent, this inevitably led to a stocktake of my eclectic hoarding and then naturally to Ebaying like a pro, all displacement activities, conducive and essential in the weathering of a creative drought.

Art disturbs, science reassures. Georges Braque

And then one day, out of the blue, as I walked into the kitchen, I saw a vision in the pink stone, the two rough heads had become frothy bubbles, the whole nature of the stone was transformed into something airy and weightless, and there it was, an urge to coax that stone into new exciting floaty shapes. I have learnt never to pass up on a creative urge, so I began to research, I read, marked learned and inwardly digested the science and geometry of bubbles. I investigated, mapped and drew their amazing geometric shapes which were so unlike the cipher for bubbles, (round balls) that I had previously carried in my mind until then.

Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain. Carl G. Jung

Even so, approaching the pink stone again was intimidating, as now I knew that it was riven with secret fault lines just waiting to catch my chisel the wrong way and collapse in on itself. I cut off a small sample piece of the stone and started again, this time with no expectation, just a feeling, willing my way around it, I began to fashion the first experimental bubble.

This time once I got going in my little one-person studio with Radio 2 purring in the background, it was effortless – I can honestly say that the stone began to shape itself, passive and creamy under my chisel it no longer resisted me, I was under its skin and at some point, I lost myself entirely, absorbed into the process of the stone becoming a bubble. No even that’s not specific enough – I was the stone becoming the bubble.  

Art is the triumph over chaos. John Cheever

I think what I am trying to say is while the lockdown has forced us all inwards, given us time to reflect, slow down and focus, inadvertently affording us a perfect environment for flow to flourish and creativity to seed, but with all the exhortations from the media to be creative during this time, there is a danger of turning precious creativity into a benign commodity, synonymous with Hygge and leisurewear, which would ultimately de-mysticise and devalue it. The pressure cooker constraints of lockdown are just the beginning, the end product is much harder won.

My sincere thanks to Donna Fleming* and her Sculpture Studio https://www.facebook.com/donna.fleming.568

Reader’s Marks – Fair Use or Foul Play?

My eldest daughter’s, perhaps first, expression of equestrian longing on the way to becoming a fine horsewoman.

There is a feebler but still more irritating form of outrage upon books in public libraries, which consists in scrawling on the margins the vapid and frivolous criticisms or opinions of the reader, who often unconsciously gives evidence that he is incapable of appreciating what he reads. ~”The Sufferings and Death of Books,” Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, 1890 August 30th

It was a Ladybird book that led to my first transgression – with a soppy story that couldn’t hold my attention, so I wrote a better one. Oh, the joy of scrawling over the insect-covered flyleaves, imprinting myself forever into the book with my special preschool calligraphy. My parents were understandably not amused.

A book earmarked is art – reading art. Oscar Wilde

Fast forward to lockdown late-night me, Twitter-scrolling in the dark, coming across a wonderful hashtag about reader’s habits including, page corner folding, spine breaking, eating while reading and doodling etc. I was amazed at how polarised this discussion became and just how passionate people were on both sides of the debate, with equal amounts of zeal and bile. And while I agree that coming across a darkened with grease, transparent patch of vintage peanut butter, in the middle of an engrossing passage is disconcerting, and I would definitely frown on wanton desecration, I should make clear that I am definitely in the zeal camp.

All books are self help books. Frank Arricale

When I went looking for and found evidence of my own youthful calligraphic interventions, I soon realised why. Writing and drawing holds not only an essence of the author, but I believe, an ability like a forgotten scent, that can transport you back yourself, to that other version you had forgotten about, or open a window on to another reader’s mysterious story. It also due in part to the aesthetic loveliness of ageing in this context. Old books with their frowsy comforting scent, watercolour age spots, or the dogeared corner of a page are a timeline that tracks and documents age, wear and evidence of pre-loved use.

Your shadow left on the pages of every book you read. Dr. Sun Wolf

For me, reader’s marks, including stains, drawings and even as in the back of one book, someone’s national insurance number, are also a response to the book, in a similar way that the viewer of an artwork enters into a dialogue, the act of which is necessary to complete the work. When a reader writes in a book, he is responding in kind.

A dirty book is rarely dusty. Author unknown

I have while travelling in the past, sometimes got myself into a difficult situation, but wherever I have been in the world there has always been a second-hand bookshop with worn out, knackered old copies of Maeve Binchy’s books, (especially, Light a Penny Candle) what an honour then that these books get passed from hand to hand, extending their life, accumulating human DNA in the form of tears or perhaps sweat. And yes, they are filthy, but in this case, evidence of use, works as authentication of the book’s value. No one throws these books away until their pages drop out. And reader they have saved me on more than one occasion.

There are books in which the footnotes or the comments, scrawled by some reader’s hand in the margins, are more interesting than the text. George Santayana

 I want to share with you my treasury some of some wonderful and spontaneous interventions that only enhance my sensory reading pleasure. My favourite is the copy of Little Women (I have collected several versions), but oh the delight of finding three generations of the Hutchins’ family represented inside the cover, and Natalie’s obvious pride of ownership. Despite the wear and tear on this copy, I think if Louisa May Alcott were looking on, she would approve.  

Always look on the bright side of life – otherwise it will be too dark to read. Author unknown

My grandson’s intervention (and priceless treasure) into my university sketchbook.

I took this book out of the school library as a teen and recently came across this copy on Ebay. I could hardly believe it when I found the lady author’s hand on the fly leaf, dated a year after publication!

My first attempt at scaling up an illustration for a painting, from The Observer’s Book of Wild Animals.

Little Women, with three generations of the Hutchins family represented here.

New Work – Para in upcoming Paper Trail Exhibition.

Paper Trail Exhibition                                                                                                                        August 25, 2020 – February 27, 2021                                                                                                  Maidstone Museum,                                                                                                                              St Faith’s St, Maidstone                                                                                                                      ME14 1LH, UK                                                                                                                                        100 pieces of heritage paper, some from Maidstone mills, have been given to 100 artists.Inspired by the year the paper was produced, what have they made?

Paper Trail: Ruth Geldard

One of my earliest memories is of sucking my thumb while cradling a piece of Royal blue silk to my nose, breathing its exotic mustiness. I wouldn’t sleep without it and clung on until it was a tiny shred of its former self. The former self being a large, men’s handkerchief fashioned from World War Two parachute silk. The silk was obtained by my mother, Jessie Martin, nee Chapman, who in the year this paper was made, was serving in the W.A.F. Throughout my childhood I (wrongly) believed that she had packed parachutes as part of the war effort. In fact, she supervised twenty-two men did the parachute packing. When my mother corrected my version of events, I remember being absurdly disappointed and it was only as an adult that I realised what a huge responsibility her job must have been.

 

For more information: see below.

Para – 2020. Watercolour, pencils and gold thread on archive 1940s watercolour paper.https://appletye.org/category/news/