Who, where, how?

This morning brings memory moments; the blue tinge in the departing  night sky takes me to azure mornings in a sleepy Rome, where the August heat is beginning to wake up, where  trash is being collected and stalls set up. The city's statues seem to be yawning and reaching for their espresso, so I join in -profligate in my desire to sit and watch as the sun and fellow tourists appear around the Pantheon.

From here my mind takes me to an icy New York, to steam rising from the subways, to tracks of snow along the sidewalk, to layers of insulation with boots, coats, hats and gloves, and the diner with breakfasts that spread from here to eternity along the counter. The city that never sleeps wakes with one eye open, mine are filled with jet lag however, and I stumble over my order overwhelmed with the choice and settling for bacon of some sort, some eggs and probably maple syrup.

These memories bring me back to where I walk. I realise the people waking braced against the cold, the shops readying for the day - lights flickering on, shutters raising, and others emerging from their houses and trimmed gardens for work coughing and buttoning up. It strikes me that in the last few months I have got to know where I live more precisely, I have begun to look around me. For a long time my surroundings were a contructed map that took in where I worked and placed it side by side with my house - as if I moved seamlessly from one to the other, and adjacent to the supermarket and the high street. This is easy to do with a commute - you remove the details of the distance, the connection with the world around you. Now I have begun to look.

Yesterday I used my breaks to sketch where I was - the results are rushed of course, but they began to deconstruct my reason for being there through the surroundings in which I found myself. Quick sketches can become drawings, can become a way of understanding how you are in the world by your responses to what you see. 

Memory moments are good, they contrast people and places, this helps us realise and understand who and where we are. Dreams, too, can be fun - they take us beyond  out horizons and make us want to feel a bit more. Yet I worry of aspiration - I worry of the comparison that assumes rights and wrongs, that deals in the absolutes of better and worse, not the subtleties of difference and nuance. The journey is completed by the return, and the exotic is only so through contrast. Sunny memories are created on days without rain, this is not to say that it doesn't, it won't, it can't rain. 

So as my morning can take me to the steps of the Duomo in Florence, gelato in hand with the warmth of midnight and the laughter of revellers around me; it is this memory that let's me see the sneeze of the secretary, the shuffle of the labourer, the chuckle of the shop keeper, and the lilac in the sunrise. Though I may dream of these moments I use them to season my day - enhancing the flavour, not to drown it out.

Love dammit!

Normally I get my wife to proof read these posts. She likes to pick up my typos (although, as I type them up again I probably don't give a fair representation of her ability to spot my mistakes), but I also like her to read them through to ensure that I haven't been too obscure, self-indulgent or even narcissistic; and also because I want her opinion... cos' it's important.

As she drove off this morning the rosy fingers of dawn stretched over the close. The pink hue gave a glow and warmth to a freezing morning, and bathed her departure with poingance. On a day that heralds some of the worst weather the country has experienced, and a day that I (and many, many others before me) have often refered to as a Hallmark Holiday I thought this may be significant (- or coincidental, but today I'm going with significant), after all on Valentine's day the world was covered by a rose tint.

If I am naturally negative, brooding and introspective my wife has always been outlooking, warm and quick to see the best in the world. For many years I often used to claim she had a rosy vision of the world. But she is much more that this stereotype (aren't we all), and though the joy and love of the light was apt this morning, her favourite flowers are Cala-Lillies (and I'm not even going to pretend I've spelt that right) and here we get to her depths. These flowers are elegant in nature, sculpted and fragrent with pollen; they are controlled while those around them are erratic and chaos, but they contain passion within, and have a scent of depth and bass perfume; they are complexity in the guise of simplicity, and they are beautiful.

This is my wife - more than she seems and all that she seems; a paradox that moves quicksilver from innocence to experience, from joy to rage to laughter and off in so many directions. She is my critic and my support, certain and insecure, and most awake when she most craves sleep.

I'm not good at outpouring of emotion - too quick to irony and caustic comment, but without my wife I could not have found who I am, and could not be who I have become - for good or ill. I love her.

As the storm gathers I will cling to her the tighter and my joy will be that she clings back.

What you looking at?

Melancholy can bring an air of sharpness to the world around you; an extra strong mint for the eyes. The fading snow that lies on the ground brings such a feeling. Whilst cold settles around the eyes, making lids and lashes tingle, the snow creates microcosms of canyons and crevices where the ground and grass push through. The snowy residue inverts and highlights the contours of the ground and frames the day with a distinct line of ground.

The warmth of the coach begins to thaw the face as I sit here, but there is a second on alighting when my view is pointed, the cold on my eyes bearing down on my surroundings, while my brain is woken by the warmth that still bares the freshness of the outside. 

Today I see the incongruity I love in landscape and terrace; the potter-pattering of nature that lifts the everyday through contrast and disguise. My paintings of landscape look for the oddness of beauty: modern architecture on the face of a storm; a Cathedral's haunting presence; a dual carriageway at sunset and flowers in the dark. Nature is beautiful I know, but life is more complex than that - for every dramatic landscape there is the hardship of day-to-day life; for every slick city there are those who are downtrodden - and more, within lives of toil there are moments of joy.

Landscape can be dominated by the weather (much like we are at the present), and painters I think of: Turner, Constable, Ceazanne and Monet, all knew how light would change the scene. Some worked quickly and in the scene, others sketched then worked up later, but all acknowledged how quickly things could change. Today we work in different mediums and with a more graphic sensibility, but still we look for a moment that can tell us more than a snapshot, for a moment that tells us how we engage with this great force that surrounds us and has the capacity to take away what we know overnight. So the dullness of an English winter over graffiti on a wall - the clouds broody and resentful; a lamplight shimmering over the river as dusk falls and cranes bob for apples behind; a sheep munching at a crisp packet; snow fading to a puddle in a second of sunbright sunlight; these are moments that make us feel lifted and small, safe and disconcerted.  

These are our surroundings and we should get to know them. 

Release.

I'm buzzing a little this morning. I got up and finished the painting - ploughing straight through and not feeling the need to go back to bed. I worked the tricky details without too much swearing and self abuse (or for those of you with a certain frame of mind, recrimination), I found an answer to the texture problem I was chewing over yesterday, and I got a gut feeling it was right.

I'm pleased it's finished - partly because it should be - I was working from a watercolour sketch so it was all planned out; but mainly because  I didn't feel I wanted to stop. I mean I wanted to finish it, that was what I was working toward, but I didn't want to stop adding and tweaking, blending and smoothing. I enjoyed the moments of precision with my breath regulated for a steady hand, I enjoyed the freedom of splurging colour and mussing it into another, I enjoyed letting my brush take over to solve a problem I couldn't quite see it in my head. In short it didn't occur to me to stop, or to do anything else, or to have a rest and come back; I loved the process and wanted to see it through. 

This burst of enthusiasm is a relief; it reminds me of how much I love doing this, how much painting takes my emotion and energy and thought and parcels it up in a package that I love to slowly unwrap. Painting like this is a release, it opens up a little of who I am and who I want to be. It let's me see myself in action - and critique that person when I need (as well as giving the odd pat on the back). 

In this way painting differs from illustration - it is a personal expression, whilst illustration is my interpretation of a story or tale - whether mine or someone else's; it requires me to consider the meaning, adaption and complementing of the text. This brings another sort of delight - the exercise of imagination and the freedom to explore, but it also contains the pressure for accuracy and execution. Doubt is a constant companion, and accuracy a necessity - illustration is not worked out on the page in the same way.

I suppose the other reason I'm feeling good is that the painting seems to work, and at one (several) point(s) that didn't seem likely. So, as with all disasters, it's nice to avert the worse in favour of the best. 

Framed.

Sunlight blazes today - icy, the pause before the oncoming storms by all accounts. I'm out of the house earlier today, having painted again, to get some paintings framed. 

The week away from painting has been resolved with a weekend of snooze - maybe the illness is clearing, or maybe it's the chance to splurge on canvas, but I feel ready to engage again. I'm painting from a prepared sketch that I've been meaning to do for a while, so it has the benefit of me not having to worry about composition and colour, but simply being able to let the paint breathe and mingle with only loose guidance from me. Later in the week will bring the fiddly detail, and the need to focus - for now I can be relaxed and spontaneous (interestingly the predictive text predicted the word 'spontaneous' from 's', so maybe not so much eh?).

A chance meeting over the weekend has brought the opportunity for me to hang my paintings in a space outside my house - hence the need to get the watercolours framed. There's no cash yet, but they'll be seen, and maybe noticed. It also gives me an excuse to kick myself up the arse and get commercial stuff sorted - frames, cards, costs and so on.

This is stuff that always seems secondary, but - you know, is quite important if you want to get your stuff out there. I've mentioned before that it screws with my head a bit making a work of art out of an art work if you know what I mean, but there has to be some thought and purpose in the process, a re-evaluation of what you hope people will see and think. 

The trouble is firstly it makes you go back to a piece that you thought was good, and now maybe you start to doubt it; and secondly the nagging thought that what you decide now may ruin the overall effect. I mean there is a time pressure as you choose frames, mounting and so on, and although I really think when it comes to colour gut instinct is 90% of the choice, that other 10% can really make itself known if there's a second of doubt. 

So you pause, breathe, go with the gut, and hope in ten days you won't hate what you chose, or worse, what you painted. After all, this has to be done, you can't just paint for yourself forever... can you? 

Escape notes.

The guy in front of me has headphones on. The music is really loud and I keep feeling the music is escaping. The notes seem to run along his should and down his arms before jumping high into the carriage. Once out they like to sprint and leapfrog and tumble over and perform acrobatics on top of morning heads that nod and bounce with the rhythm of the train.

I find it hard to concentrate this morning; I am drifting in and out of consciousness, trying to latch on to a train of thought that will pull me into the day - or as my spell check claims, I am frothy. The notes seem to gather around me, on the floor and seats and climbing up onto the windows.  They are playful, as if ready for the weekend, and unconcerned about the trivialities of life.

I try not to make eye contact as now is too early - if I am to make my way through the day this motley crew of minuets, staves, crotchets, notes and minims must not be allowed to distract and divert me from the task I must perform. 

Blinking I confront the hallucinatory nature of this scenario and briefly stop to consider this image as voice(s), or other symptoms of unhealthy thinking. But then a note somersaults from the seat and delivers two twists and a pike before landing in scale.

This bout of surrealism is my way of exercising - some pound the gym, flexing and stretching muscles that are really beyond their evolutionary sell by date; others test, break and extend their stamina in preparation for the Armageddon that will surely fall. I indulge in whimsy and what if - I provoke my tolerance of what is and what could be through absurdity and extension. This is hard as sleep falls over my eyes, but fortunately dream state and unconscious are there to spot me.

The notes begin to pickpocket the other passengers, and I wonder, with a shudder, what they might find. 

Crowded.

Commuting takes its toll. Passengers traipse on and off. A single delay causes chaos - with bodies clambering on and squeezing into any space that remains. Our natural tendency towards personal space is invaded - instead replaced with a band of guilt that clings to all who are forced to press, knock, nudge or (in extreme situations) tackle other people.

A film of anxiety covers these travellers, stemming from the unsettling lateness of the train; the tiny disruption to hundreds of schedules which place us all on edge - making us ask will we be on time?

There is a sense of doom that pervades the carriage. These early risers, who wish to ensure they have time to arrive, or who start at the most ungodly hour, are certain in the pattern of their day, and have already coloured it with hues of grey. 

Here, at the back end of the week - still far from the weekend'a shore, we bob in expectation of the expected, contemplating the variety of our free time. In my moments of whimsy I have images of deserts and paradise that are being rendered in my mind, yet my body is putting up its hand to ask for leave to sleep.

I begin to fear delay and waste again - knowing I need to find time for expression. A hurried outline on a canvas awaits - a declaration of intent that bind a me to my purpose over the the will of my body. 

And now I have a cough - ticklish and violent, this is a symptom of a body that needs to rest, and a mind afraid to stop - the two working brilliantly in equilibrium against each other to wake my lungs and fog my thoughs. 

Sheeessh.

Ugh.

Shitty weather this morning. The train is more crowded - a coincidence or have more people sought to avoid the downpour? I found myself sketching briefly yesterday as I waited to meet my wife. It was quick, it was vague, but the quick flurry of marks on the page gave me a lift.

Painting after work always seems harder to justify - like I'm going through the motions, and not really producing my best stuff. So this week is unproductive - a bad thing I would suggest.

The rain is battering what is left of night outside. Though I know the days are getting longer it still feels like the night is thicker at the moment; I think this is because it bookends my day at the moment, it feels more present to me. The lost mornings are replaced by an eagerness to get to the end of the shift and tick off another day. 

The sun rises with potential however, as a project arrived through the post last night. Stories to read and illustrate - something to sink my teeth into. And next week sees a return to normal patterns. I hold my breath for this week and tightly cross my fingers, looking forward to the opportunity to read and doodle ideas, before finalising my submissions. 

It's not that my mind stops working or trying to create, it's just that without the art to focus it I drift towards systems and structures, and ways of doing things better. This is not where I want to go - I can, but it's a cul de sac, and once in there it is harder to escape. Before you know it, what is not important to you becomes vital to the pattern of your day. I want to create new worlds, people and situations - not protocols, increased efficiency and behaviours.

With this reminder ringing in my ears I go forth to play my part, but already ideas for images flicker behind my eyes. 

Mornings.

He sits, his fingers playing the strings of an imaginary instrument. For now he is absorbed in the world inside his head - the plink and plonk of emotion that draws something from within. Crescendo and diminuendo play out in his eyebrows. This is how he enters the day.

Beside him sits a model in all but job, caught in his thoughts and dreams. Brooding eyes and angular features reveal his worry and anxiety, while his labourers clothes hide his feelings. Sporadically his eyes flash with the passion of anger that gives a glimpse into the argument that rages internally. On the outside arms and forehead are scrunched defensively, threatening a protection, in fear of the world that looks in. 

Standing to my left a woman bites her nails as pensive eyes flicker around  the carriage aware of who and what lies around. Maybe she seeks to avoid missing her stop again - a second time being too embarrassing for an office that has not yet embraced her worth. Or maybe she is being followed and she has seen him on the carriage and seeks to make her escape from the door. As we pull up to the stop she readies to bolt. 

The crowd disperses as we draw out of the tunnels, and the signs of dawn are conveyed by the slow drawing of a watered brush across the night, thinning the black to a bluey grey; broken by light yellows creep into the sky - mingling to reveal blues and reds and whites. The camera pulls back on the streets turning closely lit pools to wide angle panorama of terraces and slowly waking commerce. Curtains are drawn back, shops are opened, cranes begin to move and people begin to stretch.

Is there insight to all this? I suspect not really. Though this week I start work early, so the painting is lost to the evenings - maybe I need to wake my imagination at day break and indulge myself with creative nourishment? Without the flourish of my fingers and wrist with pencil and brush I find the dancing words and idle speculation my best hope for a satisfying breakfast that will see me through the day. I tuck in.

The game.

An early morning commute. Dark skies as I walk through what's left of the night, then to the train, and it occurs to me that we have extended our houses to corridors of neon and travelways of fabric seats with lit carriages and dashboards. Home to hub to transport to work.

The outside begins to wake up as my eyes adjust to the creeping light. Sunrise brings a palette of pink and purples as the clouds splash over the growing light. The sky plays tricks with perspective, creating layer upon layer and reaching back further than feels comfortable. Wind moves the wisps into streaks and then into Islands on which worlds may exist. These are world in quicktime, their civilisations rising and falling in seconds as continents drift and evolve; the plate tectonics determining wars, governments and art.

This Ariel geography ripples across the sky and I reflect on a weekend of travel, revel and excitement. I have returned from an adventure - night journeys, cheap hotels, a city en mass and the woman I love. A rugby international, something I have long wanted to see: waking in the morning, walking to the city - becoming part of a tide of others; spotting the rival colours sported and hearing the harmony of accents. It begins, as is typical of my life, in a pub. I drink the drink, hear the voices, the discussion, the anticipation.

Then the street: vendors, queues, more pubs - another drink, and another. There is warmth now, and nudges and spills are well met and give rise to acknowledgment and halloos. The day builds in excitement - consideration and prediction of the game with photo ops, selfies, silly hats and scarfs. Faces are painted, tribes evolve, and we get closer and closer to the stadium. People pour in from all directions, music is played, food is prep-ed, and drinks are pre-poured, ready for the rush. 

Then the stage and the theatre. The field stretches out its fingers painted with big screens and neon advertising. The roof is shut, the atmosphere enclosed and beginning to murmur. The players practice, the crowd moves from bar to seats. Music basked in tradition and popularity calls out. The noise is expected and elated. The gladiators arrive surrounded by fanfare, explosion and flames. Anthems are sung, memories recalled and created, then - almost too soon we are ready to begin.  

The game is hard, is physical, is frenetic, inspired and frustrating. The crowd ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime:-drunken expostulation, enraged shrieks, sage commentary and culminating in beautiful harmony as the game draws to the end. 

Having had our fill we stream out, amongst those dressed for the weather and those dressed for the night, to refill the pubs and bars. We go to watch the other game, to pick apart the experience, to make memories of what we have seen. 

We watch lives around us together, filling in the gaps in our knowledge with speculation and imagination. Flagging now we drink on, before a walk back in the rain - accompanied by song and dance (not in tune, and stepped with no skill) and fall gratefully into a sleep inspired by exhaustion, drink, excitement and the glow of the adventure. 

The clouds have moved in quick succession, pulling myriad faces as the whim of emotion pulses through them. Beneath we are left breathless, but happy.