Machrihanish

I went to Machrihanish for a rest. I hadn’t been feeling great and several life events had knocked me a wee bit. The sea always restores me, the big clout of a wave in our cold northern waters blasts the mind clear of all sorts of rubbish. I swam as soon as I got there, and again the next morning with snorkel, mask and fins - really getting into it.

Walking back to my glamping site, I came across two young girls with bikes. “Did you swim?” they asked.
“I did” I replied.
“Was there a rip current?” they asked.

“Not where I went in,” I replied.
One girl asked further: “Where did you go in?”
“You know where the river cuts across the sand into the sea?” I asked. “Yeah,” they both replied.
“Well just beyond that - where the high sand dunes start there’s a big tree trunk lying on the beach. I left my clothes there and swam opposite that.”

All the swimming happened before I noticed the dead guillemots, soft, dark, dark brown and white, their beaks shut tight, their small flat feet lifeless. They had died from bird flu. All the air on the beach was suddenly changed, sucked away, still as a stone. I was moved beyond words. Some kinship about pandemics stirred within me, and I started to draw - I hardly knew what. I was not about to draw dead birds.

One dead Guillemot at my feet.

But the paintings came, easily, quietly once I was home and the memory lent them more calm than I could muster on the spot. There is a resignation to strange aspects of nature which contributes a beauty that can only be perceived if we accept.

I Sometimes Remember My Dreams and am Astonished to Read them Later.

On 6th March 2020 I dreamed…

I was at a party - a desultory party in small rooms connected by short flights of stairs. The place was drab and there was piped music. I wandered up some stairs to a room where there were five people and myself and some drinks in glasses.

I wanted to dance and came hopefully up to three of the men - one at a time. They none of them wanted to dance. Reluctantly the third guy - a tall old hippy in a long coat with a shock of grey hair and a big belly - stood while I took his right hand across from my right hand and started to jive a little. He smirked nastily and butted his belly up against mine. I left him.

I looked for a drink and found a pail of water with some pint glasses steeping in it. I swished around to take out a glass to drink but noticed there were flecks of spittle on the surface of the water. A man instantly came along and took the glass and then the whole bucket away warning that this was not for drinking.

Somehow I was in a train station. I was late for catching a train to Russia at 2 o’clock. There were two levels in the station - downstairs had no trains and was full of people. I ran upstairs where the trains left from deserted bus stances on a deserted plane behind a wall. I hitched myself up onto the wall and the faces of two beautiful, dark-skinned women with Romany faces and head scarves came riding on ponies right up to my face over the wall. They were mother and daughter. They did not smile nor respond. I understood that they were going to Russia by pony and had not caught the train. They turned their animals off to my left and rode away.

In desperation I looked behind them for the 2 o’clock train to Russia but there was only an empty, old-fashioned train standing there alone. I rushed down to the lower level again and at once realised my stupidity in noticing there were no trains down there. I also knew that by now my train would have left as it was ten past two.

I rushed up concrete steps once again, pushing along with people on my left and the wall on my right. The surroundings were all dingey and colourless. I knew for certain when I once again looked out over the wall for my train, that it had gone. I mentally blamed myself for allowing people to hold me back.

I realise now, two years later, awake and not dreaming, that really, only the final line of this saga needs to be remembered.

My Own Heifer

I went to the Apple Store in Glasgow. I was not feeling confident about discussing my intention to change from using the the pc computer I had used for years, to buying a Mackintosh computer. No facility for managing my computer has ever arrived for me, and the news that creative people get along better with the Mac system had encouraged me to take the leap and change. I am an artist who favours any analogue task over all digital activities.

To put paid to any possible misunderstanding with the Apple Store representative, I started with: “I’m not a geek...” intending that he would understand the implication of this statement and adjust his vocabulary accordingly. “Yes you are.” he interrupted. My brain froze. The entire continuation of his spiel consisted of convincing me how electronically literate I was. He moved on to discuss solid state systems and progressed to various amounts of megabytes and gigs. I barely distinguished anything meaningful out of all that he said., nor could have cared less about the detail. I left prematurely having learned nothing and not even having attempted a shot at a laptop I had been considering.

I stood outside on Buchanan Street, awash with unwanted responses. I would go and visit the Mitchell Library - the analogue antidote. It was a sort of giving up, a retreat from the Rubicon, but my spirits lifted in the up-draught of the M8 motorway hurtling through Charing Cross as I cut across the street and swung through the double doors of the library. Books I can manage.

I have often carried out research there. It makes a welcome change from working online. Books stay still - you are not required to toggle between them.

“Can I help you?” a man in the foyer said. I let him know that it was a reference section I was looking for - a place with a thesaurus. He declared the fourth floor would have what I wanted.

I turned towards the staircase but it was cordoned off. Internal renovation was underway in the building which may have accounted for something. So I turned the other way and wandered off. He called after me: “I thought you were following me...” So I followed him. He got to a corner. “Go down there and turn right when you get to the carpeted bit. There’s a lift there.” I moved down behind another woman who was also looking for a lift and seemed equally bewildered. We met with closed double doors and no sign of a “carpeted bit”. She stopped and half turned to me...unsure. “This is my first time here.” she said.

I sighed and went back to get the guy. He was marching towards me, impatient. He burst into a room through the double doors ahead of us and veered right. “Over there behind the box,” he said. I turned to look. The woman also looked. “The box?” I said. “Do you mean the pillar?” He walked away, not answering.

I walked unhopefully on and a box did become evident. It was a Tardis-sized plywood construction. A workman came along and forced one of its sides open. He went in as I approached. Beyond the box there was indeed the door of a lift. However, the buttons to call for the lift were barricaded off within the confines of the Tardis.

I hesitated, then raised my voice a little to carry through the plywood. “Is the lift working?” Silence. Pause. “Is the lift working,” I ventured on “because, if it is....the buttons are behind your plywood box?” Another pause. Fingers then grasped the plywood wall from the inside and heaved it inwards four inches or so, revealing the lift call buttons on the wall.

Becoming steadily less sure of anything that I had previously known to be a reliable element of my life, I pressed the lift button and gained the fourth floor. Many volumes of thesaurus were there. I hefted a large one with two hands and took a seat. Vaguely I thumbed through the back pages with no real purpose in mind other than to rediscover the closer fit of some attitude that I could confidently inhabit. I waited for the kiss of some familiar facility to arrive and settle, bringing order to my internal disarray. Nothing happened... nothing came. I realised that my attributes and skill with language were not going to make a consoling appearance.

With a sinking feeling I looked up phrases about failure, disillusion, becoming disarmed, not being able to leverage the familiar, and I struck on a gem - smiling up at me there, from the mighty pages. I started to write, and the story came easily because I had just walked through it, Gradually, very gradually, words unfurled onto the page. The process hauled back around me an air more convincing of all that I am. The process diffused the previous empty conclusion.... that I couldn’t even plough with my own heifer.

September Sunday

I watched a programme about hypnotherapy on the television at 0330 in the dark.  I failed to note the irony.  Padding back to bed I tried not to hunch up to keep sleeplessness out, and I succeeded, waking at about nine. My life is not comfortable. We are experiencing a global pandemic. I have had the disease and tended it by myself for three weeks before calling an ambulance. I am better now but untrusting about everything I previously knew about my own safety.

My days are dotted with small incentives, like weymerks (ancient Scots coins reinvented by sculptor John Behm as kists of small  coin rewards hidden along the route of the Southern Upland Way).   So yesterday I had the umph to make a new batch of muesli, with roasted coconut shavings and quality organic oatmeal.  This morning I reap the benefit of that.  Yesterday evening saw the last proving of my batch of focaccia.  So lunch with good bread and will be another weymark.  I have slowly been tackling an overgrown section of the lower part of my unruly garden.  I filled 6 sacks with pernicious weeds and couch grass.  Those bags were leaning together at the bottom of the garden - my garden is on a perpetual slope. But yesterday I dragged up these sacks to a more accessible place for the bin collection on Monday - another small weymerk, as I do not have to tackle the whole slope with them, all six, this evening.  

These small boosts to the well being of the current moment fetch me onwards through the day, the weekend in particular, hand over hand like a human chain passing on a precarious package.  They are talismen against loneliness and loss.

It’s difficult for me to settle to rest, living by myself.  I certainly cannot sleep during the day, but today I do not need sleep.  However, I do need rest, how shall I manage to achieve that?

It is mid September and we have an Indian summer here in Scotland where my wooden home quietly regards the Islands of Bute and Arran over the long silver stretch of salt water which is The Firth of Clyde.  How can I be so fortunate?  You cannot breathe in good fortune every single day, however, and allow the exhalation of pure joy. Humans grow quickly jaded with one joy and soon start the restless search for the next.  

I can sit outside and let the fresh sea air do its age old work, and I have my soup here and my focaccia - on two new lovely pieces of Danish pottery which I recently bought.  “I am resting here, “ I hesitantly think, because it is warm, I am comfortable, I have my lunch, glasses and yesterday’s newspaper.  I could stay, I could stay….

In September, wasps can be a bother.  Being a flicker and a swatter, it occurs to me to preempt that by placing the flat side plate on top of the soup bowl, to obliterate any temptation towards the soup dregs to the wasp which is careering around.

There is to be no resting, I flick and swat, and to my horror, swipe the side plate off the bowl and onto the concrete slabs of my verandah.  There is no saying the distress which this causes me.  I lean forward, put my head in my hands and groan out loud.

Abruptly I leave and go indoors to do some ironing.  Then, just as quickly,  I recover some sense of proportion.  

I pick up the plate which has a coin sized piece chipped out of the rim.  I center myself and seek out my sketchbook.  I sketch the plate with its chip and its beautiful  pale lines hand drawn by the potter.  And through the drawing of it, remember who and what I am - or who and what I now am.

I remember the pieces of my old leather jacket I was cutting up and stitching into a new piece of research for my next exhibition, and resolve to bring them out to my resting station on the verandah and reclaim my mood.

Then I write this blog. 

Sore Ankle

There’s news at last that being isolated and restricted is going to come to an end in April hopefully. I’m dying for a break away...I remember my last break away to Arisaig where I seriously damaged my ankle on an epic walk. This is the picture of my world the following day:

I am wearing my walking boots in a lounge bar, lying along a short couch with my legs hanging over the end. Every so often the hilarious proprietor of the B&B comes in to remark on the difference between laziness and taking a rest, or some other such drollery. He has already remarked that I should take myself off to FortWilliam on the bus, “have a wee look around the shops...” he says. He wants me out. There is a notice in the lounge ‘No food to be consumed here’.

“I’ve been to Fort William,” I answer thinly, implying more than he cares to grasp. But my foot is so terribly painful that I know I should stay here and recover for a complete day before attempting to walk to the train tomorrow. If I were only left in peace.

Thankfully I have a great novel, Colm Tóibín’s Nora Webster, but every so often I get the notion that my foot is feeling much better and I swing my legs down and start to stand. It is a pitiful sight. The ankle is not much better. I have the utmost difficulty walking.

I have time to ruminate while prone here of course. I appear to be distracted by myself which is a pitfall of lone travel. I don’t intend it to be this way, but it turns out that it is and I’m grid-locked in the internal discussion. So I’ve gone back to reading my book, and here, the Irish author Colm Tóibín is writing about the very same thing. I am also Irish, although I now live in Scotland, and Irish writing continues to sustain me.

In this excellent book he is discussing the pumped up nature of politicians or the personal power attributed to them by others “As they stood by the Minister (Dr Ryan, Minister for Finance) in all his considered grace in the hallway they became less than themselves.” “Less than themselves...” Enough subject matter for a month in a cave much less four days in a B&B in Arisaig. ”Tóibin goes on to discuss Charles Haughey before he became Taoiseach of Ireland. Before his rise to political success, Tóibín mentions: “the ease with which the minister dismissed Haughey, saying “he was a young pup in too big a hurry with no roots in Fianna Fáil.” So, there was no apparent whiff of success about the man at that stage. And what about an epitaph then? What did Haughey believe about himself having reigned as Ireland’s premier, and indeed what did others believe about him at the end of his life? Had he grown into himself, had he grown greater than his apparent potential?

I remember my own father’s comment on Charles Haughey at the time of his death. Dad had the early stages of dementia by then and this condition provided him with as many violent swings between juvenile naivety and acid superiority as he had enjoyed for the whole of his former life.

“Look at him lying there with his nostrils on show,” remarked my Father, looking at a photo of the laid-out Haughey in a newspaper. No doubt my father was more than half aware that he would be in for a similar inadvertent display in the not too distant future. However he was not one for existential considerations, so I guessed he heard the remark about the laid-out Haughey from some somebody else. Nevertheless, he made it his own with poignant delivery.

Is there anyone who doesn’t compare what they are to what they think others are? Or compare what they think they are to what they think others think they are? And I know none of it matters in any case, but every step of the way I need to decide what to do - what steps to take, which decision to make, the next choice - and then dismissing all the other thinking, chose my action in favour of a spontaneity which will not lead back to being the person I believe I was, but have left behind. Choose my action with a new spontaneity born of finding my true inner self - devoid of ego? I can barely get the concept together enough to put it coherently down, never mind put it into action. But sometimes it bothers me. It bothered me yesterday. It doesn’t bother me so much today. My ankle hurts, and I want a bit of peace.

I Know of No Star

This is the track to Lighthouse A4272

In nautical terms a beacon sending beams of light out over the ocean, is letting the world know where it is. A lighthouse is a fixed point of recognition - a known place - pin-pointable on a map, which is immediately identifiable by the rhythmed signal of its light.

I have a fascination for lighthouses, beacons, nautical marks and buoys. Something about the certainty of knowing you can rely on them to know precisely where you are when at sea, and which passage is safe to take communicates itself to me as blind reassurance. So I made a jaunt to visit the Mull of Kintyre lighthouse - just to salute its fortitude, touch its massive curved side and to strain upwards from its base to admire its bearing. I did all these things. I even took a thumbnail cutting from a deep purple, flowering hebe which was bold enough in the lighthouse garden to resist all the Irish Sea could throw at it, and was blithely flowering. That tiny cutting now grows in my garden and I admire its fortitude too.

So...this affection - preoccupation even, of mine with the certainty of position - of safe passage - what could it be all about? I drew a blank on this one. I simply had no idea as to what forces were working on me except to be able to state with certainty that I was a hesitant person when it came to stating with conviction, my own direction. This dilemma must have been on my mind while I walked down the steep, blustery slope to the lighthouse. That lighthouse - so fixed! suddenly transfixed me. It occurred to me all at once that the position of the lighthouse is always a known one because it is on no journey...it is stock still. The question as to where I am, metaphysically speaking, is an altogether separate thing.

This apparently blazingly obvious realisation came suddenly to me as I was walking down the steep hill towards the lighthouse A4272 at the south end of the Mull of Kintyre. For reasons unknown to me at that time, this realisation freed up a longing in me. I was halted on the track leading down to the lighthouse, as though the immediate urge to continue had vanished. Sands settled differently inside me and I felt a silent temptation to weep but I did not succumb. It might seem unfounded. Some guard - ever on duty - at the access to my personal freedoms appeared to melt away. Suddenly...it seemed....”it might be safe to sail.”

The mistaken belief that “where it’s at” is always somewhere else, was the very thing which had always blocked me from completely inhabiting my own boat in my own harbour. I could not acquire the steadfast knowledge that I am in exactly the right place at the right time to strike out, to forge ahead and guide myself.

For me, the sudden thought that “it might be safe to sail...” gave rise to the handing over of the tiller to my own inner guide. It grew into the flowering of my commitment to myself and of an acknowledgement of the wealth of wisdom and experience hoisted about my person which would seize my unsettledness at any one time, and curb it before it rocked my boat. But most importantly of all...it gave rise to my active motivation - the setting of my sails.

There was a barrier across the track down to the lighthouse. I walked down and down the zig zag track. On the way down to the lighthouse, that fixed point on the earth - recognisable from all other beacons as flashing twice, white, every twenty seconds ......and suddenly I knew where I was. I wrote a song about it. Alexander Barclay and I made a film there a few months later. It’s called The Soothing of The Soul.

A Commission

A commission came in asking for an abstract portrait of a Mother and her two grown up daughters, Some story about each was provided and I asked each person to send me three words describing herself (one of the words to be less than flattering.) I asked each also to send me three colours that they respond well to, cut out of a magazine (nothing electronic because tones are too difficult to match). They sent the stuff and I started the research.

Three women in a play was not difficult to find - I was thinking of three family members in a confined setting - a family, lockdown, and Come and Go, a play by Samuel Beckett emerged as being just that. The play is only 2 minutes odd long, and left the watcher begging to know the stories of the three women. I was made to think of the sibyl - the ancient prophetess women who lived in the mountains of NW Italy before the birth of Christ. They were storytellers as well and I found their fabulous portraits on the ceiling of a chapel in Siena. I drew them again. I gave them hats as were worn by the three women in the dramatisation of the Beckett play that I watched. I got my own daft vintage hat and altered it with the trappings and the fragments of the women's lives that I could glean from their stories. Then I wore the hat, and I drew and painted and was so immersed in the material that before long I had done the commission, and had enough material to work towards a new exhibition. Bring on the identity portrait commissions. This is the way I love to work.

On Consolation

I notice a great many people are fixing, painting, renewing, repairing during lockdown. and yesterday I found myself pondering over this while looking vacantly at my hall dresser. The photos here show various parts of it. On one door the paint has a deliciously antiqued look because of engine oil which has come seeping out through the paint that I applied. It only had one door handle, so I took a couple of bits of broken brass fittings to a local light engineering shop and he fashioned me a handle that would work. All this was done ten years ago when I was starting to live on my own. Here is a little story about that dresser.

Having a Flutter

I got an email from HMRC this morning, inviting me as a self employed person to register for consideration for their support grant as part of their economic package during the pandemic. It’s really rather Groundhog Day for those of us with a creative practice as we almost all need to shore up our income stream with some other steady source. An artist’s income is reliably intermittent. I have tried many ploys to bolster my finances and here is a little story about that……..

Paladin on The Ramparts

I was looking at items belonging to The Iberian Warrior late 5th early 4th century BC from the Necropolis of Arroyo Judio Cártagena It was late last September and I was in a museum in Malaga. I drew some of the artefacts - one of these was a double spring fibula. The only bit of text I copied into my sketchbook was this:

A warrior’s gear was considered a highly personal possession. Consequently all offensive and defensive weapons were buried with their dead owner after being ritually decommissioned so they could never be used again.

I underlined the words never and used again.

Later I went snorkelling. I wrote in the sketchbook:

I snorkelled out to the end of the breakwater with meters below me, occasionally diving down to swim with the silvery, fluttery, darting wee shoals of harmless iridescence. Suddenly a tight shoal of half meter barracudas swam right under me from behind - fast, close, determined. I nearly fainted. I yelped out loud into my snorkel.

On the stony beach, emerging from the water I picked up a fragment of ceramic tile and kept it. I drew a figure on it every day for six days, erasing the graphite every evening with toothpaste as I cleaned my teeth, leaving it clear, with only some traces of greying, and ready for the next day’s drawing. The photo is of one of those tiny tile drawings.

The figure, a snorkel and a double spring fibula are all visible in the painting The 2 Spring Fibula one of the new works in the September exhibition Paladin on The Ramparts, on show in @Art Pistol my wonderful gallery.

Adding to the Sketchbook

How dark the heather is in County Donegal. As a county I don’t know it well at all - having been schooled in Co Derry and grown up in Co Down. I sang a song in praise of Donegal in the Féis Ceol in Newcastle Co Down when I was 10 and won third prize. I still have the small medal. I was singing that song again as I drove around to the Atlantic shore early this Spring, to the pub, to the Museum in Letterkenny where the exhibition was about the emigration of women from Donegal to the Americas.

Visually the place is littered with ugly white houses, newly built without a plan at all, on every conceivable hilltop and scattered over every vista. How come we cannot keep sight of any good things in Ireland, and treasure them? We are a nation deprived in the past of instant gratification and hungry, still hungry for it. It squeezes my heart to be here, and I cannot really tell why that is. Maybe I just want to have a chance to start again, and….. with the potential of all the same good ingredients…. play it all so much better.

Up and Running

 

It seemed to take too long to build my new studio.  That is because I was anxious about the cost of it all and cramped in my living space.  I was living, cooking, sleeping and working in the same space.  It was a shock to my system.  My clothes were hanging on an oar.  Someone pointed out how artistic that was.  Yes, you ought to try it. See how artistic it feels.

After two years...this Spring of 2018...I moved into my new studio. A friend had said this would up my game.  It has upped my game.