Week Nineteen | Atmospheres of Grief

7 Mar

“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time”

- Leonard Bernstein

I seem to have time travelled and I am a week ahead of myself on my blog. Having magically created an extra week of my life I am going to enjoy having created time. That said, I’m a bit behind schedule on two of the drawings so maybe that makes me a sweaty two weeks behind…

Bits and bobs that have struck me of late:

Constant state of under-the-surface irritation. Signals of a growth spurt, like a toddler who has just discovered the baby in the mirror is in fact himself.
Within each of us lies the tightly coiled nightmare that one day our loved ones will die. I have been wondering how to just stuff it and stop caring. Lights off, toodle pip. It’s improbable but my enquiries are around useful rituals that allow us to converse with death without being devastated by it. Grief is just so completely unbearable.
People make too much noise. I am increasingly - to fill the lexical gap with a German word - Ruhebedürftig, in need of quietude or rest. Quiet. Is a word that keeps coming up for me. The world is a disaster but all the shouting just makes it worse.
Compassionate stoicism. Too much emotional diarrhoea in the sphere is getting me down. Frank Auerbach’s response to his fleeing Nazi Germany as a child and never hearing from his parents again? “I don’t think about it very much”. Asked why he doesn’t do interviews? “It’s time I could better spend painting”. I also like the Marcus Aurelius I have been reading: “Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly”.
Bearing boring discussions about the challenges and vicissitudes of the artist life and wondering why we spend so much energy looking for a collective adjectives and nouns for artists where, to my mind, artists are just people who make art. An Angst of Artists, perhaps. Children seem to be born with a desire to make marks as evidence of self - steamed up car windows or with a stick making lines in the sand at the beach so if it’s in our collective DNA there seems little need to feed the idea that artists are special. I don’t really think we are and I enjoy the freedom to feel fairly ordinary and make art at the same time. I seem to be all on my Tod with this one.
Looking forward to the interim show next week. I look forward to the RA, loads of curry and visiting much loved friends in London. I wonder how I will present my work but I am sure it will come to me when I am there.