disorder and hope

If you get a chance go here and watch a fascinating documentary

about the lovely Mr Wallace and his incredible obsessive hoarding problem

and have your heart warmed by the compassion

of Mr Honey who is a ray of hope in our judgemental world.

Happy Christmas to you all from me and the new man in my life :)

simple pleasures

I've learnt a lot recently.

More than I have ever learnt..

including degrees and masters degrees.

I've learnt about what matters in life.

I've learnt about courage and loyalty.

About friendship

and

its limits.

I've learnt about myself.

About daily rituals like lighting the fire and cooking comforting wholesome foods.

About making the most of life.

and sharing simple pleasures.

We'll be making the very most of this festive season

enjoying every simple moment.

hello

we've finally got an internet connection at Dad's house which

means that I will be able to keep in touch with blogland while caring for him.

It'll make things a little easier for me to have a world outside work, cancer and caring.

I'm having a good lesson in how hard life can be.

It's hard to remember what my life was like before

and it feels like I wake up every day in a horrendous

bubble of disaster while normality seems to surround everyone else.

We are a small close family, dad has prostate cancer,

I have a thyroid problem which I've struggled with for years and

now I can't take the medicaton for it because it makes my heart go bonkers

and my lungs fill with fluid...if anyone has had similar problems I would be very

interested to hear from them. . On top of this, regular car, house, work

stresses sometimes seem like the last straw.

i see these paints and sometimes think i can paint my way through this nightmare.

sorry to offload

I know others have difficult lives too

and there must be plenty who experience much worse

i don't know how they survive.

i don't know how i will survive.

all i can think of is that if i do survive this ordeal

i will have learnt a lot about how hard life can be

and i'll be able to use my experience to help others.

it's good to be back here.

x

print

it's been a bit of a nightmare week

and i don't really have anything creative to show from it

here's one i did earlier

my head's so fuddled from stress and lack of sleep

i can't even remember if i've posted this before

the night's are getting darker

and the air has turned cooler

i chose this print because the colours

make me think of autumn and winter

i made it using a reduction technique

with lino. it's easy...cut and print..cut a bit more and print..

keep going and keep going using different colours each time you print.

i'm still waving

seaside memories

our holiday by the sea seems an age away now

i haven't even had time to unpack the beach treasure

or the stash of art i started by the sea

and will hopefully finish sometime soon

waving to strangers from a train

a ten minute ride on a seaside toy town train

with 3 little kids behind me

shouting and waving hello

was the complete antidote for

recession

cancer

and

riots in our streets

everyone smiled and waved back

young

old

even the crack heads under the bush shelter

it was the best £1.75 i have spent in a long time

and i'm gonna make it my business to travel

toy town

more often it occured to me that blogging is a bit like waving to strangers from a train

i'm

waving

to

you

holiday art day whatever + 1

there's been so much art
going on around here

even the birds are leaving

coordinating sculptural forms

on the balcony

holiday art days whatever and whatever

see that man lying on the beach?

that's how i feel in this place

holidays by the sea should be prescribed by doctors as a tonic

there's enough inspiration here to last a lifetime

nature is a wonderful artist

i can only try and capture a fragment of this beauty

holiday art day 3

as predicted i didn't get much art done on day 3 because a friend came to visit

and we had too much paddling, ice cream eating and seaside tatt monitoring to do

i seriously love these shelves...i could fill them with handmade goods

for noone to buy

i'm extremely spooked by the way digital stuff doesn't photograph

like when computers go wonky when they're on tv

I'm even more spooked by my reflection in the photograph

but then my reflection always spooks me

i've got one of these plastic letter signs for my craft stall

but it doesn't have stars

if i could find some stars for my plastic letter board

it would be like a dream come true

sorry i'm daydreaming about signage....

i might not have done much art but i was drinking in the colours of the sea

which change constantly

very inspiring for me

I think these colours come from the tones on the headland

Holiday art day 2

day 2 was quite productive which is just as well as friends are coming ova days 3-6

and we go home day 7...not sure how much more creating I'll get done.

some of these are finished, some aren't

some of them are on surfaces I'd already been working on

before we came away, some aren't

I used the colours shapes and lines that most inspire me

when by the sea.

holiday art day 1

with precious Dad installed in front of his beloved rugby

(notice the tea paraphanalia on the table)

my sister and I got on with our art

she's been sketching the landscape


wheras I started to explore tea

I've got a few bitter gripes about the obsession with tea

and the number of cups a day I end up making at work, home, everywhere

i used the dreaded tea bags to paint on torn up watercolour paper

and dyed some white cotton tape

then I went off to seek inspiration and took photos

with my crappy camera of anything that caught my eye

the lift buttons

the beach huts

this one could be used for a friend's birthday next year

as usual i was drawn to concrete

and the marks on roads and pavements

i love the colour of the sea and sand

pale

and the colours and marks in the rocks

lines

the shapes and tones on the beach

circles

andy goldsworthy inspired land art

more circles

and more lines

i liked these painted pebbles left by kids outside the beech huts

makes me want to paint pebbles

makes me want to leave art for others to find