Sound of Silence

It’s been a while and, while I realise this isn’t quite the same as when I missed my last essay on King Lear, I feel I ought to explain. My excuse has all the brilliant melodrama and exaggeration that I sadly failed to summon in the face of Dr Sullivan’s wrath over my lack of comment on the use of the rhyming couplet in sibling rivalry disputes. You can believe me or not, personally I still don’t believe it.

Long story short, one morning a few months ago a man who used to be a family friend turned up at our house with a gun, some ‘devices’ and a scutch hammer and forced his way in. I learnt a few things that morning:

• Jumping from a high window is really, and I do mean really, easy if there’s a bloke with a gun on the other side of your bedroom door and it’s just your double bed holding him back.
• Time really does stand still: for two days after, everyone else in the world moved at half speed and colours were extraordinarily bright and clear. Briefly, like Sherlock Holmes, I wanted to shout ‘How can you be so s-l-o-w?’ at everyone and then annoyingly my moment of genius was gone and I was returned to my normal state of well, normality.
• The police keep change in a tupperware box for nipping round the corner to buy chocolate digestives for the rescued.
• Ten snipers in your back garden won’t be good for your herbaceous borders, not if they’re there all day for a siege.
• It upsets the neighbours, especially the one who shares a Christian name with the attacker, when the police marksmen get shouty and demanding.
• Lastly, if you do break in and then say you have lots of bombs, they make you take off all your clothes when you surrender and then they laugh about it down at the station with the victims.

It’s easy to be flip on here: the blog is flip and I like it that way. However, I’ve lost a few months of my life to this and it stopped me writing among other things. Last month it all went to trial and he was found guilty on several counts. We await sentencing. It’s not been much fun, but I’m getting there and I have written something down. Which is more than I can say for that last essay still due from 1982.

buzz buzz buzz

We have a bee’s nest at the foot of one of our apple trees. Strictly speaking it is a wasp’s nest, but they left at the end of last summer and the bees have since set up home. They came under an entirely fruitless badger attack last week: the badgers left empty handed and we were left with large, deep and perfectly circular tunnel in the lawn. I ran over it with the lawn mower yesterday and froze in horror at the sound of deep buzzing. In my head I imagined the immediate appearance of a solid column of bees, angry as a mob of French peasants hunting down the aristocracy. What actually happened was that about half a dozen bees came out looking slightly cross and bewildered; more like a street’s worth of Highgate Guardian readers on finding they didn’t have advance warning of a mains closure.

I was entirely glad not to be massively stung, but I did sort of expect to have more impact. I felt a bit non-consequential as a result and that brings me on to the main thrust of this blog. Someone asked me recently ‘Why do you write a blog? Does anyone read it? Doesn’t it tie you down?’ Heavy questions indeed. Well, I do have readers: my mum-in-law and assorted other enthusiastic family members, the people who come up on Google Analytics (Berkshire Fire and Rescue: I know who you are and thanks for your support), the lads from Wells enamel factory (if they know they are getting a mention) and the very occasional kind person who posts a comment, but that really misses the point.

I write this because it’s a fun exercise to write something neat, amusing and short. Posting it means it has an end destination and no, it doesn’t tie me down. My friend saw blogging as a sort of monstrous chore: a necessary piece of public relations, relentless as the maintenance of a dark haired Hollywood starlet contracted to go platinum blonde. I see it as a sort of small indulgence to be enjoyed when I’m in the mood: more of ten minutes in the warm sun with a really good coffee. So it really doesn’t matter if, like the bees, people at large take no notice, I’m enjoying myself...

Numbers

Six seems like a good number to me when I’m printing an edition. Every time I make a lino print, it’s a bit of a gamble: I print using one block of lino and gradually destroy it, cutting it away in order to build the print out of layers of colour. Start with six and, if I’m clever, finish with six. There’s no going back and doing another few copies or idly hitting the button for a fresh batch of giclee printouts. It’s about as close as I get to living dangerously...
However I have just finished a huge, really huge, edition. One hundred and twenty one lovely late summer sunsets thanks to my sort-of-relation Phil and his generosity in letting me into his printworks at Hand and Eye (www.handandeye.co.uk).To print on this scale I had to produce a set of blocks, piecing the image together like a lino jigsaw rather than using the one block. Precision isn’t my middle name and I suspect it’s actually Phil’s first name. It’s a good job neither he nor his team saw my dreadful inexperience at multi block work; the cold sweats and the idiotic mistakes (including a beautifully prepared upside down field) that went into preparing the seven cut blocks that make up the final picture.
The print is still an original linocut print and every print is unique – unique because I painted every one of the 121 sunsets by hand during printing.
But before this sounds too much of a personal success story, I should confess to having access to Rosa.
As secret weapons go, Rosa is pretty impressive, a former restorer of Italian frescos and a fine printer, she mixed my inks and matched colours brilliantly to my somewhat hopeless descriptions: ‘sort of a non-colour: greenish grey – you know, with a bit of red in it probably’ which is hardly a pantone recipe. She also operated the proofing press and helped me print, ha, actually I helped her print and learned a great deal in the process. The finished result costs £70 unframed and you can buy one from me via this link or from Phil at Hand and Eye.

Stage Fright

I’m not keen on climbing ladders, positively scared of rollercoasters and nothing on God’s earth would get me pot holing.

That’s not a definitive list by the way, just a few examples to show that I’m not one of Nature’s bravest. What I will do however is to venture outside my comfort zone and to that end I have embarked on setting up some studio workshop days to allow people to come in and learn about printing lino.

Being an artist is a tough thing to define, but I think part of it is to be uncomfortable. Uncomfortable mentally that is – I definitely need access to a comfortable bed, a bath, oh and Radio Four, the odd glass of wine and a hot dinner. Normally I teeter on the edge by signing up for enormous public art projects with woefully little idea of how to complete them, embarking halfway round the world to condense a seven year apprenticeship into eight weeks and by finding ways of making my everyday printing near technically impossible. This time I’ve been agitated about stuff like where people will park, what they’d like for lunch and how to give them access to the loo and not my jewellery box*.

Finally I realised that I was dithering. It’s madness: I love teaching people about printing, I have the studio space (thanks mainly to my husband and brother-in-law, though I like to think my barrowing of the best part of three tonnes of concrete helped) and people are kind enough to be asking. So I’ll be sending out the booking forms soon and you’ll be able to come and haul on the Albions for yourselves if you wish...

*actually not worth the bother for the serious burglar consisting as it does of what my mum would call ‘schmuck’ – stuff I like, but an insult to any professional fence.

Missing

If the world is divided into those who keep and those who throw away, I am standing, bin bags in hand, at the fanatical end of the throwing away section. I’m not sure when it happened: as a teenager I clearly remember sleeping in a bed which rocked, balanced as it was on a slag heap of under-the-bed detritus, my mother in despair and my cupboards bulging in dangerous and delicate balance. Somewhere along the line there must have been an epiphany since now I’m never happier than after a good clear out – that rush of endorphins that accompanies the appearance of an empty space, however temporary, in this house of male hunter gatherers.

Today it caught up with me big time: a deadly combination of technological ignorance and literal thinking. While I don’t have an iphone, I do have a mobile that will talk to my email (after a delay suggesting a collection of switchboard operators distracted by an unexpected box of chocolates). This morning I decided to clear my phone, getting rid of all the untidy messages in the inbox that I’d downloaded over the past few days while I was travelling, confident that they were now safe on my computer. You must all know where this is going: no, they weren’t safe and yes, they are all permanently gone. I’m left wondering how this could possibly be: imagine if I slung out all the redundant paperbacks in the spare room and came downstairs to find my cookery books gone too...

My husband has been very kind; instead of a well justified victory song and dance avenging his many beloved items I’ve disappeared over the years, he did his best to recover the mails. No joy. If you are one of the victims then I apologise. I’d like to say I won’t do it again, but actually, that empty inbox does look much neater...

Good Housekeeping

The problem, I feel, with the short bout of food poisoning I had recently was that, after a couple of hours lying on the bathroom floor wishing for death, I was forced to the disagreeable conclusion that not only were the gates of Paradise going to remain firmly closed, but that it was high time to sand down and repaint the room’s skirting boards.

One thing we did manage last week was to replace the kitchen floor. It’s not often we get interior decoration wrong, but we’ve had nine years of a pale laminate floor which, since it showed every micro-particle of dirt in glaring detail, would have been a perfect worktop surface in a forensic laboratory (no more government enquiries into lost evidence, however small), but was a disaster for a working kitchen. Now we have cork – swirling chunks of the stuff in cross section a bit like marble, but marginally less expensive. It looks beautiful and is brilliant at concealing dirt; I know this because I only discovered the remains of a dead mouse this morning by treading on it with bare feet.

While our kitchen floor was approved by an architect friend and his wife who came round for dinner, my studio heating was condemned. This may have been because I put the fire on and it made their lovely clothes reek. I am resigned to smelling like a construction worker’s site office, but I realise that ‘Bute’ for men is never going to be a stocking filler. I am however quite safe: my brother has insisted I install a carbon monoxide monitor. This shows a touching concern for his little sister’s safety which I’m pleased to say he never exhibited when I was small and he was my twelve years bigger, marvellous, dangerous and tyrannical babysitter.

Trainspotting

I’ve always liked the London Underground. I cut my teeth on the Metropolitan Line at seven, taking a couple of stops to school and back. By nine I was making the trip to see my dad who lived in Kensington High Street: a neat change at Baker Street and a loop of the Circle Line. By eleven the system was my oyster (though those were the days of singles, returns and seasons only) and I was loose to roam. These days, thanks to my enamels project, I count among my friends the people who cut, spray, print and fire all the London Underground enamel signage which adds a sort of warm and fuzzy feeling to my travels.*

Today I needed all the warm and fuzzy I could get once I left the shelter of the tube: a bleak howling day of sleet and pinched faces. I visited my print supply shop which is a gem. When I started out I found the assistants horribly intimidating with their total lack of eye contact and empathy. Now I know what I am doing, I find their obsessive expertise enormously helpful. I spent a long time with a man who was possibly even more interested in the mulberry fibre content of Japanese paper than me and knew to the drop exactly how much cobalt drier to use for each ink colour.

Travelling back I had to balance two heavy bags, a large and awkward roll of lino and a fiendishly expensive, long and delicate roll of Japanese paper. Like every over-burdened woman extra in every British film ever made about trains, I decided that I needed tea. Unfortunately, on reaching Marylebone, I was unable to do the sensible thing and find a seat, stymie the romantic end of a love affair and exchange some banter with Stanley Holloway. Instead I juggled a boiling pint of earl grey along with everything else up the platform and onto the down train home.

As a footnote, I have finished my experimental woodblock and lino mixed print that I mentioned in my last couple of blogs. You can see it and access the rest of my website here

*Sadly I do sometimes find myself patting enamel signs in a slightly mad sort of way and saying things like ‘I bet that’s one of Ian’s’.