Blackbird singing

Out of the office window I can see the canal boats drift past and the café tables begin to fill with people. Not people enjoying post work drinks as it's a bit too early, but coffee drinkers, the retired with their papers and their halves of bitter. The young men who come out of the woodwork when the English weather turns sunny. It's barely 17° but the smell of sweat is lingering and there are pints of lager and any minute now someone will remove an item of clothing.

Because I've had an extended weekend, I have returned to hundreds of emails. I quickly feel anxious and overwhelmed and then I remember my mantra for when the day job fills me with feelings of less than and not enough. I am just a woman doing things on her job description. I have many variations of this mantra, for use in times of stress, when a panic attack begins to prickle at the back of my neck I am just a woman walking across a car park, I am just a woman buying milk, I am just a woman sending an email. I find reducing my circumstances to the most basic of descriptions infinitely soothing.

Upstairs in one of the conference rooms a local singing quartet rehearse. The songs filter through to my office and though I can't quite make out the words I know them anyway:

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise

I am thinking about the half bottle of yellow, resiny wine left in my fridge. Tonight I will chop vegetables and make stew. After that I might write for a while. I will finish a painting. I will use my voice even though to do so feels fraught with a hundred unseen evils as well as those I feel familiar with; disappointment, failure, judgement. I will do it anyway. I am just a woman writing a blog. I am just a blackbird singing.

The free-range artist

Christmas is over and I'm finally working on a few paintings. Today I finished one that has been languishing for well over six months. I also started another. That felt good. I did all this fuelled by double chocolate and raspberry brownies. I decided a couple of days ago that January would be the month I cut down on sugar. That lasted then.

I don't think I ever really liked the idea of having a pristine white studio space, shared with other hipsterish artists, seriously working away whilst we talked about gallery representation and listened to Autechre. I think I do much better working out of my living room, on my own, glass of cava just out of shot, Boromir getting shot by orcs on the TV in the background (and then dying beautifully) for what seems like the fifth time this Christmas. (Note to self, must find new box sets to watch whilst painting).

Across these two tables (one on loan from my brother, one from Ikea £14) are the collection of random and useful objects helping me work at the moment.

Candles, always.
Pile of Moleskine notebooks for journalling, notes, poetry etc
Pile of handmade paper.
Yellow A5 Finsbury Filofax (Xmas prezzie from mum and dad)
Nourishing reading matter.
Crime novel (January is all about crime fiction)
Brushes, paints etc
Feathers
Bright pink poster paint
Karma bubble bath bar from Lush (it smells amazing and every now and then I catch a whiff of it and just think mmmmm)
Knitted owl gloves made by mum. Slightly too small. They limit my hand movements somewhat but i am determined to break them in.
A little stuffed and stitched handmade mouse. Gifted to me by one of the tutors at work late last year when I was in the middle of a stress related meltdown.
Sharpie markers
Washi tape (a growing addiction)
Dirty paint water
Earphones
Course file for my classes
Pile of magazines inc County Living (even though I live in the middle of a large town) and The Simple Things. Both are essential for decent vision boarding and daydreaming about cosy fires, woodland walks, suppers that include all manner of rare and lovely foodstuffs and rugged yet sensitive blokes in fairisle jumpers.
Broken glass lampshade (cracked side facing the wall)

There. You can keep your sparsely furnished converted warehouses. This is all I need.

Autumn landscapes

So, I have still been painting quite a bit. These are quite different from my flower paintings, which are very bright. I just sat down one listless Sunday afternoon and had a doodle. I've ended up teaching these techniques in class, I think people have quite enjoyed it. The trick is to apply the paint in very thin washes, let it dry a bit and then brush the shapes out with a very wet brush. The painting is built up this way over a few days as you need to let each wash dry thoroughly in between layers. I've spent a very happy and contented fortnight painting these and listening to music.

In other news, I have finished my short story but didn't throw my two main characters off a cliff. I left them bickering in a National Trust car park. I think we've all been there.

Goodbye paintbrushes?

I always find summer to be quite a strange time. My weekly classes have finished and I'm not teaching regularly again until the end of September- I have a couple of one day workshops but they are few and far between. I'm back to doing the day job but, at The Mill, we don't programme bands or shows throughout August as the theatre is under maintenance. Because of this the normal routine (as much as there is ever a normal routine) goes out of the window and we all sort of drift. And bicker. There is tidying and filing and, this summer, a manic preoccupation with income generation and expenditure reduction (the government doing the best it can to see off the creative arts in this country). In the meantime I have been getting my teeth into some new projects- some ambitious new paintings, repainting the flat and attempting to write that novel.

Yep, you did read that last part right. The novel.

When I was younger all I did was write and paint. It's pretty much all I do now. My 9 year old self used to hide in her bedroom and laboriously copy out page after page of the Wind in the Willows in grey exercise books. When I was 13 my next door neighbour gave me her old word processor. It took up the entire bedroom and looked a little bit like the computer Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey. When you sent something to print it sounded like machine gun fire and took about 20 minutes to type out one page.  Somewhere in my parent's house there will be a file with a dozen or so stories about a misunderstood and awkward teenager. The heroines will all have alarmingly precocious names like Araminta or Thea.

Even as an adult I have journalled regularly from the first few dizzy weeks at art college to documenting the glorious, cinematic beginnings of a relationship and it's mundane and all-too-ordinary disintegration. There are stacks of cheap notebooks filled with the kind of obsessive longings normally reserved for teenagers, not apparently sane 32 year old adult education coordinators. But I want to write something a little more structured. Something with plots and characters and themes and a point to make somewhere. And, for all my flippancy about this, it disguises the fact that this is quite important to me and has been a secret wish for a long time. For the first time I have really started to appreciate the situation I find myself in. I am single, I have just enough wit and intelligence behind me to make a reasonable, if not exactly incendiary, stab at this. I have time on my hands and a room (a couple of rooms actually) of my own. I have no idea what's in store for me but this may be the only time in my life where I have access to this period of grace and stillness.

So, I have stock piled the Moleskines, the dark chocolate and a couple of helpful books (Stephen King's On Writing is fab, as is Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg) and I have set my self some small and manageable goals. The rest is up to me.