How (not) to be single and fabulous in a market town in North Oxfordshire.

• Awake on Saturday morning at your parent's house having slept badly.
• Organise staff bonding session/get together only for it to fracture into splinter groups due to clash with local music festival.
• Take a gorgeous top back to the shop because you simply can't afford it and you're more sensible than that. It's something you never hear these days but it's worth saying: if you can't afford it, don't buy it.
• Put on your favourite skinny jeans, a cheap t-shirt and a beaded shrug. Spend an hour reading Dylan Thomas, having been on a spree in the Oxfam bookshop. Feel good in your own skin, like the best and truest version of yourself.
• Spend the afternoon in a wasp-infested field, drinking warm cider, listening to good music and talking to people that you like.
• Realise that the crush that has been happily fermenting since Christmas has morphed from weak shandy into moonshine of the deadliest potency.
• Watch the object of your affection kiss his girlfriend and wonder, not for the first time, if you can die of dejection.
• Carefully pick your way through the hippies and empty plastic cups smelling pleasantly of weed and cigarette smoke mixed with your Jo Malone perfume. Traipse back to the flat.
• Realise you are meeting friends in a bar in Banbury in a mere 40 minutes. A prospect that, even under the best of circumstances, usually leaves you feeling violent and unhinged.
• Arrange face and posture so that gory heartbreak is not obvious to all and sundry.
• Consume rather too much vodka in a surprisingly nice new bar. Bask in warmth that only good friendship and booze can bring. Decide that your friend Tim is the funniest bloke on the planet even if you now know more than you would like about his dream diary.
• Eat oven pizza at 2am. 'Fess up to 8 months of pale faced pining to a much loved girlfriend. Listen as she shares some of her own secrets.
• Talk until 4.30am. Realise you need to trust your friends more.
• Spend Sunday in bed eating chocoalte, drinking green tea and watching The West Wing.
• Feel strangely optimistic about everything. There are good things around the corner.

This post was bought to you today by Ray Charles singing this song.

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.

Why I hate dresses

Another family wedding to go to on Friday. Despite being single and, at times, embittered, I love weddings. I love weddings involving my family most of all. It's a guarantee that by the end of the evening someone will end up crying in the loos, someone will have to go home early because they haven't paced themselves, someone will have fallen over and flashed their knickers, every female present will have long ago discarded their crippling shoes somewhere on the dance floor and people will be drinking Courvoisier because there will be nothing else left behind the bar.

The thing is I can never get the outfit right. I always end up feeling uncomfortable, hemmed in, tummy control knickers cutting off my circulation. I bought a great dress two months ago but, because of exercise and dieting, it now resembles a beige sack. I have spent the last two days traipsing around the shops and sobbing in stuffy dressing rooms and have come up empty handed. I have decided to wear the beige sack anyway. At least it won't be too tight for a change and it won't matter once I've downed a few glasses of wine.

Third party cookies

Every now and then blogger will frustrate the hell out of me with some new problem. The line breaks was one of them. Whole posts where I couldn't seem to start a new paragraph, creative musings looking like impenetrable modernist stream of consciousness nonsense. Three days trying to work out how to make my images bigger ending with a long howl of frustration and mum eventually taking the laptop off me. And now the comments problem. I have to say though, the help forums are pretty useful things. It's third party cookies people. My laptop settings have blocked them but I think (whisper it) I have the problem sorted.

Unravelling

Things have been in such a mess here over the last 6 months. Not a bad mess, but a fairly typical busy/glorious sort of mess. Life has felt like a ball of tangled wool and the act of unravelling and bearing witness to each little strand (which is what this blog is really- an act of bearing witness) has been nigh on impossible. But I want to be here and it feels good to be back here at 11pm on a Sunday night the week stretching out before me.

Waxed dry points

This dry point has a thin layer of melted wax applied. I'm not sure what led me to make the odd decision to do this. Two years ago I went through a phase of working on wood panels with mixed media and sealing everything behind a layer of beeswax, you then buff the surface to a high shine. The painting then looks like it has been captured in some kind of resin. I think I wanted the paper to go transparent here but it didn't quite work out like that. Hey ho. I'm going to have another try later in the week on a bigger print.

I've used regular parrafin wax which means the surface is beginning to crack. Beeswax is slightly more elastic and giving. There's a random fact for the day.

Of lost voices and printmaking

These are the prints taken from the dry point I was planning in this post. I didn't mean for them to be quite so detailed, it just seemed that once I had started with that needle I couldn't stop. Still, it was a worthwhile exercise I think. It hasn't been put in the artweeks show. I have hung a couple of more restrained efforts.

I've been meaning to post for weeks but I find that in stressful times (as they are at the moment for oh so many reasons) my articulacy fails me. I'm finding it a struggle to put even the most simple of sentences together. I wrote in my diary yesterday for the first time in 6 weeks and managed a paragraph. A concise whinge. None of this is to say I haven't been working on making pictures as I have. Loads. But it might just be images for a while at least until my voice returns.