let’s be honest…
…we all like to think that people are waiting with bated breath for our latest painting, word or offering…or is that just me? But even though, with my logical head on, I know that not to be the case - I mean, really (!!!) - I couldn’t help but have high hopes for my latest ‘big rock’ - my limited edition print of ‘Dance of the Tulips’…
And isn’t it hard when expectations don’t match reality!! Couple that, with the fact that everything I have painted this week has ended up in the bin, and I have been left feeling decidedly downcast…downbeat, much like the weather…
And yet, even amidst my ‘feeling sorry for myself’ mood, I am reminded of a poem by Robert Frost: My November Guest…
“My sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted grey
Is silver now with clinging mist.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.”
So wrapped up, boots on, I headed out, searching for the beauty in the damp and the fog. And, before I had even got to the road end, there it was…. droplets of water clinging to the remnants of a rosebud, blush pink in the grey, petals strewn on the ground. My perambulations took me across the fields: brown earth sleeping. Dried stalks of cow parsley, skeletal fingers outstretched, mirroring the bare branches of the stately horse chestnut tree. A flurry of leaves blown across the soil, a cloud of golden confetti. The raucous cries of the crows. Skeins of geese overhead, their evocative sound echoing over the land. Hedgerows, bedecked with hips, dangling like Christmas baubles… It’s there isn’t it, beauty: sometimes overtly, sometimes you have to search just that little bit harder. But it’s there…
I arrived home, made a coffee, and watched in fascination as tendrils of wispy steam rose upwards before melting away… and things didn’t seem so bad.
I determined to do something, even if it was something mundane. Sorting out my painting trolley and deciphering the splodges in my palette (long forgotten, having been packed away for months) felt like a non-confrontational task: creative but without pressure. And that sense of having achieved something is so encouraging…
…that the sorting didn’t stop with art materials…
Okay, so this might be a little over the top - but I know that I don’t work well when things are disorganised/in a mess. Having everything sorted gives me a calm frame of mind in order to create. Not sure what a psychiatrist would make of that, but there you are…
Resilience - that capacity for recovering from difficulties, tough times, and hope: qualities and aspirations that keep us going…
“When by my solitary hearth I sit,
When no fair dreams before my ‘mind’s eye’ flit,
And the bare heath of life presents no bloom;
Sweet Hope, ethereal balm upon me shed,
And wave thy silver pinions o’er my head …”
Onwards and upwards, onwards and upwards,
Cx