My mate Sue’s Private View

Four Bright Poppies

Its been a long road with my good friend, artist Sue Bartlett. She is of ‘mature years’ and yet has clearly always had a talent for artistic expression. She is also one of the most vibrant, optimistic and ‘present’ people I know – which it has to be said is unusual for an artist. This boundless energy and enthusiasm of a person awake and alive in a world full of colour and potential, sings in her work.

I first met Sue when I stumbled through her art class on my way to my pottery workshop where I was making handbuilt goddess figures, much to the concern of the vicar’s wife who sat next to me and worried that I was gong to start on a male version, which sadly I did not get the opportunity to do. This was because Sue, in her bright eyed way and showing me her beautiful and impressive nudes, drew me right into her art class, and there is another story…

A couple of years later Sue emailed me to say that she had been to look at a BA Fine Arts course and the smell of the paint and the stacked up easels had been too much for her, and she had enrolled on a three-year part time degree course. I saw less of her as she slogged it out, working very hard to fit the degree in with running her business. I had the pleasure of student shows, one of which was in Brick Lane in London, and supported Sue both with presence and encouragement, watching her develop and grow through some tough feedback from her tutors. For me, she was a perfect example of someone who listens, takes on feedback well, uses it and grows with it. When we are able to do this we push ourselves into the achievement of our potential. This is what Sue has done.

Since Sue completed her degree she has become highly successful. When she takes her work into galleries it is often described as ‘sumptous’ and it is highly unusual, vibrant, colourful and organic, using coloured wax as its main medium. She is a top seller accross Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Surrey and we suspect that one mega superstar, who the gallery owner quite rightly would not reveal, now owns one of her ‘cup cakes’ – a favourite theme.

What is wonderful for Sue is that she has now been able to devote more of her time to her art, and works for 3 days a week from her studio! She has taken some convincing of the fact, but she is now a genuine, real McCoy, practising artist!

All this would explain my great pleasure to recieve my beautiful invitation yesterday to Sue’s very first solo exhiition at one of Oxford’s most prestigious galleries. Sue has been working hard in recent months to produce an impressive body of new work. The exhibition, entitled ‘Pausias Passion’ at Sarah Wiseman Gallery in Summertown, Oxford, promises to be a visual treat, and well worth a look at.

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Art & Medicine

What I love about art is the way it stretches thought beyond the obvious. I am well aware of my Jungian preference for Intuition in the way I deal with information – and modern art is an ideal medium to spark off the completely random tangential thinking which so appeals to my psychological nuances.

I have just spotted an intriguing piece on Damien Hirst’s installation Pharmacy in the Tate Modern. Damien tells of how he came to make the work when he considered that people trust medicine more than they trust art. Prescribed drugs are seen as beyond doubt – problem solvers, death defiers, cure-alls. Clutching their comforting little prescription, people swallow the pill thoughtlessly, and yet they question art. The installation contains four step-ups with a bowl containing honey placed on each, and an insect killer mounted on the ceiling. This is Damien’s challenge in the chemist’s shop – where death is a thing which is denied, he invites it in and has set it up in the form of lures and electric shocks. The four beautiful apothecary bottles lined up on the counter represent the four elements – earth, air, fire and water.

It leads me into thinking about healing and personal responsibility – and how so many of us have surrendered our power and total trust to the world of conventional medicine.

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Creative Block… at Lughnasadh?

I know enough artists and writers to understand the suffering of creative block. In the madness of the current age, when we feel compelled to be continually and consistently productive, there is a disconnect from the natural flow of things.

It is entirely natural to experience the fallow time, and to need to rest, re-stock and in so doing be creative by making empty space for new ideas to grow. People who are deeply connected to the flow of the seasons, like Druids, understand this well, and as Samhain and the death of the old year approaches, retreat to their physical and psychic hearthfires for the dark, dreaming time and all the potentiality it holds. There is great acceptance in this, and even some exhilaration, and of course that deep peace that comes when we live in tune with the energy of the Earth itself.

To experience this at a time near to Lughnasadh, the first festival of the harvest, when the Earth is giving up her bounty abundantly, seems very odd. But that is where I am right now. And I am struggling to accept it – so am eating the words I offer to artist friends who complain of it during the winter time! Where is my Awen, the ‘holy grail’ we Druids seek, the divine inspiration which flows into our souls when we find it?

In the Song of Amergin, the bard Amergin of the mythic Irish race of the Tuatha de Danann, pours forth his Imbas, the Irish word for Awen, when he sets foot upon the shores of Ireland. The words “I am the god who puts fire in the head’ (which incidentally are all over the walls of Bewley’s tea rooms in Dublin, something I discovered to my delight) describe the creative process really well. When the fire is dwindling, embers, a pile of ashes in the hearth, or just a smoky cloud, the bard feels unsighted, disempowered, frustrated. The sharp sword of the creative flow has fallen from their fingers, and they are lost.

So we must seek to rekindle the fire in the head, the Imbas, the Awen. In preparing to do so, I am categorising old writings – and like all things we make – some things I like a lot, and some is cluttered, uninspired, clumsy, so it is going in the virtual bin. I found a poem I wrote on a workshop at the Druid Camp a few years ago, which speaks to me of the the death-in-life nature of Lughnasadh – whilst the earth is alive and all things are being brought to potential, there is also death and loss. Some things will never come to fruition, they will be forever lost. Just as some of my seeds never germinated, and a good many of my seedlings were given up to the earth in the form of slugs and pests – this is way of nature, and is to accepted and celebrated.

Thistledown on the Wind

Ripe, you break free
from that which holds you
in reality. Seeking truth.
Turning, ready to be reaped
from the body of the Earth.
Turning, struggling to birth,
pulsing, warm in mother love.
Becoming, or losing it?
Ripe, but lost, seeds
scattered in the wind.

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Poetry – words & sounds?

I have heard a few performance poets lately and am unsure how I feel about hearing, rather than seeing, poems. It’s not that I don’t enjoy listening, I do, enormously, but there is a subtle change in my relationship with the poem which has stimulated a puzzled interest in me.

It’s the same with paintings. We often don’t need to hear the artists’ interpretation about what they have created – the important thing is the emotional response it triggers in the viewer. The art I love has this effect on me – it stirs me and creates feelings – good and bad – witness tears in the Van Gogh museum last Spring!

When we hear a poet reading their work this relationship changes – suddenly someone else’s voice is there, with all the cadence and tone present, with all the emotion they felt when they wrote the words. When the poems are funny or satirical, the listening pleasure is all the more! Accent and dialect add to the mix – Ian McMillan being the example which comes to mind, and hearing Yeats recited with an Irish accent is magical.

And yet I miss seeing the words on the paper – the way they look, the black symbolic shapes on the white space – the shapes of the letters and the shapes the words make on the page. The effect the words have on my feelings as I read them, the pleasure lingered over, and over and over. As many times as I choose. Repeating my favourite lines again and again if I want to.

Mary Oliver is one of my most favourite poets – it’s hard to choose the poem I like the most because all her work is so wonderful – simple, yet technically perfect. Like Robert Frost, layered with a deep connection with the Earth. Black Oaks is sublime, speaking to me of the release that comes from a life close to nature:

Okay, not one can write a symphony, or a dictionary,

or even a letter to an old friend, full of remembrance
and comfort.

Not one can manage a single sound though the blue jays
carp and whistle all day in the branches, without
the push of the wind.

But to tell the truth after a while I’m pale with longing
for their thick bodies ruckled with lichen

and you can’t keep me from the woods, from the tonnage

of their shoulders, and their shining green hair.

Today is a day like any other: twenty-four hours, a
little sunshine, a little rain.

Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from
one boot to another — why don’t you get going?

For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees.

And to tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists
of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money,

I don’t even want to come in out of the rain.

Mary Oliver

Not long ago I stumbled on a website with an mp3 of Mary reading her most well known poem, Wild Geese, and it was really surprising – the tone and emphasis was very different to my interpretation. Here’s Mary reading At Blackwater Pond.

Perhaps I just need to enjoy it all!

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We live the life we choose

Each morning I look at the beautiful print I have on the wall in my bedroom – it was painted by a wonderful, sensitive and spiritually focussed American artist called Melissa Harris, and depicts a woman in a green robe with a red lining (like my own ritual garment) standing by a Cornish windbush – the kind that you see a lot there – all bent and misshapen yet at the same time very beautiful. The print is entitled To the Goddess in You, and at the start of my day it reminds me that I myself am a living manifestation of the Goddess and am divinely guided.

Yet at the same time I know that we function best when we are responsible and conscious beings, aware of karma, or the law of the harvest as we Druids call it, and knowing that each action results in a consequence. That’s a far cry from the ‘cop out’ of giving up to ‘Fate’, ‘Providence’ or ‘Destiny’.

I have used an extract from a book called Do it! Let’s get off our buts by Peter McWilliams, on a women’s programme I run regularly – and have repeated it throughout the three months that the group are working together – it’s a really powerful and direct piece of writing and resonates well with the content of the programme. I read it out again this morning to some colleagues and reminded myself of what a worthwhile message it is:

“Here’s the premise: We are all, right now, living the life we choose.

This choice, of course, is not a single, monumental choice. No one decides, for example, “I’m going to move to L.A., and in five years I will be a waiter in a so-so restaurant, planning to get my 8-by-10’s done real soon so that I can find an agent and become a star,” or “I’m going to marry a dreadful person and we’ll live together in a loveless marriage, staying together only for the kids, who I don’t much like, either.”

No. The choices I’m talking about here are made daily, hourly, moment by moment. Do we try something new, or stick to the tried-and-true? Do we take a risk, or eat what’s already on our dish? Do we ponder a thrilling adventure, or contemplate what’s on TV? Do we walk over and meet that interesting stranger, or do we play it safe? Do we indulge our heart, or cater to our fear?

The bottom-line question: Do we pursue what we want, or do we do what’s comfortable?

For the most part, most people most often choose comfort–the familiar, the time-honored, the well-worn but well-known. After a lifetime of choosing between comfort and risk, we are left with the life we currently have. And it was all of our own choosing.”

And believe me, I do need to listen to my own advice!

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