Alpaca on green

Blank becomes a screen

What next? - suburban shopfront: closed, repainted and awaiting its next incarnation.  Rather pretty with the pattern of patches, light and the tree shadow. And weighted, of course, with symbolism.

Greyscale

Centre

It's cold and raining. My steps squeak and squelch on the pavement, each one reluctant. Look, look into the heart of things, the sweet centre where it never rains, is never cold.

By the pond

Sitting duck

Blue sky

Ahem, speaking of tigers

Tigers and elephants

I love the way that, through the always inter-referential human gaze, the patterns in nature recur and echo one another in the most surprising places. Like the tiger-stripes of the iris (tiger in a  mauve bonnet?). Like looking at Marja-Leena's photos of wet sand and seeing the dripping hide of an elephant.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

I am staggering in my life lately, as I often do, feeling overwhelmed physically by exhaustion and mentally by my sense of inadequacy and failure. This is not an uncommon feeling, I think - the way a lot of us live in a Western city in 2010 must make many people feel this way, and the figures for mental illness and other clearly stress-related illness show that many are worse affected than I am. There are a few things that help: keep breathing, just the next breath; keep trying to hear and see other people clearly and treat them with kindness (this can feel like an extra pressure, but, as well as helping not to push up other people's stress levels, it actually helps me too by adding warmth and calm to the surrounding atmosphere instead of more tension); keep looking not just inside myself but at what's around me, the weirdness and wonder of people, of the vestigial natural world  surviving in the city, of everything; keep trying to articulate my perceptions and feelings, capture something of what I see.  Simple things. Hard to do when feeling like a floundering fish. 

Louise Bourgeois: 25 December 1911 – 31 May 2010

'Maman' by Louise Bourgeois

on the South Bank as part of her London retrospective in 2007.

Seeing that retrospective - twice - was very exciting. The fierce, astonishing, angry beauty of her work made me feel alive, as do my still sharp memories of it, even now, in this very moment, when I've been so tired and ill and discouraged recently, feeling honestly closer to dead than alive. There can't really be a greater tribute than that, can there?  In loving, awestruck memory.