Synchronicity

I love it when things come together...

I've been looking for a new magazine to subscribe to - so-called 'women's interest' magazines bore me senseless - they're always about the same things...

I saw this magazine in an art gallery last week. It's beautiful, but I'm not that into textiles...

While browsing the internet the other evening, I came across this. It looks wonderful, but it's Canadian, costs 18 canadian dollars an issue, and another 18 dollars to post....

So imagine my delight when we dropped into WHSmiths in the hospital after my gym session yesterday morning, and saw this beautiful specimen :)

It's produced here in the UK, costs £4 an issue, comes out every 2 months and I've taken out a subscription (costs £18 for the 6 issues). This issue has 128 pages, every one a work of art, interesting and quirky articles and barely any adverts!!

I'm finally in magazine heaven *sigh*

Anxious thoughts...

"The only thing that really matters is to create something."

Lady Ottoline Morrell

But she had enough humility to know that she was not an artist. She came to view herself as someone with the painful sensitivities of an artist but without the talent, and she devoted herself to making the world more hospitable to
artists... Her aristocratic background brought a particular frisson to her friends in the arts, and their creativity gave her a passport to worlds she might otherwise only imagine.

Katie Roiphe, Uncommon Arrangements, p. 194

I identify with Lady Ottoline... wish I had her wealth so I could be a true patron of the arts!! But I do my bit - by buying as much handmade stuff from etsy as I can :)

I, too, put great store by creating something - a family/ a career/ a home/ a memory - but I cannot agree with Katie Roiphe's assessment, as I believe everybody can be - indeed is - an 'artist' - including Lady O. She doesn't expand on this one sentence from Ottoline's memoir, so we don't know if Ottoline's definition of 'create something' was as narrow as Roiphe's...

I think being an artist isn't about being a 'successful' painter, sculptor, actor, dancer, etc. or being 'talented' - whatever that means - it's about creating something, creating a life that has meaning. I've read elsewhere that Lady Morrell's hospitality was legendary - she was the consummate hostess! And Ottoline may well have seen it as her contribution to the world, her 'art', giving her life meaning.

Hence, I'm deciding what's important to me, and making time and space for it. Deciding, yes, I do want to learn the skills of drawing and painting, because they are meaningful to me. If baking a cake floated my boat, I would want to learn the skills involved in baking cakes, but it doesn't, so I don't.

The anxiety comes when, having made this decision, I'm now full of worry and doubt...

How will I afford it?

Will I be good enough?

Since I'll never be as talented as the artists I admire, is it worth even starting?

Am I just setting myself up for failure?

Surely it's too late at 46 to learn to draw?

etc, etc, etc.

The reality, of course, is who knows??

But if I never try, I'll never know...

Indeed, I'll never be able to draw like Leonard da Vinci, simply because I am not Leonardo.

I will learn to draw like Claire Sauer, and the more I practise and practise, the better I'll get - hopefully...

Just finished reading...

... this fun book :)

The fact the author covers seven marriages in barely 300 pages means, by definition, this is simply an introduction to these famous couples. But she does include a decent bibliography, so I can follow up any that interest me.

However, the questions she asks about the nature of love and romance and marriage in the introduction are largely unanswered... I think she would have done better to look at only two or three couples indepth to really get to the bottom of her rather insightful questions.

But it is a good read - quasi-scholarly gossip is such fun!! - so I'd certainly recommend it!!

It's one of those books where the front-page blurb is actually true - 'Positively fizzes with scandal and emotion... Deliciously addictive reading' - so it is worth packing in your suitcase as holiday fare...

Then when you return home, you can go to the library to read more meaty biographies of those characters who have piqued your interest :)

Plus I learnt a very interesting fact that simply passed me by when I was a 'sort-of-political' student in the 1980s (I did go on anti-Thatcher street marches and join those protesting Somerville College not give her an honorary doctorate) - Shirley Williams (one of the 'gang of four' who broke away from the Labour Party to form the SDP - Social Democrat Party) was Vera (Testament of Youth) Brittain's daughter...

I simply never knew that!! And now I want to read William's autobiography about her childhood - she was actually raised more by Winifred Holtby (Vera's faithful friend) while Brittain was being feted on both sides of the Atlantic...

Sagely advice

I do terribly want you to be
yourself - to have the freedom to grow

and be whatever you have it in you
to be. The one terrible thing seems to be not so much unhappiness - which is
inevitable - as being thwarted, stunted, to miss opportunities and not live
fully and completely as far as one can...

so wrote Vanessa Bell to her son Julian when he was in Rome, considering marriage to an unknown woman...

Whatever the actual details of the situation, I love Vanessa's wise words. The fact she's wiser than to just wish happiness for her son - unhappiness is indeed inevitable - Vanessa's mother died in her 40s, her step-sister Stella died in her 20s, and her beloved brother, Thoby, died aged 26 - not to mention her sister Virginia's (Woolf) ongoing mental problems...

What Vanessa's wishes instead is essentially her personal credo - to live freely in a way that's true to one's own truth. She worked hard to create a home, first in Bloomsbury, then at Charleston.

Admittedly, her marriage to Clive Bell was highly unconventional (I love Katie Roiphe's description:

'The emotional arrangements at Charleston were so complicated, at times, that one needed a chart like the one at the beginning of a Russian novel to keep them all straight' (Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Marriages in Literary London 1910-1939, Virago Press, 2009, p. 145)), but she lived a full, vital life that was totally of her own making.

And so I'm endeavouring to work out my own credo, and then, I'll endeavour to live true to it... and I'll attempt to share my findings on this blog...

A new day, a new month, a new ???

boy! i've missed this whole blogging malarky!!

thank you for those who commented on my first post - it's so good to reconnect with you all :)

i have kept up with my favourite blogs over the past 18 months, and commented now and again, but it just feels good to have my own little corner of cyberworld again.

i'm still tweaking with the new place...

i've reduced the size of the title header - having seen it with fresh eyes after a couple of days away, i decided it looked like i was shouting in such a large font - DECIDE WHAT YOU WANT NOW - OR ELSE!! - and that sooooo wasn't my intention :)

this is so not a place for shouting...

hence the background image - i sooooo want my own library, my own oasis of calm, a place to sit and read and think, with floor to ceiling shelves of books, a big comfy chair, and a coffee machine...

and i'm creating it here in virtual reality :)

but what about day-to-day, messy, busy real-world reality??

at the moment we're living out of boxes and hoping another moving date will be confimed very soon...

at the moment, thankfully, everybody seems to be OK with this limbo state - the kids still have the TV, the playstation, their ipods, even though their bedrooms look like little warehouses, and are just glad to be not at school :)

at the moment, nick's back at work and in regular contact with the letting agents and taking a breather from the manic sorting and packing which have filled his days the past couple of weeks...

and at the moment i'm thinking about enrolling on a distance learning course with the london art college...

my dear friend tina b has sold some of my handbags (and yes, i did have quite a collection...) which could largely finance the drawing course i'm considering...

and this is all part of deciding what i want -

i want to learn to draw, properly,

but i don't have much money.

however, i do have some nice 'stuff' that just sits in a cupboard...

i can't travel to a college,

but i can do online learning...

i did enjoy the local art shop's lessons i took last year,

but they're on saturday afternoons, and i do like my live football commentary...

taking a course online - which actually costs less than the art shop lessons - means i can work in my own time...

so, i'm trying to work out what i really want, and take steps to making it happen - one little step at a time...