Disturbed by Alice Munro.

^{Over the past couple of weeks I have been reading a collection of short stories by Alice Munro. She is the mistress of the understatement. Each story seems to carry you benignly along, drawing you in to the often unremarkable world of her characters, their ordinary lives a parallel to our own. Then caught in the text, without warning and unheralded she slips in a shock, and because you have been so beguiled by her writing, the softness ( I cannot think of another way to describe it) of it you pass over this moment with ease until seconds later it registers....WHAT!... and in disbelief you have to go back and read the text again, and again!}

^{It is this I suppose that I am still looking for in my work; that moment of easy familiarity... undone.}

ward
constructed drawing detail

Grassy breathing spaces.

^{The variety of grasses growing along the bank by the river have caught my attention this week. They are the most subtle of colours, a barely there of colour , quiet, slight, unobtrusive. Then looking up some of their names: Velvet Bent, Orange Foxtail,Crested Hair, Green Bristle, Cats-tail, Water Horsetail these seemed to me to perfectly catch their essence, a precise pairing up of the grass with its name, no fuss, no frills!}

^{As usual I am full of doubts about my work, paring it back to such a state of simplicity it seems to teeter precariously on the edge of becoming nothing. Yet it is this concision that I find so appealing. So shaking and quivering, I guess this is how it must continue to be, I take a lesson from the grasses...}

breathing spaces
constructed drawing

breathing spaces detail

nurses...

^{Stuff, push,squash...I wish I had been brave enough to throw away more...a black bin liner full and tied tight at the throat. Dumped..lid down and dark.}

^{It is the only way to make room for more, a necessary hitting rock bottom in order to start coming back up to the top. Frailty out of which comes strength... at least that is the plan!}

nurses
installation
constructed drawing

..a spoon full of sugar...

^{An exhibition of the work of , until recently, little known artist Saloua Raouda Choucair at Tate Modern, raised some interesting questions this week. http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/saloua-raouda-choucair}

^{It is a small exhibition by Tate standards showing a range of Choucairs paintings, sculptures and macquettes. The paintings, mostly abstract with titles such as 'Composition in Yellow' and 'Visual Meter' used shapes and colours that worked in subtle harmony, really quite lovely.}

^{Perhaps working at the same time as the great experimental giants of the 20th century Choucair also felt the need to push beyond the boundaries of paint and so began making sculptures in the 1950's. These were often modular in structure, echoing her paintings, using wood, stone, metal and plastic. Rather disappointingly most of these simply didn't work. They felt contrived, forced, lacking in depth.}

^{How sad that the visceral essence which seems to me to be so vital in making art had been so lost in translation.}

^{And for me a lesson in persistence, finding ways to coax myself on...a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down...}

sweet detail
constructed drawing