Time to say goodbye to this old house that I’ve loved these past thirty years.
When we moved in here in 1991 I had a room at the front of the house with north light which is best because you don’t get any sunlight falling across you or your work, meaning that you have virtually constantly even light all day. That room where I created some of my best work was my studio for twenty years until I had a studio built over our garage down the drive. It’s said that every man should have a shed, somewhere to escape to on his own and I’ve absolutely loved working in my studio, not actually a “shed” but a haven of creativity overlooking the fields at the edge of our village. From my studio not only can I watch the sun go down in the west, I can also look back at the front of the house and see anyone approaching and unless they turn round and look up, they can’t see me.
In 2019 we decided we wanted to downsize as all our children had grown up, left and settled locally. We sold in early 2020 and as I write this in May of the same year we’re still waiting to move to nearby Pontefract. They say that the plague has made everything so much harder and slower and I understand that, but the waiting is driving me crazy! Virtually everything is packed up and ready to go, including all my art equipment. My studio isn’t very big but it’s taken me weeks and weeks to sort everything out for keeping or chucking away. I’ve found all kinds of paintings done since I was an art student, right through my professional career as an illustrator to the present day. There are hundreds and hundreds of paintings, unmounted, mounted, and framed. Normally I would hire the village hall and have a weekend art sale, but the pestilence has put paid to that for now.
Now my studio is eerily quiet, forlorn, and almost empty, apart from the boxed up equipment, bags and folders of over thirty years of accumulated stuff.
The bungalow we’re moving to needs a lot doing to it, extension work too, so I doubt if we’ll be straight for a good year or so yet. First on my priority list though is building a studio, and I’ve drawn up so many designs for it being situated at the back of the property to make best use of the space that there is. I’ve looked at numerous garden offices/studios and most of the companies who build them haven’t replied to my enquiries so I guess they must be very busy building everyone else’s spaces now that more people have discovered working from home! A good friend of ours is an interior designer https://www.facebook.com/Vision2Fruition-104481935010848/ and she’s planned some excellent visual plans of how it might look eventually.
All this is of course going to take some time, so until it’s built I’ll have to use whatever available space amongst the chaos there is in the house!
As all my art stuff is packed away ready to go, I’m getting restless and twitchy because I need to paint regularly. I’m getting withdrawal symptoms now and I can’t wait to be able to set up somewhere properly and get on with the myriad of paintings I want to do as well as recommence my Zoom painting workshops, one of the good things to come out of Covid!
The other day, the SAA emailed and asked me if I could do a workshop at HQ in July which will be online until it’s safer to host attended workshops. I have many, many pictures and reference photographs, but hardly anything I hadn’t already used that would be appropriate for a two-hour workshop. Eventually I took an idea from a photograph a friend took and thought I could develop it and simplify it to use as my subject.
So… now… where are my pastels? Where is my Pastelmat paper? Where are all the other bits and pieces I need to create the painting?! Well, bit by bit they were gradually tracked down, boxes rumpaged, and fished out for use once again. I found a collapsible table and set up as best I could to create a new painted world in pastel. Joy of joys, bliss! This is food and drink to me, the air that I breathe. It went surprisingly well which I wasn’t entirely expecting as a gap in creativity can diminish my powers of expression and confidence. After a few hours it was complete and then I had to pack all my things away once again! This reinforced my view that to be creative it’s important to have actual space dedicated for that, otherwise the prospect of getting everything out only to have to put it all away afterwards can discourage the best of intentions. If I have a spare hour I’m more likely to paint if everything is permanently set up for me and all I have to do is go there and get cracking.
I’m not one for writing blogs really as I seldom seem to have the time to write something that might not be of much interest to others anyway. One thing these lockdowns have given us is more time to appreciate what we had that we could no longer have; simple things like seeing friends and family, celebrating with others and meeting for a chat and a drink. Good things have materialised such as Artist Demo Days on Facebook, the community of the Facebook “ADDicts” and the opportunity of each of us contributing for the benefit of our own sanity as well as the sanity of others.
Now the latest lockdown is easing and greater freedoms may be enjoyed, I for one am so looking forward so much to seeing family and friends again, now the waiting is almost over.
We’re now optimistic about being able to move house within the next couple of weeks, so this waiting is almost over too. When the studio and house are left empty and the keys are handed over to the new occupants a new adventure will start.
As it says on a little plaque on a bench in the garden of our next home: “Don’t be sad it’s over, be glad it happened.”