ANGELAGOODMANART
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It was during the dream time. The time when we were suspended between universes, between light and dark, life and death. The time when I saw the falling star and the fox.
 
The world was in semi-sleep and dreaming, but as always with dreams, the dark mares flitted with manes like black water, through consciousness and unconsciousness. Tales of horror and trauma infiltrated those almost silent sunshine days. Echoes of far off battles, corridors and machinery, exhausted running feet, precious breath, the push of the ventilator and the beeping of monitors… the valiant and the dead… yes that was there, even in the quiet of the night and even in our deepest sleep. We were there, and not there.
 
Death waited in the touch and in the breath.
 
I had trouble sleeping. Woke at four each morning with heart pounding, and speeding, circling, go-nowhere thoughts. Fear prowled the room. What if. What if. Guilt blacked out all hope of dawn and made the future dark. I was alive. Did I deserve it. Would it even last? What if. What if. I rose. Made tea. Tried to read. Went to a window and watched the sky to the east and waited. Weeks… months… we were all waiting, so what was one more hour, to sit and watch and wait? We also serve, who only stand. And wait.
 
I thought of the Bristol churches with their watch towers looking eastwards, the faithful watching and waiting for another kind of dawn.
And waited.
And looking eastwards, there it was. My first ever falling star. A lonely Lyrid, falling… falling… briefly a light to our world.  Out there was hope perhaps.
 
As the sky greyed, things took form outside.
 
A moving shadow caught my gaze. It stopped. A glow of white fur under the body and face. Darkly silhouetted ears, inscrutable eyes, and stillness. Our eyes met through glass: the human being, trapped inside, locked in my own darkness and the small fox out there in the dawn. And I heard her, as if she spoke to me … no… not heard… sensed?... a message without words.
 
This is not a dream.
 
There is always hope.

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Pandemic

August 05th, 2013

5/8/2013

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... continued from last post...

Pintar Rapido turned out to be one of the hottest days of the summer. Lucky me being on Cadogan Pier - away from heat-reflecting asphalt and in the one place where a breeze blew and where even just the visual effect of the water was cooling! 

Only one problem... the sirocco-like wind dried the paint on the brush before I could even apply it. It formed immediate skins on the blobs of paint which even the stay-wet palette doused in river water couldn't keep from solidifying. 

The light changed during the day from early morning haze to picture postcard greens reds blues and whites and it was a staring eyed, sun-baked, heat-crazed artist who at the close of play, staggered, gasping and clutching a laboured, fussy daub, to Chelsea Town Hall  . It was splodgy and much, much too pink.  As I handed the horrible thing over, seasoned professionals glided coolly past carrying calm well drawn work, opulently framed in heritage colours. Grrr.  If that weren't enough,  a day spent on a floating dock was like a day on board ship at sea... delightful yes but every time I stood still, Chelsea Town Hall was rocking.... the tube platform at Sloane Square was rocking... and even in Leytonstone, where I slept that night, the room was - like Ted Highes' house in 'Wind'  - ...'far out at sea all night.' 

Of course the work didn't sell. Who would buy blotchy pink splodges?  I now realise that probably plein-air isn't my forte; but the image above is what happened later in the studio after I took the work back to the simplicity of earlier morning views.  In the end, the splodginess of the wind-dried paint was serendipitous,  because it accidentally laid down an interesting base texture to work over.

Speaking of the river... this is what the string was for... I tied it round the rim of my plastic water jar and clung happily to a rusty old ladder on a massive and ancient wooden piling to dangle the jar in the flow of the water.  Not only is the painting of the river it's  really made 'of' the river.


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    An artist on an alien planet.

    May 19th

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