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

Art in response to violence

5/12/2015

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In the online clamour after the Paris attacks - amidst the blooming of tricolour flags across the internet - I've read a whole spectrum of responses. These range from the ultra-violet of those who exhort calm and peace and love, through the stars and stripes of Trump's assertion that the victims would have been safe if they had carried guns, to the infra-red rage of 'kill the f***g b***s'. 

Among the peace-inspired, a good many shared the clip of someone playing 'Imagine' on the street.  Others have shared Martin Luther King's statement about Love and among the  quotations I've read, some Facebook posts from fellow artists, where people say that in response to evil and atrocity they will go away and immerse themselves in making art.   In shock and in the face of our own overwhelming impotence to change what is happening or to feel safe, making art is what we can do.
It's a good plan.

Except is it enough to say 'Well the world's a horrible place and people have died in blood and pain so off I go to paint the sea....or some bluebells..." ?  Will it change anything? Isn't it somehow self-indulgent?  And what difference would it make, if I tried to convey the horror which others lived through but which I only saw on a TV screen.
Yet here's the thing.  I can't help remembering that our right to create (to make whatever art we feel impelled to make), was hard-won and paid for on pain and blood by those who over the centuries have given their lives to keep us free.  I think of German Expressionist, Emil Nolde,  considered degenerate by the Nazis and forbidden to paint, who continued to paint using only water colour because he could hide the paints, paper and brushes under his floorboards and because, if the Gestapo battered his door down, there would be no smell to give him away. (The painting shown above was I think made during WW2)   I think of those who wrote in prison cells and who smuggled printing presses across borders.
Not painting in response to violence and terror, seems somehow more twee and more disrespectful to the brave.  Apart from writing this, the best way I can honour those who were censored and persecuted and the only way I can show my gratitude to those who fought for freedom of expression, is - perhaps - to go off and paint whatever I'm impelled to paint... even if it's only the sea or a jar of bluebells.

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    An artist on an alien planet.

    May 19th

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