 ' The Blue Hums To The Yellow ' Yesterday I took four paintings to the Roger Billcliffe Gallery in Glasgow for their summer show - prints from Peacock Printmakers, Aberdeen and Advanced Graphics, London, paintings, sculpture, ceramics and jewellery....if you live near enough I hope you'll take a look. Opens 2 July, closes end of August. Private views (you are invited!) Friday 1 July 6pm - 8pm and Saturday 2 july 11am - 1pm www.billcliffegallery.com
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 Can you see the needles? They're giving him acupuncture,  to relieve the pain  of holding up the Mitchell Library.... Do you think our landscapes form us, and our tastes?
Do you find when you return from holiday, you have, for a short time at least, a different perspective on your life and your home? I'm always taken aback by how spartan my house feels (but I have just come back from one of the chinziest parts of England and B&B's with piles of pillows, duvet plus quilt, thick fluffy towels, lined curtains, patterned textiles, carpeted bathroom etc.) We visited Standen, an Arts and Crafts house, where everything is decorated - wonderfully. Lovely for a holiday, but I would feel suffocated if I lived in it....but after an hour or two at home it just feels like home again, and suits me perfectly. I don't stint on comfort, but simple and spare and plain are comfortable to me...if you see what I mean. I am aware of it in the landscape too. I can remember feeling I could hardly breathe in a pretty part of Devon one August - the heat, the still air, the dense leafiness, the narrow lanes and high hedges, the thatched roofs - gorgeous, but the relief of bare hills, cool smooth stone, moving air and huge, open, empty spaces when I got home was wonderful too. PS It's not raining today!!!  I know we need rain, and I'm truly grateful for life giving water, but this much? In June? (We even took our own personal rain cloud down to the drought ridden south! Kind, or what?) A holiday on the other hand means a change - of scenery, of activity....and does require planning and organisation and sometimes considerable effort and expense. So it's really important to get it right, don't you think?
My criteria for a Simple Holiday (see Sep 21 2010) - no flights in the middle of the night, a clean and simple place to stay, new landscape to explore, energising, and different enough to be stimulating - were met with the recent trip to the south of England, and I've decided to make our annual holiday a trip to a music festival. Not Glastonbury - far too mucky, and not Glyndbourne - far too expensive. Not T in the Park - far too many people (85,000! mass hysteria never was my thing..) Part of the research is to find those I can afford - Aldeburgh or Mendelssohn on Mull perhaps....The brilliant violinist Rachel Podger runs one in Brecon..I think I like chamber music best and festivals run by the musicians themselves have an intimacy and enthusiasm and a creative energy about them that I love. Some nice research required.... Have you figured out exactly what you want from a holiday? There is a difference between Simply Holiday and Simply Chill.
Simply Chill is what I am trying to do at least one day of the weekend (that old Sunday idea). For me it means a commitment-free day, making few, if any plans, requires no organisation and very little effort - doing just what you want - reading a book, going for a stroll, drinking tea or wine, playing with children or dogs - taking it easy. Actually, I'm not very good at this, but am practising and getting better all the time! I can enjoy it for a morning or an afternoon and find it refreshing and relaxing. It involves switching off my head for a bit (that's what's hard to do!) Simply living, contentedly.... Do you do it? Now and then? Today? Now? Even for an hour? Why wouldn't you really, when you think about it............  My very green-fingered friend has grown this Giant Himalayan Lily. cardiocrinum giganteum, and friends and family are coming from far and near to view it and draw it (and photograph it). It can take seven years to flower, and after it flowers - it dies! Patience and skill are required....and Lucy has both. Magnificent! We've been busy creating a new website for Cowal Open Studios - do have a look - www.cowalopenstudios.co.uk
some beautiful photographs of Cowal, as well as work by 32 local artists.... ....that when I post multiple photos (as yesterday) you can click on each photo and enlarge it !! WOW!
I don't know that they will stand up to scrutiny so large, but isn't it clever? Thank you Weebly.    Friends have asked about the Chagall windows (see photo in yesterday's post). They are in All Saints Church in Tudeley, near Tonbridge in Kent, and we were amazed and delighted by them. You enter the church, not very big, mentioned in the Domesday Book. There has been a church on this site since the 7th century. The light is intensely blue, and the silence is deep. We just fell quiet and walked around the twelve windows very slowly, taking in the blue and the silence - it was the most meditative space I think I have ever experienced. Profoundly beautiful. Then a coach party arrived - noisily! But we had that 15 minutes or so of it to ourselves and the stillness of it stays with me. It was one of the highlights of the holiday - a very sensuous experience. For more photos and the moving story of how the windows came to be there, click here: http://www.tudeley.org/allsaintstudeley.htm Churches and Chagall, chinz and charm, and history, horses and high hedges, and roses, sun, wind and rain, but best of all sublime music at Charleston Manor Festival (see, and listen, at www.charlestonmanorfestival.com/....)          I leave you with this delicious Pizzicato oriental poppy, photographed today in bright sunshine! Hurrah!...  Here is the very talented Pia Jane Bijkerk again, playing some music she composed herself....enjoy!
http://blog.piajanebijkerk.com/WordPress/2009/03/29/a-quiet-moment-in-le-petit-bateau/ That was a rather short posting yesterday!
(As children we were told 'I want doesn't get!' We were expected to wait for something to be offered, or at the very least say 'Please may I have.' But that was the way the thought came to me that I would love to have a piano. I had been talking to someone who was getting rid of one, and I was thinking of the immense pleasure of listening to my daughters playing the piano, and I realised that, actually, I wanted to learn to play. As parents it wasn't easy finding the money for music lessons, but for my parents it was simply out of the question, and it just didn't enter my consciousness that children had piano lessons. It was completely outside my experience. And now, all these years later, I suddenly know that I would love to learn to play the piano. Someone else got the one that was being given away - but I'm looking now.... ..do you have any unfulfilled ambitions, musical or otherwise, that you didn't know you even had?.... Rain, thunder and lightening! We only got about an hours sunshine all day - but what an hour! I adore the slanting evening light....snatch it while you can.. The flowers on the doorstep are viola cornuta alba minor - they flower forever, and the really nice wine is a Crestview Park Cabernet Sauvignon from California - never heard of it before, but it is very good! Ah, the good life! I hope you got enough sun to activate the happiness glands! (It's the wine that is making me put exclamation marks everywhere!!)    I think the keeping of a journal is a lovely thing to do.
It makes me pause in the sometimes hectic hurly burly of the days, and appreciate moments of calm or beauty or delight. Lynne said 'You do find the lovely in things'. And Socrates said 'The unexamined life is not worth living'. This blog journal is a way of examining my life, and a way of lightening up for me (I've always been rather too serious!) I am quite taken with Pia Jane Bijkerk's book My Heart Wanders which is a very personal journal, on the whimsical side, but rather beautiful and gentle. It crossed my mind that it could be described as self indulgent, but I decided it isn't. Looking for the wonder, the enchantment, the whimsical and the fun in one's days doesn't mean living in some 'la-la land' or that we don't engage with what is often referred to as 'the real world' of earning a living, of politics and activism for causes we believe in, but to ignore this parallel world of finding beauty in simple things and being mindful of the small sensual details of everyday life, is to miss out on an aspect of a beautiful life and world which is, at the end of the day, the only thing we have.... Pia Jane Bijkerk posted the soundscapes (see 30 Mar 2011)....I plan to read Rachel Carson's 'The Sense of Wonder' next. A packet of mixed 'gallery' lupins sown last spring produced a lovely selection of strong plants - I've selected the colours I want for the garden : the lightest clear pinks for the 'ice cream' bed (palest pinks and white) and the peach which in early summer look good with oriental poppy 'Coral' in a yellow and orange corner - and put the others out for sale. Next, delphiniums....can't wait to see the shades of blue. Sowing from seed or tiny plugs produces lots of plants for very little cost and then the fun of choosing from a whole range is like having your own nursery....    I write the blog on my laptop which is more often than not on the dinner table. I try to write every day and I usually write either around breakfast time, or late at night (I hope this is not annoying if you look and find I haven't posted until 11.45pm, but it just has to fit in with whatever else is going on!).
How? Well I sit down and type it up on Microsoft Word. Sometimes I will write a few rough drafts at one sitting, then edit them a bit before I post them - I quite like this bit....Also under 'How' - I try to keep it light. I assume that you don't want to know about my dark nights of the soul, or the burst pipe in the loft which ruined the decoration of the guest room.... Do read Christine McIntosh's comment on 30 May. She writes FOUR blogs! I loved this blog where she is editing the letters written by her father to her mother during the second world war - beautiful. http://wartime-letters.blogspot.com I've looked at who inspired me to blog (Gretchen Rubin), what I blog about (Simplicity), why I write it (to help me think more clearly, and to share my thoughts) - that leaves where, when and how....
Do you know this Rudyard Kipling Poem? - I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew) Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who. ..very useful aide memoir....  A picture tells a thousand words. I can't imagine describing this in words!
I really enjoy taking photographs for the blog. It keeps me visually sharp - looking out for good subjects, for something slightly unusual perhaps, or funny (at least to me). Sometimes the photo is just to remind myself that simple things can give a lot of pleasure. A friend uses Blipfoto - a lovely free site where you publish a photograph each day, with or without text - a visual diary. It is really worth a look : www.blipfoto.com Perhaps you'll join.... David Hockney said '...of course art is about sharing: you wouldn't be an artist if you didn't want to share an experience, a thought.'
It validates me in a very comforting way to find that other people also think that living more simply is an idea worth exploring, and a delightful thing to aspire to. I love the fact that up to ninety five people from all around the world are reading my blog every day (though if I think about that too much it becomes kind of scary!) and I feel I've made new friends I'd never have met up with, albeit virtually, other than through the shared interest in living simply. As far as I know you are nearly all in UK or USA - anyone else out there in another country? Do tell me! My reaction to the first ever comment on my blog - it was from Brazil - was 'Wow, I'm connected!' It's all about communication. Keep the feedback coming so I don't feel like I'm talking to myself, won't you....(I usually put my replies under 'comments'.) Thanks for reading! |
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