At the table

At home

At my sister's house

I had a week of the three sisters plus husbands and toddlers, cat and donkeys (not to forget a walk with Emilia, the micro pig from the Burren Nature Sanctuary), swimming in the sea and only doing teaching hours and urgent e-mail, followed by meals with my Saturday art class, visitors and neighbours, all a reminder of the truly important things in life. We ate the first salad from our polytunnel and hope to say goodbye to supermarket salad for the rest of the year.

This morning was the start of my summer: a much looser, more self-directed schedule work-wise, which requires discipline amid the freedom. There is a part of me that wants to lock myself in, plough through the work-load and neglect my needs, when I know I will function so much better on good food, exercise and sleep, books and art. From my maternal grandmother I must have inherited the busy-ness, always jumping up to do something, and in combination with my racing thoughts it does not make for a serene life.

Happily I now see my daily yoga as a necessity rather than something to tick off a list. Throughout the day I find myself craving to get into a certain pose or just stretch part of my body in a certain way it has stored in its memory from my yoga practice. I will also switch off early in the evenings and read all the books that have piled up (we have a tiny library in the village, and from my first visit I came away with books on Edvard Munch, a memoir by Graham Greene's partner and Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.)

Once I have my current work project finished, I want to paint colourful things from around the house and the garden, calm seascapes as a counterbalance, and do more drawings of my nephews.

Books | Continuity, meaning, value

Furbo beach, 12 May 2017, 8:30am

"With 'a brush, the one dependable thing in a world of strife, ruin, chaos', they could return, whatever the stress and discord of daily life, to that continuously absorbing interior world in which the struggle to record observations of light, colour and form, however agonisingly difficult and intractable, resolves into an enduring happiness. Here, where the artist strives to shape, condense and order thoughts and sensations until they take on a form that communicates, is the promise of continuity as opposed to decay, of meaning as opposed to senselessness, of value as opposed to pain. Vanessa painted, not in order to forget anxiety and pain, but in order to transform them into the permanence of art." (Spalding, Frances: Vanessa Bell. Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist, Tauris Parke, London 2016, pp.225f.)

I enjoyed this book about Vanessa Bell immensely, and once you get over the dreadful snobbery (an even bigger problem with Bell's sister Virginia Woolf, whose writing I adore), you get to 'like' Vanessa, a complex and at times intimidating person - not that liking the subject is a prerequisite for enjoying a biography. Spalding recreates Vanessa's and Bloomsbury's world so vividly, and her writing about painting is achingly insightful.

While she experienced quite a lot of hardship and finances were not always as free-flowing as it seems, it can be tempting to yearn for the lifestyle that allowed Bell and Duncan Grant to paint all day, travel widely, with lengthy stays in France, and shut themselves off from the demands of society. 

I am struggling to arrange for one week of painting (or more likely drawing) with no interruptions, but it seems almost impossible in our day and age, and I don't even have children. On Inis Meáin recently I could picture an island stay with no technology, so who knows. 

And I have to remember that I am extremely lucky with my circumstances - I can create pockets of time at home working in my studio, and more of time management is choice than I have allowed for - I can choose when to let e-mail distract me, for example.

Next on my list is another art book by another Frances, Seeing Ourselves by Frances Borzello, a book about self-portraits by women artists. My sister gave me one of her books a few years ago, and I want to read my way through all of her publications.

Things that work | Silk and lace

I get overwhelmed by too much choice and too many decisions to be made, which explains why I can be found skirting the deli counter nervously (and possibly walking away hungry) and why our house will be all-white on the outside when the external wall insulation is completed.

While I doubt I will ever resort to a 'uniform' that eliminates the need for deliberations on what to wear - I love clothes too much for that level of minimalism - shopping leaves me frazzled, so finding well-made things that work and knowing that in the future I won't have to wander around countless shops before emerging with the item I need simplifies things.

I prefer my clothes to be made from natural fabrics*, and one of my favourite materials is silk. Currently about half of my underwear consists of silk and lace sets from this range. I don't care that it is a celebrity line; it is beautifully designed and the sets are extremely comfortable and light, so suitable for everyday wear. They are machine-washable, and they last. I am sure there are various other silk options online, but I can buy these locally, which is a bonus, and the old-school department store assistants are always so lovely and chatty.


 *though I have a few polyester pieces that are years old but still look like new, so I don't rule it out