Knits, reads, paints

 

|  Knitting cushion covers in two-purl-two-knit squares and washcloths with leftover yarn from my jumper (bamboo washcloth pattern by John's cousin Lisa. My sister also makes her own washcloths) - I love spotting and noting random beautiful colour combinations, such as this one in my knitting basket: sage green, mint, magenta and silver grey.

|  This is not my current reading list (I am always late taking photos, and I already posted this on Instagram), but some highlights from last year, though not all recent publications. I am trying to remind myself to incorporate what I learnt from James Nestor's Breath (especially taping my mouth at night and doing coherent breathing: inhale for 5.5 seconds, exhale for 5.5 seconds), Glennon Doyle (stop caring what other people think, for example) and of course Pema Chödrön's wisdom. I read so many self-help books, and while I often take notes, once the books are back on a shelf, it is easy to forget the aha moments.

|  Working on a portrait of John: I am taking a lot of photos along the way, as he has given me permission to use this as an example in the online classes I am teaching, and I might add the work-in-progress shots to my website, if I ever revive the art blog I sporadically update on there (I am thinking of merging it with this one). The above photo is cropped; the painting is portrait format and will include seaweed, flowers and a bee when it is finished, symbols of John's love of nature, gardening and the sea and his new passion beekeeping.

Around here

 

Dotty

Matcha tea ceremony

Some fiction highlights from last year

Sideboard still life

Work-in-progress: John and Cillian

"She walks back, more slowly, the way she came. How odd it feels, to move along the same streets, the route in reverse, like inking over old words, her feet the quill, going back over work, rewriting, erasing. Partings are strange." O'Farrell, Maggie: Hamnet, Tinder Press, London 2020, p.214

 

|  I like to knit all year round, but often abandon it during the summer months. At the end of the year, while on an unplanned break from work due to a health complication (neither cancer-related nor COVID), I picked up my knitting needles again and have been knitting every day since. It can be addictive, and even though I am a morning person, I can see how my sister is able to stay up past midnight while working on a project. You don't notice the time going by, and the movement of your hands keeps you alert, albeit in a lulled, relaxed way.

|  I had been drinking matcha tea for years and John never showed any interest, until one of his favourite podcasts dedicated an episode to it, which prompted him to order a matcha tea set and introduce a weekly ritual.

|  Books are my weakness when it comes to acquiring things (outside of lockdowns I also use the library a lot) - even though there must be dozens of books in the house that I haven't read yet, I keep getting more. I always have several books on the go and make sure at least one of them is fiction, and I exchange books with friends and family and often pass on novels when I am finished with them.

|  Apart from the books that are scattered everywhere, I lean towards minimalism and try to limit clutter (of course everyone has a different interpretation of what constitutes clutter, and the definitions of minimalism are equally varied), but I do get aesthetic satisfaction from the objects surrounding us, including the jars of fermenting kale that are currently fizzing away on the sideboard (not pictured). The Irish Times recently featured Kopper Kreation, a Dublin brand that makes homeware out of reclaimed and recycled materials, and John bought a copper pipe candelabra. It has been brightening up our dinners.

|  A couple of weeks ago, when my energy had returned, I gave my little studio some TLC and am now back in there for hours every day, preparing videos for my art classes, finishing commissions, working on illustrations, and getting started on a new series of personal paintings on wooden boards - as much as I love the texture of canvas, I want to experiment with smooth surfaces.

Books: Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton

 

 

 

 

“Whatever peace I know rests in the natural world, in feeling myself a part of it, even in a small way.”   (Sarton, May: Journal of a Solitude, W.W Norton & Company, New York 1992, p.16)

"There is nothing to be done but go ahead with life moment by moment and hour by hour - put out birdseed, tidy the rooms, try to create order and peace around me even if I cannot achieve it inside me. [...] And here in my study the sunlight is that autumn white, so clear, it calls for an inward act to match it... clarify, clarify." (ibid., p.33)

Best known for her poetry, this is one of the journals May Sarton published, of a year in her life in the early 1970s when she was approaching sixty and living on her own in New Hampshire. It is a beautifully written account of life in solitude, her inner world, her connection to nature, the changing seasons, her love of gardening and animals, her writing process, ageing, depression and the meaning of home.

Sarton is honest about her flaws, such as anger and being difficult, but her self-criticism is tempered by compassion and serenity. She writes movingly about the redemption (and the restrictions) of  friendship and love, and her journal includes reflections on politics, race, feminism and literature and extracts of her correspondence and from other writers’ works.

I love her descriptions of simple pleasures and how she imbues everything with a sense of wonder. I am obsessed with observing the changing light around the house and the pattern it forms and was delighted to see Sarton detail this play of light and shadow in a lot of her entries. She also creates a vivid picture of the various ways she brings nature into her home - each of those still lifes is seen through her poet eyes. 

As I mentioned here before, the theme of home has been a big one over the past year, and so many of the books I read in 2020 happened to have the houses we live in and the homes we leave or lose as well as those we create for ourselves as a central theme, or perhaps I was more attuned to it in the year my childhood home was transformed and I wasn't able to visit my family. And of course I have spent most of the past ten months at home, and the fabric of the house (with all its issues!) has become interwoven with nearly everything I do.

Journal of a Solitude is the perfect read for level 5 restrictions / stormy weather / any time, especially for introverts. I read this over a stormy couple of days during one of the lockdowns and wanted to re-read it straight away – it is one of those books that you want to revisit and that reveals more layers each time. 

 

Silence and Quiet (and kale)

 

 

Some snapshots from the last few months:

1  |  The perfect book pair. I had been meaning to read Susan Cain's Quiet. The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking ever since its publication spawned myriad articles, talks and interviews. This summer I finally bought it in a small independent bookshop in West Cork (sometimes it is nice to wait for serendipity - I will always remember where I got this book). It has helped me focus on the positive sides of my (often extreme) introversion instead of beating myself up for the downsides, of which there are many: to name just one example, in my thirties I still have a phone phobia that means I have to settle and prepare myself in a quiet room to ring places such as the dental surgery, and I will shake when making those calls.
My sister-in-law gave me explorer Erling Kagge's book Silence in the Age of Noise, and I read his philosophical vignettes parallel to Quiet. 

2  |   Light-and-shadow patterns in the living room

3  |  Kale is officially this year's polytunnel star - it has been thriving. I add it to nearly every meal I make and we have been giving a lot away, yet I still cannot keep up.
Cut off in the corner of this photo is my paperback of The Dutch House by Ann Patchett, another book that had been on my list for a while and that also 'came to me' when I was browsing that new-to-me bookshop on holiday. I had given my mum a hardcover copy a year earlier. Patchett is one of my favourite writers, and this may well be my favourite novel of hers - it also fit perfectly with my ongoing preoccupation with the symbolism of houses (I still have strange dreams about my childhood home). I love the story behind the painting on the cover: Patchett commissioned an artist friend, Noah Saterstrom, to paint one of the main characters for the book jacket, and the mesmerising portrait has taken on a life of its own.
Speaking of paintings, I only realised after I had taken the photo of the kale bouquet that John is in it twice - on the couch in the background and in the painting on the wall, both in profile and in the same shirt!

4  |  More light at play. An (indoor) plant that hasn't been thriving is the money plant a friend and former housemate gave me over ten years ago when she moved out. It is down to a stump, with some struggling tiny green leaves that I won't give up on. I am fairly certain that where we put it is not the correct location according to Feng Shui, but refuse to worry about what this might signify. But the citrus trees are doing well, thanks to John's green fingers and my nephew's diligent watering (it is one of the first things he will check whenever he visits - he loves refilling the drip-watering glass bird planters). 

We have the late Tim Robinson's Burren map in the living room (from where we can look out across the bay at the Burren) and his Aran Islands map in the guest room.

Books: On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming

"The Misses Williamson inspired in her the gift of transforming the everyday that has enriched my whole life." Cumming, Laura: On Chapel Sands, Chatto & Windus, London 2019, p.145*

Laura Cumming writes about art like no other critic and with great sensitivity and empathy towards her subjects, evoking the life behind the work. Her books on self-portraits and Velázquez were both outstanding, and her most recent, a memoir about her mother and thus a deeply personal project, is no exception - I read it in April and still think about it almost every day.

The photograph shown in the last image above is reproduced early on in the book and then again at the very end, with a revelation that moved me to tears (not the only time while reading this book) and that has been hinted at in some articles and reviews, but I don't want to include any spoilers here.

Cumming's art critic's eye is evident throughout and she brings alive the art of famous artists (Bruegel's "Fall of Icarus" is central to the book) as well as artworks by her relatives, some acknowledged and celebrated during their lifetime - her father's, who died prematurely of cancer -, others hidden and only freed from obscurity through this labour of love - the photograph that looks like a Vermeer painting, taken by her grandfather, a "travelling salesman who would like to have been an artist", with dreams unfulfilled and buried. Her mother was a gifted artist who gave up painting when she got married, as she felt there "was only room for one painter", but she took up weaving instead, painting compositions with wool.

Cumming unravels her mother's life and the secrets around her disappearance as a young child (when she was abducted from the beach) with the help of images, constructing a biography via the interpretation of pictures both real - photographs, paintings - and those formed in the mind. She also quotes passages from her mother's own memoir, which like her daughter's is beautifully written and was a birthday gift to Laura. The book is suffused with her mother's artistic sensibility and ability to "transform the everyday".

I don't write detailed book reviews here, and I am hesitant to sum up the content. I noticed that a lot of the marketing centered on the kidnapping, a sensationalist approach that is misleading and does the book a disservice. While the book does relate a real-life mystery, there are so many layers to it: It is about family and memory, community and the individual, the psychology of identity and consciousness, art, the power of images and objects, silence and lies, class, the sea, and most importantly, about love in its many forms. It is a delicate and intimate piece of life writing and an exquisite meditation on loss.

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*The US title is Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother's Disappearance as a Child

See also: Laura Cumming talks about On Chapel Sands in this interview in The New York Times

Love, compassion, light: Celia Paul's Self-Portrait

This memoir by the artist Celia Paul has accompanied me for the last few months, moving from bedside table to coffee table to dining table to my desk in the studio. I read it almost in one go, but I have been going back over certain passages and revisiting the reproductions of her work and the photographs.

While substantial parts of the book are about Lucian Freud (another artist whose work I admire - Celia Paul was one of his lovers and muses and they had a son together), she emphasises that he is made part of her story instead of the other way around, "as is usually the case".

I was more intrigued by her relationship with her family and her mother in particular and the work that arose (and continues to arise) from those family bonds. Her paintings of her mother and of her sisters are very moving and tender. Paul does not consider herself a portrait painter, but rather an "autobiographer and chronicler" of her life and her family, telling their story in images.

The memoir charts finding her own voice as an artist and breaking away from the role of the muse. So many artist couples have played out the dynamic of the woman making sacrifices that enable their partner to thrive. Paul shares a lot of insight into the challenges and obstacles to becoming an artist that women face and offers up her experience of working out "a strategy" to carve out the solitude that is essential for making art. This involves not living with her husband, as she needs to have her own private space*. She also talks about the conflict between motherhood and artistic creation, how being with her son makes her unable to work, as "all my concerns are for him" when he is present, and how she feels the guilt and separation acutely.

This interview includes interesting observations about Paul's connection to other artists (I love her voice; she emanates such calm and poise). She feels "this moral quality to Constable, this kind of love and compassion that comes through...", informed by familiarity with the subject matter: "you can't do anything unless you understand it".  As she writes in her memoir,

"I only ever work from people and places that I know well. This insider knowledge gives me freedom to take liberties with the forms and structures of the faces and figures, the clouds, the waves, the houses. [...] If I know my subject well, it's almost as if I don't need to look at them in order to give them intense attention, and yet I need their physical presence."

(Paul, Celia: Self-Portrait, Jonathan Cape, London 2019, p.3)

This is what gives her paintings their intimate and empathic quality. Even in reproductions in print or on the screen the spectral light in her paintings is powerfully conveyed - her work contains a "juxtaposition of the mystical with direct observation" (p.5). Her mother would regularly travel to London from Cambridge, climb the 80 steps to Paul's flat and pose for long periods of time, during which both artist and sitter would enter into a meditative, elevated state. Paul often uses spiritual language to describe the process of painting people, and her sisters and husband also give their perspective of what it is like to sit for her, by all accounts a transcendental experience.

In the interview the curator asks her about the evanescence of her seascapes and Paul reveals that she only really started working from water after her mother's death, when "forms broke up, nothing seemed permanent. So my subject seemed to be water, in a new way." She also talks about her "struggle between dark and light", with the light always emerging from the darkness, and the influence of Goya, how the light behind the figures in his family group paintings seems to be the subject of the painting, and how there is a "melancholy feeling about that, that the light will actually outlast the figures".

The language in the book is often sparse, and this minimalism, coupled with clear-eyed honesty, carries an even stronger emotional impact. There is one passage, when describing her mother's childhood, that relates a tragedy her mother was witness to and haunted by, and it is something I haven't been able to get out of my head.

Gwen John was another inspiration that is apparent in the two paintings above and below, in the containment and stillness of the self-portraits (John is also another example of a female artist having an all-consuming affair with an older male artist - Auguste Rodin. It appears Freud expected a similar subservience from Paul).

The book is also a meditation on the intersection between the written word and visual art. Paul says writing the memoir - she had not written much previously, apart from early diary entries and poems, and found 'freedom of speech' in painting instead - has affected her art: "I feel a new assurance in my painting, through a growing confidence about using words again."(p.5)

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* Her husband Steven Kupfer wrote this essay about Celia Paul's art: "Celia Paul - Painting her Life"

Birthday, houses and home

From Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (we sometimes put on subtitles in German if available, as John is learning it, or French or Spanish, as a brush-up exercise, but I put on English subtitles when I rewatched some of this, as there were so many quotes that I wanted to see in writing in addition to hearing the voice; it can add a layer of something I can't quite put my finger on)

‘I realised [the novel Play It as It Lays] was about anticipating Quintana was growing up. I was anticipating separation. […] I was actually working through that separation ahead of time. So novels are also about things you’re afraid you can’t deal with. In that sense that a novel is a cautionary tale, if you tell the story and work it out all right, then it won’t happen to you.’

Joan Didion, in Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold

What I paint and what I read and think about and feel, and things that come into my life without my prompting them, seem to constantly interweave in astonishing - or perhaps expected - synchronicity.

It was my birthday yesterday, and talking to my mentor and friend Margie, the themes of home and rebirth and becoming through coming home to ourselves came up. I am working on the painting above, which was also born (excuse the pun) out of conversations with Margie and inner child work (my younger sister had recommended the book by Stefanie Stahl, which is about accepting our ‘shadow child’ and thus freeing our ‘sunshine child’) and may call it 'Birthday' (also as a nod to one of my favourite paintings). 

Margie had asked me a while ago whether I had something symbolic that could represent the child in me, and while I searched I kept thinking of a blurry sepia photo of me on a beach that I had saved when my sister sent me a digital copy of it and that I had been meaning to use as the starting point for a painting. 

The book I mentioned in my last post, On Chapel Sands, starts with a girl – the author’s mother - disappearing from a beach, and the memoir is about where we come from, among other things. And incidentally, I just started swimming in the sea again last week.

The house my sisters and I spent the best part of our childhood in is being transformed into a home for my younger sister and her family, with an integrated apartment for our mum. I am so glad they will be under the same roof (the guilt of having left my tribe and moved to another country remains), but there must be something potent in the symbolism of the dismantling and rebuilding, as a lot of my dreams these last few weeks have been about home and a nostalgia for my childhood. Not being able to go to Germany at the moment comes into it as well, no doubt. There is a walk John and I like to go on here that, even though it is at the edge of wild dramatic windswept Connemara, has a softness that reminds me of the fields and ditches surrounding our village at home.

In a sense a lot of art is ultimately about the journey home; it is one of those archetypal themes that underpin pretty much everything. Yet I am still struck by how it is such a dominant thread in my reading and painting at the moment. 

John gave me the recently published Lives of Houses, a collection of essays about the physical homes of various artists, literary figures, composers, politicians, etc. and how they shaped their lives and work. And I bought (and have read the first few pages - then I put it away, as my currently-reading pile is about to topple) Elizabeth-Jane Burnett's The Grassling, about place and landscape, memory and grief. It also includes wild swimming.

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We watched two excellent documentaries that are available on Netflix at the moment. Becoming, about Michelle Obama’s memoir of the same title, which also has some moving scenes of her revisiting her childhood home and reminiscing about her late father, and Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, a portrait of the iconic writer, created by her nephew. 

I realised recently that I had quite the collection of literary works dealing with grief and packed away some of them to donate, but I still have Didion’s exceptional memoirs about the deaths of her husband and daughter, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, and I want to reread them after watching the documentary.

A lot of my recommendations these days are the opposite of feel-good escapism*; between my choice of books and TV and the themes of my paintings (and the sea-swimming!), salt water is featuring heavily at the moment!

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* We are also watching After Life.

Routines for staying grounded

 

 In the studio

 

Some recent and current reading

 Spinach 

There are no weeds

Routines, be they daily, weekly or monthly, are an anchor in life, especially in these extraordinary times. We need structure. As a natural introvert I haven’t had trouble adapting to the lockdown, and while I share the global anxiety and heartbreak, just as I feel it about global warming, wars, human rights issues, poverty and other crises, and am worried about other people (and in awe of the frontline workers), I am used to dealing with massive uncertainty and am embracing the gifts and lessons in this situation, something I have had plenty of practice in since being diagnosed with cancer.

I am using this period as a retreat of sorts. Luckily I am still working part-time and only losing out on some of my income, and we are financially secure. Being at home has given me the space to expand the routines that have become such vital tools in my healing. It has been an emotional few weeks for various reasons, and some days I could barely do one or two of the things on this list, but I can feel the cumulative benefits from incorporating the below into my days and weeks as much as possible:

Exercise / gardening:

Two activities not everyone is able to do, and I never take them for granted. I dusted off the dumbbells I had bought in preparation for surgery and now rotate Christine Coen’s 22-minute workouts. She focuses on the mental health aspect of weight training and the workouts are varied enough to not feel overwhelming, though I still have to pause at times. I am also running more than ever, but I try not to be too rigid about it. One of my rounds involves stopping at the beach on the way home and wading through the water - we are very lucky to have so much space around us with access to beaches within the 2km radius our movements are currently restricted to. When I don’t feel like a run, I walk instead or spend an hour gardening. It has been sunny and dry lately and I am getting a lot of fresh air into my lungs and appreciating this heightened connection to nature.

Creativity:

Thanks in no small part to this wonderful course, I am in a state of Flow when it comes to painting and drawing. At the moment I am drawing and painting children a lot and working on my botanical illustrations and some personal projects. Last night John and I got our hands into clay, inspired by the Great British Pottery Throw Down (Keith Brymer Jones must be one of the most soulful people on the planet; he is regularly moved to tears by a piece, and those are moments of humanity that are a balm for the spirit!). Food preparation is a creative pursuit in itself and an exercise in mindfulness, and I am trying out recipes I had saved and making large bowls of rainbow salads, healthy desserts and cakes.

Meditation / visualisation / spiritual practice:

These days my practice usually involves one long Joe Dispenza meditation and/or two shorter ones each day. I also still listen to my custom hypnotherapy audio recordings a few times a week. Marisa Peer has been uploading a lot of free resources, including hypnotherapy sessions and visualisations. I read spiritual texts every day and listen to podcasts or Youtube videos, for example talks by Michael A. Singer (I bookmarked this one as I want to listen to it again).

Yoga / breathwork:

These are essentials for getting back into my body. Yoga with Kassandra has created a 30-day morning yoga challenge, so before I sit down to work I do one of those ten-minute sessions and later in the day one of her longer Yin Yoga classes. This one focuses specifically on the immune system.
Wim Hof (aka the Iceman) regularly shares free content, and I have been doing this short sequence of Wim Hof breathing.

Reading:

Reading is probably my number one activity right now; I have been reading so much, across different genres. A couple of standouts: Before lockdown I got Laura Cumming’s new book On Chapel Sands from the library and started reading it last week (as usual, I have several books on the go); I am savouring it at intervals, chapter by chapter, out in the garden. I finally bought Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. Instructions on Writing and Life, which I had been wanting to read for years, and, as expected, it is excellent, a book to visit again and again. Elizabeth Hardwick's semi-autobiographical novel-letter Sleepless Nights is also remarkable and certainly in a category of its own.

Writing / correspondence / connection:

I still write my Morning Pages every day and am also working on a journal/memoir (that I might never share publicly either) about the last two years, something I have been doing on and off.

Correspondence is important, too, and I have been making and sending cards, writing letters and putting together parcels, and reaching out to people I had been meaning to contact for a while. Snail mail also offers a balance to all the additional screen time now that so many meetings and appointments have moved online. In a lot of ways this pandemic has brought people closer together. I now talk to my 86-year old friend almost every second day (she lives alone and is cocooning); there are more video calls with family and friends; my ‘Irish’ nephew has playdates with his cousin in Germany via Whatsapp; people are reviving old friendships and forging new ones.

Therapy:
I have regular appointments with my therapists, counsellor, healers and mentors, and these are very much part of my routine. They are expensive (with the exception of the Cancer Care West counselling service; everything they do is free - we are very lucky to have them), but so worth it, and I am thankful that I am in a position to afford them.

Rest:
When I am feeling well, I want to make up for all the time I lost or wasted and go all in. Thanks to energy healing from this man the previously continuous fatigue lifted not soon after my treatment, but in my excitement over that I tend to forget that my body still lets me know very clearly when I have overdone it - which is of course true in general, but now comes with the added sensations of cancer-related fatigue. So while it is tempting to do all the things I've been meaning to do, I remind myself to slow down and take rest days as needed, with no pressure to be productive.

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On the note of productivity, I hope to be back here with possibly shorter but more regular posts - I have a lot of drafts, but haven't had the mental space to edit and post lately.