IT’S A KIND OF LOVE SONG, 2018 [for you, N]

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It's a kind of love song, 2018 [for you, N]  // detail

I completed this painting this morning. 

Well, it’s more of a drawing in paint than a “painting” in the conventional sense of the word. 

Seen in entirety, and in the light of the world rather than a screen, it is delicate and quiet, just like my feelings about this beautiful moment in time are.  It’s taken me two years to make a bit of work that fit the feelings I have for this, that suits the memory. 

The words go like this: 

When we stand

together

your hips

meeting mine

my fingertips gently

in the groove your spine makes

your hands flat

at the small of my back

when we stand up like that

together in the sunshine

it draws everything that’s important

between our two bodies close

it’s a kind of love song.

I’ve used the words “it’s a kind of love song” before.  In an artwork for my mother, as the title of the show I did for her.  In that artwork, the words had so much sadness wrapped up in them, because jesus christ when someone is dying you feel your love for them like a song but equally keenly feel the loss so dark and heavy.

This time, in this artwork, the words are light and gentle because standing in that sunshine with him that particular day was just one of those moments I don’t think I’ll ever forget it was so beautiful.  Thanks, N, for those years we had.  I don’t miss you anymore but damn the memories are good.  

A new season

I have been working really hard, not sleeping well at night.  It's fairly par for the course at this time of getting an exhibition mounted [yup, a private view opens in four weeks].  My head is whirring non-stop with ideas and to-do lists and I find it difficult to stop my bloody brain.  I'm normally such a great sleeper, sigh.  

On the other hand, man am I getting stuff done!  It feels good to be focussed so intently, to feel  like it's all going to come together in the end.  

Today I've been thinking about Mum.  About how during the years of her sickness, I really had the brakes on with my work because I know myself well and knew I couldn't manage a big workload as well as manage my own emotional fallout.

I remember well the day I got the news she was terminal.  I was sitting working in the studio of my dreams that I'd only just rented, the studio I'd waited so long to have.  I heard the news on the phone and felt my world crumble.  From then on my work and that studio just kinda crumbled too and my work/life took a path the last couple of years I didn't quite expect.

I'm not saying I haven't done work for the last couple of years.  My god, I have!  I just mean the focus of my life has really been my son,  and coping with the idea of losing her. As a result my life's been quite a lot smaller than I had imagined it would be.  Work took a big backseat in terms of priorities.   And you know what, I'm pleased it did.

I'm glad I took the time to focus on Mum.  To be with her when I could, to process my own loss and grieve and sleep and cry when I needed to.  There is nothing more important to me than the people I love, and that includes my work and any ambitions I might have for it.

It's five months since she passed. I think of her every day, I know she's with me always.  In the early hours of this morning I put a pillow behind my back and pretended it was her cuddling me, even though she hasn't really done that since I was a child.  It was a comfort for my tears.

But I was saying to a friend this morning that I feel like I've turned a corner in this sadness, got renewed drive and energy for my work.  I've no longer got part of my heart wondering when she would leave me.  She already has.

It's so very good to be feeling this new energy.  I feel a lightness, and a kind of steely determination to do my work, and this new show.  I feel my focus sharp and clear.

None of us know what life brings, eh.  On the day this photograph was taken, that beautiful couple sure didn't know what the sixty years they had together would hold. 

All I can say is that today I feel alive.  Aligned.  Awake.  I'm hurting less, laughing more.  I'm hopeful that a new happier season in my life has begun.

And that, my friends, is good enough for me.

These are our days

These are our days [let's live them fiercely, love], in situ at F's house [Photo by FL, used with permission] 

I've been asking for people to send me in shots of artwork they've bought off me - because I love seeing my work in people's homes, and I love how people buy my work for such different reasons and are such a wide variety of people.  Plus my work seems to really come alive once it's got a place in someone's home [and heart], and I love to see it loved in a domestic setting.

This morning the lovely FL from Wellington sent in this gorgeous picture of a wee card I did a few years ago as part of a project I did for a year called the Fleur Wickes Monthly Papers.

When opened the message and saw what she'd sent through, the words really hit me.  

These are our days

let's live  them

fiercely, love.

Yes, I thought, these are indeed OUR days. Let's LIVE them. 

Those of us who are still here with our hearts beating have a responsibility to make the most of the hours we have.  To find ways to feel truly and properly alive.  To live this life awake.

Getting this photograph first thing this morning made me feel awake alright. 

I cried when I saw it because it reminded me of how my mother fought for three years every single day to stay alive because she loved us and we were what mattered to her and we needed her still.  It hurt to think of Mum and her dying and her leaving and the gap she's left in me.  It hurt like hell.  But you know the other I felt when looked at these words?  All of a sudden I understood that it's okay to be happy again. She'd want that.  She'd want me to be happy. It fact it's all she ever really wanted for me my whole life.  I cried again.  

I love it how receiving this photograph opened my heart up.  I love it how I cried.

If you choose to live this life fierce and alive - and I do - you get given the remarkable gift  of being able to really feel.  But mate, feeling so keenly hurts just as often as it gives you pleasure.  One is inextricable from the other.  But I tell you, it is so worth it.  Every damn roller coaster minute.

Thanks, FL, for sending this beautiful photograph through.  And thanks for being such supporter of my work over these long years.  It means so much to me.

Start from where you are

Start from where you are, written on my desk. 23 January 2018

Drew this on my desk this morning.

I'm about to start serious work on two projects I'm very nervous about.  One's a commission,  one's an exhibition.  Both are going to push me to the limit, both are going to take me well out of my comfort zone.

Around about this time in any project that matters to me, I find myself wanting to dive under my duvet... I get the im-too-scared-to-start vibe going on in my head.  Lucky for me I've had loads of experience of this kind of sick gulping feeling, and know after nearly thirty years of working that it's usually a good sign, the yuk sicky feeling in my throat.  Because it means I'm moving into new territory, pushing myself to go to places artistically that I've never been.  Taking yourself to the edge of new horizons always pays off.

But how, how how to start?  How the fck to begin when I so fcking scared?  

It's simple.    

Start from where you are.

That's all you ever need to do.  All you ever can do, really.

Start from where you are, put one foot in front of the other, and see where you end up.

I can tell you right now that despite my brave words, right now I've got a pounding headache, a tight throat and a fast-beating heart.  But fck it, giving in to fear never got me anywhere.

Here goes... 4,3,2,1 and I'm off.

Let's see what the next six weeks brings...

Aliveness

God I feel good today.  I feel awake and alive.

Slept in, got up, put my favourite t-shirt and raggy denim skirt and steelcap boots on, went to my favourite cafe, got two lattes to go, took them home and drank them one after the other.  Sat on my green velvet couch, looked around me, saw quiet beauty everywhere. 

Yesterday I had a long walk under whispering trees, excellent conversation, delicious kisses, then an evening laying with my dear old sighing dog watching Last Tango in Hallifax until midnight, crying occasionally because I missed Mum. 

I'm seeing my wise friend for dinner tonight, and until then, for the rest of the day, I have the happy circumstance of being entirely in my own company.  Bliss.

Contributing to the reasons I've got this good-day- feeling is the fact that I've had the luxury of a marvelously slow start to 2018. 

Unusually for me, I didn't spend New Year's Eve & New Year's Day setting goals.  Instead, I spent the entire day alone, took great pleasure in the solitude, let one day roll into the next with no real plan.  I've realised goal-setting doesn't work for me.  It's always been more like a stick to beat myself with, a measure for what I didn't get done.  Screw that.  

My son has been off having a great time with his father for the holidays, so I have had these last weeks off being a mum as well having time off from the making of artwork and a living.  I've been able to relax properly.  Time has stretched to my own schedule.  I have eaten and slept and and cried for Mum and binge-watched tv as I've wanted to, without needing to have thought to anyone else's needs.   The hours and days have felt like this liquid fluid thing playing to my tune instead of a hard and fast 9-5.  It feels like a year since the first of January.   There is something very special about once and while giving yourself permission to attend to your own self first and foremost.  It brings you back to life in a way nothing else can.  

The other day I listened to the marvelous Esther Perel on Debbie Millman's Design Matters podcast.  Esther was talking of trauma, in this case of her parents and their friends who had survived Auschwitz.  She said "there are two types of people; the people who did not die, and the people who came back to life. There is a world of difference between not being dead, and being alive."

Yes, I thought. YES.  Aliveness. 

I do believe I have decided that aliveness is my word for the year.

Here, my url-friends, are a few things that in the first few days of 2018, have made me feel aliveness. 

And yes, I am aware that grammatically, that previous sentence sux. 

Ain't it great to do what the fck you like with words. 

What pleasure I take.

1. Walking a beautiful shoreline alone on a New Year's morning. 

Taking a delicious dip, lying down in the shallows, feeling the water across my body.  Not giving a flying fck about my hairstyle.  Loving the feeling of sand gotten right in everywhere.

2. Recovering my workroom chair

Used my old dressing gown which has given me at least a decade of comfort, and upon which I had sewn the words chin-up which my mother always said to me.  I made a photograph of  those stitched words for the exhibition I made for my mother.  Now I get to sit in this chair while I write, and have her words at my back.  It's an appropriate place for them, since she's always had my back.  That ain't changed even though she's gone.  I miss her every day but you know what, it's okay to feel good again.  To feel happy.  She wants that for me.

 

3. Furry pink and delightful green against a wispy sky

Nah, I haven't been anywhere on my holiday,  I've just been hanging out with myself at home.  Ten doors down from me and look what I saw. It doesn't take any other resource except for your own self to feel a few seconds of  pleasure right down deep in your bones.  Breathing deeply and opening your eyes wide so you can see how beautiful this world is will usually do the trick.

 

4. A road-trip with my wise friend

Where we saw this girl jumping a chain fence into a rough ocean, with a seabird flying above.  Then had lemon verbena tea at the home of a delightful woman I'd never met before and she gave me a green glass jar all the way from her home in Switzerland just because I told her it was beautiful. 

5. 47 years old and standing in front of a mirror, looking at myself naked 

And very much liking the body I see. 

I love my hips especially.  They are very wide, like my shoulders are.  I always think I have a pacific-type body, rounded and well-shaped like those women Gaugin made all his paintings of, except I'm pale instead of brown. 

For the last five years, I have paid increasing attention to my body.   I have found joy in the sweat and grind of training, of truly being in my body for a few hours a week.  I love feeling strong and fit.   I love having muscles and being able to use them.  I pay attention also to what I put in my body, and who I share it with.  R.E.S.P.E.C.T.  Just like Aretha said.

The very best thing about my body though, well beyond its nice looks, is that for the first time in my life, my body truly feels like my own. 

Those of you who have experienced your body being treated as if it is someone elses will understand what I mean.

The day I took this photograph, I looked at my scars and skin and breasts and legs and hands and face and felt quite fortunate and lucky, that I could stand there and bear to look. 

I know so many women who hide from their own bodies, ashamed.  Who have bought into the story that no body is good enough, especially not their own.   

What I see these days when I look in the mirror is a responsive sensitive body which has given me such deep and precious pleasure.  A body which has carried me through the deepest of grief, the blackest of days. 

Over the years, this body of mine has experienced trauma no body should ever have to.  On the other side of that mofo coin, I have cried many times at the joy my body has shown me.  Light and shadow, mate.  Light and shadow.

Like it says in this photo, it is beautiful here.  Right here in my body. Right down deep. 

I went for a walk and I heard a man singing

I went to the most beautiful party last night.  I lay on the floor on a cushion beside a kind  man I didn't know, looking up at a grapevine-covered conservatory ceiling wound through with tiny lights, while listening to another man with a fairytale hat and a beautiful voice singing the kind of sad songs that make you feel lit up inside.

I woke up feeling wide open, like the interesting people I spent time with last night made the walls  I've been using to protect myself tumble down.  It's not an easy space to find myself in. With the walls gone,  I notice how grey I am right now.  How I'm kind of blunted and the world is watercolour, not bright blue like I'm used to.  I guess my brain is doing that sensible thing and shutting me down a little so I can deal with our first christmas without her.  I figure the colour will return in its own good time.  Just gotta keep going with this process.  Can't go over it, can't go under it.  Gotta go through it.

I went for a walk this morning.  As I crossed over to the riverside, I passed a man.  He had  headphones on, singing. Beautifully.  He smiled at me as we crossed paths.  His singing - and the singing of the tui in the tree above my head - cut through my sadness, reminded me that there is always loveliness in this world, if you choose to look for it.

Two men singing in the space of few hours. How delightful.

In what's likely to be the last post of 2017, I want to thank you for bearing with me for the last few months.  IRL,  have had my close friends and family of course, but this writing I do helps me in a way I can't explain.  The particular kind of grieving you do around death is new to me, and I'm finding my way through it blindly, with no particular grace.  I feel fortunate to be able to write some of it out into the ether like this.

I went for a walk just before, wrapped in her jacket, having first attached the wee teapot in the photograph to my necklace with a dodgy bit of thin black wire.  I wanted her as near to me as I could get this morning.     

My parents went on a world trip when I was ten.  My Mum bought a sterling silver charm bracelet to remember their travelling days by.  This teapot is from that bracelet.  It had fallen off and Mum gave it to me a couple of months before she died.  I played with it as a child - it would be on her wrist and I'd be playing with the rotating enamel interior, fascinated by the movement in something so tiny.  It seemed like the earth turning.

I know the holiday season is a lovely one, full of love and family and friends and fat men in red bringing new treasure to children.  But no matter how happy we are, how much love we have, we all have our shadows trailing along behind us, seen most strongly when the light is brightest.

Grief for the love we've lost, for the love we never had in the first place.  All those knife-sharp hurts that come just from the act of living.

That's why it's so important to treasure what we have that is good and lovely.  

Even if right now that's only the sound of a man singing beautifully as you walk on by.

You me the sea

you me the sea tidal, 2017

I'm posting this image for my dear friend, M, who is having a tough time, and has been having a tough time for years now.  I almost want to laugh when I think of the pressure she's under in her life.  Because otherwise I'll cry.  

M, her heart is so big.  Being in her company you feel her kindness and generosity wrap right round you.  She is also fiercely creative, with something strong and important to say.  This woman she knows how to love, she knows how to be there for those she loves, no matter the cost to her self.  She ain't rich.  She ain't famous. But damn, she is fine.

Ever since I've known M, she's been the same: periodically gone to the same despairing places right down deep, but jesus come out of it with such fierce determination. 

She has achieved so much in her life so far, but most of the time she can't see it because she's lost in the up-down-around of her overwhelming feelings .  She and I we're so similar in that way:  both more than half the time at the mercy of our big-wave emotions.  

What I want to remind you with this artwork, M, is to remember the sea.  That big big water. She has waves so big even ships are sunk.  Some days she's calm and blue enough that the mothers let their toddlers in.

Her endless change, her wild variation, that is her constant.  That is her strength.

Tide in, tide out. No matter the weather.

You, my friend, have ridiculously heavy burdens.  But you are like her, so big and elemental that you can bear them all.  

As long as you embrace who you are.

As long as you accept your life ain't ever gonna be no rosegarden.  Flowers don't grow in a wild ocean.

I could, as you well know, M, be talking about myself.

Let's let go those dreams of a life full of pretty roses, let's leave that to someone else.

Let's be who we are.  Grey and fierce-as-fck, calm and blue.  So strong we can carve the land up if we choose.

You. Me. The sea. 

Tidal.

Love you, mate.

My favourite kind of day

My kitchen sink, 17 December 2017

Sun shining hot.

Making good work.

Doing the washing.

Cleaning the sink.

This is

my favourite

kind of day.

I'm often at my happiest when combining the domestic with my work.  Guess it's because the quiet private ordinary details of my everyday life are where my work comes from.  

Counterpoint

It's beautiful here at the edge, on the workroom wall, 14 December 2017

I've had a tough week, one way or another.  Today, in counterpoint, I got a big print made of this, hung it on my workroom wall. 

The words were written during a happier time.  It makes me feel good to remember happier times.

“it’s beautiful here
in this small room
in this small town
in this small country
at the edge
of the world”

FInding brightness on dark days is so good for my spirit.

[BTW & FYI: Studio prints of this artwork will be available at the Space Xmas Night Market on Saturday.  If you're in Whanganui, rock on up.  If you're not gonna be in my hood, hit me up and I'll sell you one URL, and send it to you wherever you are. ]

Gaps and distance

Red string in a bow, December 2017

I've got a Xmas market coming up on Saturday and I've made some artwork for it which is quite good and, according to the schedule in my own head, I'm  supposed to be spending this morning writing a cheery post so you'll come to the market and buy some stuff.  But you know what I'm not feeling it.

This morning I couldn't give two flying fcks about the market or selling any prints.  No disrespect to the market, which will be a very good one, or to my prints, which are equally good.

It's just that I feel the gap of her absence so keenly.  I've got something to talk to her about and she's not here.  

Listening to  you cant' always get what you want as I write this. Music eases the ache, eh.  You listen and you know someone else felt the same and all of a sudden all this feeling just feels human like everyone else and you don't feel so wound up.

I have something I want right now, but I'm not getting it.  The distance between what I want and what I'm getting feels like Cook Strait. 

If she was here, I'd talk to her about it, and she'd say it's okay baby just be patient it will come. Chin up. and I'd feel annoyed at her and think yeah its alright for you you're not the one wanting this so badly and I'd say see you later Mum love you in an annoying offhand manner and drive home and then realise she was right and tell her so by text and she'd say love you baby and I'd feel all was right with my world again.

But she's not here.  She's so far away.

I'm left here writing by myself into the ether, trying to fill the gap she left with words, listening to rock songs very quietly so I don't wake my son, tears hot in my eyes, cool down my face.

I've got fifteen minutes before I start the day, before I shower and dress and walk the dog and put on my makeup and pretend for the rest of the day that I'm fine.  I'm not fine.  

Here's a lovely thing that happened.  This makes me feel better. Not such a miserable downer for you first thing in the morning lol.

I made a very large print of remember love for a beautiful couple J.D and A.B.  They live apart at the moment,, for work. This is the first artwork they have bought together.  You can't see it but under the large "remember love" I wrote "and stardust" because I don't know them from a bar of soap but they and their love feels a bit like magic to me, and this print, IRL, has lots of marks that look like dust and the stars and the expansive black universe.

Remember love [and stardust], for J.D and A.B, December 2017

Anyway, the other night they opened the artwork I'd sent them together, via Skype. This is the message J.D sent to me afterwards:

“I cried. It’s beautiful. Thank you so much Fleur. It’s subtle and it’s bold and it’s perfect. Was actually quite fitting that A and i opened it together but apart... our relationship has featured quite a few long-distance separations, and even now with only an island-length between us (barely anything at all when we’ve had to cover oceans’-worth of distance) it’s an amazing way to remember love. (and stardust.)”

It was so wonderful, getting these words from her.  It's why I keep doing what I do instead of curling up into a ball on my bed, which quite frankly at the moment is what I'd prefer to be doing.

Even though right now in my life I feel the gaps and distance between me and love and most kinds of loving, it cheers my heart to feel the love others have for eachother.  It makes me smile, it makes me glad for them, it makes me too remember the times I've felt all loved up, makes me hopeful I'll feel that again.  That I'll feel something strongly again, and not just this going-through-the-motions numbness that makes up so much of my days these days.

No time left on my writing clock this morning and  I gotta wrap this up.  This post feels like it's half written but I don't think the quality of the writing's gonna get any better today... Maybe tommorrow it'll be half decent. That's the thing, you just gotta keep at it.  Keep returning and pushing through.  Some days will suck like this one does.  Other days will feel like magic. 

You never know when you start which way the coin's gonna flip.  You just gotta keep flipping the coin.