in which the fish muses on the ending of this day

The day is heading toward closing: this moment is one I love, its poignancy lies perhaps in the low angle of the sun. Low lines of gold on the side of my face, a bunch of jasmine on the table, shadows long and the scent the perfume like something arisen from the past. Barber’s Adagio perhaps is adding more atmosphere than I care for.


As a painter I am bound always to hunt for silent spaces and I spend way too much time in a place alone. If given the opportunity I will run there, whereas most persons, given the time, would seek the company of others, of community, but it is my lot to do otherwise. I spend great chunks of time in my own company.



Yet this is something that impacts on every other part of my life: My worlds collide in so many ways. I find that when I am in the silent space sometimes that I am paralysed. Sometimes when in the presence of persons huge tracts of speech fly out of my mouth before I can stop them.

At the moment there is disharmony, fragmentation, hostility. My practice is solely driven by things over which I have no control. Faced with that vast blank space before me I am often confronted by what appears there: I wish I was dispassionate. I live in an imaginary world, and I create through pictures a concrete form of that. Making pictures is the way I deal with things, yet even that is itself fragmentary, interrupted.



My life is a place of duality, hard to balance. Things slide away and I find it hard to catch them again. Things I make mean so much that looking at them sometimes breaks my heart. Right now it hurts my heart to draw.

I daydreamed of visiting Tate St Ives today,and my Tate newsletter arrived in the post.


My children. Sometimes I feel that I can do nothing for them: they overwhelm me in ways I cannot say. They are so different. Almost like opposites.
Sometimes I shake inwardly in the face of my own inadequacy as a mother: yet my son will say, upon waking and finding me in his field of vision: I love you.

I believe him.

And yet I know, as he does too, that he would live with his father, that he would choose his father if he had to. If things came to that.

The girl narrows her eyes and looks at the world with disdain, she is the blossoming of the Germanic branch of her family tree: intriguingly, there are shared traits with others, I have noticed. I fear that she will never see the world as I do, and it makes me sad, but at least she is strong, clever and organised.

The Queen of Emo gives birth to the Ice Princess: I wonder if my tears have poisoned her: that black spell when she was growing in me, and I was drowning in despair: did this colour her?
Her gaze is like a death-ray.

She is swimming, I can see her hair in a silver cloud. Her face has changed so much people don’t recognise her in the street.

The light is changing.

I think about my etchings, incomplete, and my canvases, which puzzle me. I think about the fragments of writing I have part completed. I think of all the reject letters I have received in the past week. The unsuccessful proposals and applications, so many so many they drown me.

I wish I could smooth all the jagged edges. The sea is roaring at me: I tried to keep out this morning but my limbs carried me there without my consent. Thus did I enter the sea, whether I liked it or not, in sheets of unusual icy rain.
My heart aches this week, and I suspect it will for quite some time.
The lovely Miss Boat is going to make me Steamboat next week.

The sun sinks behind a bank of cloud, at this moment the sea foam lights up briefly in a sheen of violet white, and the deeper ocean is the darkest green.
As it always has been, I will never change. I swim as far as I can in the cold, and then I swim some more.

This is me. Swimming through the dark pools when I have to. All the bits and the fragments and the hurting parts and the other times, there is always some light, there is always water, and salt. Strings of weed.
Banks of Apricot Cloud, a desperate wanting. Waiting.

Black charcoal, indigo paint.
Late afternoon light.
Everything.