Just recently I’ve been running away. Fight or flight. Apparently flight is an underrated stress response.
At the moment, I feel like I’ve got a lot on my mind; too much. More times than not, I just get on with it in a resilient effort, and other times I indulge in some escapism and don’t deal with anything, waiting for something to blow up and become urgent, preferring to lose myself streaming box sets. But, of course, that’s just prolonging the inevitable.
Anyway, I met a friend the other day. I mentioned the research paper to her. I explained that I feel the need to think of all the possible options to make sure that what I choose is the right decision. She said that I shouldn’t worry about making the right choice, I should just make a choice and make it right.
Apparently, it’s called choice overload, and it’s an evil of the modern world. Whilst choice brings freedom and a sense of empowerment, too much choice can cause anxiety; a paralysis which results in no decision being made at at all; higher expectations of making the right decision by virtue of the sheer number of available choices; and consequently an increased probability of dissatisfaction with the final decision. I’m what’s termed a maximiser – someone who has to consider all the options before making an informed decision which in essence is a good thing but in a world of infinite choices can lead to choice overload. I need to become more of a satisficer, someone who is content with good, rather than the best and who, as a result, doesn’t feel the need to research every option and consequently manages to avoid the paradox of choice.
Is on a bend on a narrow country road full of potholes, and sharp flints which are paddled onto it by tractors from nearby fields.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve come home to find a car parked lopsidedly outside the house and strangers drinking tea in our kitchen waiting for a breakdown vehicle. We’ve had a few road accidents as well, the last one being on 27 May 2020. A motorcyclist was swiped off his bike by a trailer which had swerved onto his side of the road whilst navigating the bend. The Hampshire Air Ambulance landed in the field next to our house.
The driver of the vehicle towing the trailer carried on, but later saw the error of his ways and went to a police station. He was prosecuted. Specialist police officers came to the scene to reconstruct who did what, at what speed etc, and to take photographic evidence. Four years later, I was contacted by a lawyer acting for the motorcyclist who was now suing the driver as he had sustained life changing injuries. Would I be prepared to provide them with a witness statement as to what I saw and heard on the day in question?
Well, I have difficulty remembering what I did last week, let alone what I heard and saw in the fleeting moment they both passed the house four years before. Of course, I said yes, and yes, I understood that I might be required to attend court and give evidence. What I found really difficult was trying to remember what I actually saw and heard myself as opposed to what extra information and thoughts I had accumulated from discussing it with my husband and daughter after the event.
In her book The Memory Illusion, Julia Shaw refers to this as source confusion i.e. misattributing information to our own memory or experience. She specifically talks about it in conjunction with confabulation (in which the event being remembered never actually took place) in the context of early childhood memories. It’s led to me querying my husband’s firm recollection of sitting on his grandmother’s knee with his Dinky car when he was three. Is he sure that he hasn’t seen a photo or been told a story as he was growing up? No, he’s certain it’s a memory. Apparently, the average age for a child to form a memory capable of being recalled in adulthood is 3.5 years, although the range can be anywhere between 2 and 5 years. I am struggling to find my first memory.
I’ve often thought that I would be a really bad witness. I don’t understand how that can be, because as artists, aren’t we supposed to be highly observant? Mind you I was never very good at the observation round in The Krypton Factor. Or do we just observe different things? I’m generally good at spotting when something is different, which probably means that my memory of how something was before is perhaps subconscious and is only triggered when I sense a difference. Who knows? All I know is that I can remember my 16 digit credit card number with no problem at all, which was handy when I went out on Saturday morning and accidentally left both of my bank cards at home, and had to set up Apple Pay manually so that I could put some petrol in the car to get home again.
Anyway, I have recently received an email from the lawyer informing me that the case has settled and that I will no longer be needed at trial. Result!
After my disaster trying to do my own, I managed to source some pre-treated fabric and have another go. The result is quite good, but the clingfilm effect suggests that the fabric is creased which irks me somewhere deep inside. Also, I don’t think that I rinsed it thoroughly as some hydrogen peroxide seems to have discoloured the fabric in places. I’m not sure how I might use fabric based cyanotypes yet – I need to think about it, and look for some inspiration.
In the meantime, I’ve been experimenting with adding in sections of the negative print. I got this idea from these works by a visual artist and photographer from Luxembourg, Jean Bettingen who is interested in the constructs of identity, memory and self-representation. I also like his use of text to accompany the images. I’m guessing that he has overlaid the transparency over the top of the cyanotype.
I didn’t want to cut up my negative transparency just yet, so I printed it out and tore off a section. I think that it adds some extra interest, and I particularly like the way in which it’s not obvious which is on top, the cyanotype or the negative. It’s actually the print of the negative which is just lying loose on top of the cyanotype, but it gives a sense of distant space behind it. I tried placing the transparency on top of the print to see what that would look like and I’m intrigued by the effect, so when I’m feeling a little less precious about the transparency I’ll chop it up.
I also came across a German artist called Katja Liebmann, whose work records the energy, isolation and alienation of urban life.
The water droplets on the first image reminded me of a photo I took out of my bedroom window on New Year’s Day this year. I hoped to myself that it wasn’t a taste of things to come.
I really like this image. It’s only A4. I’m going to try and do it as a triptych, like Liebman’s first image.
I knew that last week would be a busy week for other things; I haven’t even managed to post anything, on anything.
I managed to attend Madeline Hook’s online workshop on Visual Research which was very interesting and demonstrated how the online resources are a much richer environment for searching for visual inspiration than a Google search, which is primarily made up of images in a commercial context. I don’t know why that hasn’t dawned on me until now.
As it turned out, I didn’t need to do anything on the New Contemporaries, as the exhibition is part of the low residency week activities.
I did think some more about the interim show in between doing other things; I have now managed to come up with a way of making it obvious that the telephone is interactive – I’m going to do something along the lines of the accompanying piece to Michael Craig-Martin’s ‘An Oak Tree’.
I have started to do some work on Topic 1; I’ve changed it to be about motherhood as I’ve finally started realising some ideas that I’ve had in my head for months and so that seemed the natural place to start, although it’s out of chronological order. Depending on how these go, I might think about putting them in the interim show.
I haven’t done a mind map so I’ll have to shift that as an ongoing item into this week.
Gompertz reflects on the ability of creatives to think about both the big picture, and the fine detail.
”It requires your mind to constantly go back and forth, one moment concerned with the minutiae, the next stepping away and seeing the broader context… One tiny dab of colour can radically change the appearance of the largest of paintings. Each stroke of the brush is a note struck in a visual concerto; any mistake is as obvious to the viewer as hearing an orchestra member hit a wrong note.”
It’s true that the tiniest detail can make a painting: the small detail of the red sun makes this work by Monet.
Sunrise, 1872, Monet (Wikipedia 7 Jan 2025)
Gompertz describes a visit he made to the studio of Belgian artist, Luc Tuymans.
He is intrigued by Tuymans’ work and its ability to make him want to look closer. Tuymans explains that every painting has a point of entry: a small detail that catches your eye and draws you in. He is influenced by other artists who use this trick: Hopper, Van Eyck and Vermeer. In the case of the latter, Gompertz explains that the point of entry for ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ might be assumed to be the highlight on the earring but, in fact, conservators uncovered an alternative point of entry: a small dot of pale pink paint in the corner of her mouth, which serves to change the overall reading of the painting.
Detail ‘Girl With a Pearl Earring, 1665, Vermeer
As an aside, to my mind, the point of entry in Monet’s ‘Sunrise’ above is the red sun, going down through the buildings on the right, the reflection on the water, back up to the boat in the foreground, to the boats behind, up to the buildings in the distance, into the sky and following the directional brushstrokes up to the top righthand corner.
Tuymans completes his paintings within the course of a day; he uses the edge of the canvas as his palette which allows him to work quickly, as does his preconceived detailed plan, which can sometimes have begun many months, if not years, before. In fact, Tuymans goes so far as to plan an entire exhibition upfront before he has even started work, from the relationship between each painting, its size, location, the colour of the wall on which it will hang, and so on. His rationale for treating his work as a unit in this way is that to make sense of it, all of the paintings will need to be seen together, and so he increases the chances of there being a major retrospective of his work once he is dead. Now, that’s seeing the bigger picture!
I’m not really sure what I think about this. Planning work in such an extensive and detailed way seems very restrictive to me. Having said that, I would assume that his planning process includes a prolonged period of experimentation before committing to the final piece, which is why he can complete it in a day. He also uses existing images as a basis for his work, which is likely to reduce the number of questions he has to ask himself.
As for the focus on his legacy, I really can’t make up my mind. I suppose it depends on why artists, and in particular, Tuymans, make art. Is it to make the world a better place? Is it to fulfil the need to express themselves? Is it to leave a lasting mark on the world? Is it to make money? Is it because they simply have to? It’s probably a combination of all of these things, with some being of greater significance than others. I just get the feeling in Tuymans’ case that it’s rather contrived, and predominantly about his legacy. I actually wish that I hadn’t read this about him: for me it is a distraction from his work, which is primarily concerned with people, and their relationships with the past.
John Playfair, 2014, Luc Tuymans & John Playfair, 1824, Henry Raeburn (momus.ca 7/1/25)
I’m reminded of Sean Scully. My mother couldn’t stand Sean Scully. In fact, she didn’t rate Picasso either. I remember a conversation I had with her when she phoned me up one morning: she hadn’t been able to get to sleep the night before, so she had got up, made herself a cup of tea and put the TV on. She ended up watching a documentary on Sean Scully. She hadn’t been able to get to sleep after it either, as she had been so incensed by it. Did I know that his paintings, basically just coloured stripes, sold for millions of pounds? I suspect the problem had arisen because the programme makers had juxtaposed some footage of Scully applying some paint to a canvas in a rather sloppy slapdash fashion with footage of one of his paintings being sold at auction. I think it was one of those ‘I could have done that’ moments, but I resisted the urge to give the obvious answer ‘But you haven’t, have you?’, and instead commented that it’s because he is actually a very astute businessman. From what I understand, Scully controls the supply of his art into the art market, retaining a significant number of works himself, thus reducing supply, increasing demand and driving up prices, whilst at the same time ensuring that there is plenty of his work readily available for retrospectives. Basic economics, really.
Song (1985), Sean Scully approx value 2022 £1.6M (sothebys.com 7/1/25)
It all comes down to the uncomfortable relationship between the creation of art and profit, which Gompertz deals with early on in his book, and which I wasn’t planning on covering, but as I seem to have found myself here anyway…
On money:
At it’s very simplest, if you are a professional artist then you need to earn an income from your work to survive. But the relationship between art and money raises so many questions. Is the problem the amount you earn and what you do with it? Which is more worthwhile – the work of a penniless artist slaving away in a garret, or an artist who plays the game and exploits the brand conscious wealthy consumers? Does the need to earn an income compromise or limit an artist’s ability to express themselves authentically? Sophie, in her post reflecting on the first term, refers to the new sense of creative freedom she has experienced, away from the conveyor belt of producing work which would appeal to past and future buyers of her paintings. It is a subject we’ve touched on briefly in our weekly sessions, and it seems a very delicate balance to get right. I think Gompertz probably sums it up best:
“The intellectual and emotional motivation isn’t profit, but it is an essential component. Profit buys freedom. Freedom provides time. And time, for an artist, is the most valuable of commodities.”
In his book, Gompertz explores the issue of artistic entrepreneurism by starting with the artist who didn’t shy away from the subject of money and materialism by making his art all about them: Andy Warhol.
“Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” Andy Warhol
He then covers the likes of Reubens, an expert salesman, who went off ringing the doorbells of the aristocracy and royalty of Europe whilst his minions worked endlessly in his workshops; Van Gogh and his money man, Theo; and American artist, Theaster Gates, who uses the proceeds of his art to buy and refurbish buildings for use by the community in the South Side of Chicago, where he grew up, thereby regenerating the area and effecting positive social change.
‘Chorus’, 2016, Theaster Gates
I had hoped to have covered much more of the book in this post – it may end up having as many parts as The Godfather! The fact that I have had so much to take note of and comment on, is proof that I am finding it incredibly insightful. I am aware that, at the moment, I’m using this blog for note-making. I have to, otherwise I’ll forget it all. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve read a fact and thought, oh that’s interesting, I must remember that, only for it to disappear again. It infuriates me that I can’t recall facts and statistics at the drop of a hat when having a discussion about something, whilst the other person seems to be able to pluck them out of thin air in support of what they are saying. Or maybe that’s exactly what they are doing – they do say that if you say something with enough confidence people will believe you…
I’ve just been catching up with what my fellow students have been up to by doing my regular blog read. My husband read me this poem last night – it seems particularly relevant in the light of the several references to trauma and Louise Bourgeois.
… and Lead a More Creative, Productive Life by Will Gompertz isn’t taking me long to read at all. Gompertz, artistic director at the Barbican, makes some very interesting and thought-provoking observations on what it is to be creative. As I’m galloping through it at such a speed, I thought it best to highlight some parts, as I go along, which I think will either help me in finding my artistic voice, or which reinforce ideas and concepts which we have touched on in the course so far.
On failure:
”When it comes to creativity, failure is as inevitable as it is unavoidable. It is part of the very fabric of making. All artists, regardless of their discipline, aim for perfection…But they know perfection is unobtainable. And therefore they have to accept that everything they produce is doomed to be a failure to some extent…Thomas Edison knew all about the notion of sticking at it…But at no point did he countenance failure: ‘I have not failed 10,000 times,’ he said. ‘I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find a way that will work‘…There is plenty of time for wrong turns, for getting lost; for feeling generally hopeless. The crucial thing is to keep going. Artists appear glamorous and blessedly detached, but in reality they are tenacious grafters: they are the proverbial dogs with bones… And while they are out there, worrying away, they often discover a hidden truth about the creative process… Their success is very often down to a Plan B. That is, the thing they originally set out to do has morphed along the way into something different.”
He references several artists who started out in one direction only to find their success through a Plan B, such as Mondrian, Lictenstein and Bridget Riley. In the case of the latter, in the early part of her career Riley was interested in colour theory and the work of the Impressionists, the Pointillism of Seurat, and the composition of Cézanne. It wasn’t working for her; she was directionless and lacked originality, and she was getting older. The ending of a relationship caused her to paint a canvas black, and she took all that she had learnt from her studies of Seurat et al and applied her knowledge in abstract terms. She painted a white horizontal line the lower edge straight, the upper edge forming a curve – it became a painting expressing the dynamism and inequality of relationships, human and spatial.
’Kiss’, 1961, Bridget Riley (Wikiart 4 Jan 2025)
”Bridget Riley had to abandon the one thing she thought most important and appealing about painting – colour – in order to make any real progress. It didn’t mean colour could never feature in her work again, only that at that precise moment in time it was the roadblock… Only when [she] went back to the most basic of basics – a canvas covered in black paint – did she find the necessary clarity to progress. Only then did she discover the most precious and liberating of things: her artistic voice… As long as you stick at what you are doing, constantly going through the cycle of experimentation, assessment and correction, the chances are you will reach the moment when everything falls into place.”
The cycle of experimentation, assessment and correction is at the very essence of this course: Practice-based research.
Gompertz also states that if you call yourself an artist and make art, then you are an artist regardless of where you are in the process, or what skills you still need to learn and develop. I think I find this the hardest to embrace – I still can’t quite think of myself that way. I’ve only just got my head around being a student – in retrospect, it probably wasn’t the best idea to try it out first on the border official at Marrakech airport who looked at me with incredulity and repeated “Student?”. Admittedly, it’s been a lot easier since I discovered all the discounts available!
Onideas:
Gompertz asserts that originality in a completely pure form does not exist; that all ideas are additional links in an existing chain, each link adding to the one before. It is a form of disruption: something to react against and respond to, to build upon. He suggests that Picasso, in the quote attributed to him – good artists copy, great artists steal – is actually describing a process that an artist needs to go through: we learn through copying and imitating, and it is only once we have done this and developed the basic techniques that we can identify opportunities to add our own link to the chain, and to find our own artistic voice. This reminds me of my discussion with Jonathan about Frida Kahlo’s ‘The Two Fridas’, when I questioned whether any work I make which is inspired by it will be original enough: he advised me that Kahlo painted it in the late 1930s and I would be doing my version almost 90 years later expressing my own feelings – following Gompertz’s reasoning, I would, in effect, be adding my own link to her existing link in the chain.
In fact there are numerous creatives who have been quoted as admitting to building on the ideas of others.
”If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Isaac Newton
“ Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources” Einstein
”We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas”. Steve Jobs
The young Picasso produced work which imitated the likes of Goya, Velázquez and El Greco, and later the Impressionists and Post Impressionists. It was only when his friend, Casagemas, died that he found his own artistic voice in his Blue Period; the blocks of colour, bold lines and expressive manner, which he had learnt from all those artists he had imitated, still influenced him, he just put his own twist on it. He took their ideas and filtered them through his own personality and experience, and used his instincts to simplify and reduce them into his original thought, into new and unique connections. Being creative isn’t always about adding to something; it can be at its most original when taking something away. This is demonstrated perfectly by Picasso’s bull lithographs, which took him a month to complete.
‘Le Taureau‘, 1945/46 (Wikipedia, 5 January 2025)
”There is no such thing as a wholly original idea. But there is such a thing as unique combinations.” Gompertz
Well, it’s official – I’m now closer to 60 than I am to 50. Ugh!
I seem to have swapped the paraphernalia of parenthood for a bag of drugs, which I routinely plonk in the tray at airport security, hoping that no-one’s looking too closely – two asthma inhalers (a preventer and a reliever), omeprazole for my acid reflux, progesterone tablets, oestrogen gel, and 4 eipipen adrenaline auto-injectors for my tree nut allergy (yep, sorry – I’m that annoying person who prevents you from eating your nuts with your overpriced inflight drinks).
I’m well and truly in the thick of that period of life known as Sniper’s Alley, when one is constantly dodging the bullets of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, cancer and much more. My mother and her brother both died of oesophageal cancer, their brother basically suffocated to death from ‘pigeon fancier’s lung’, their mother nodded off whilst sitting on her sofa and died of a heart attack, and my father and his mother both died after having strokes. Well, it’s a rather limited menu, but if I really have to choose, I think I’ll go for the sofa option, please!
Having said that, life itself is Sniper’s Alley. I was driving my husband to the train station the other morning; he was late and not a little stressed. The traffic lights changed – shall I be an ambler gambler? I don’t think so. There was a deep sigh and a hand raised to the head on my left as stress levels increased. Luckily the lights changed to green quite quickly. As we rounded the bend, a truck had shed its load of scaffolding poles into our lane, only shortly before. “We could have been under that, had I not stopped at the lights”, I observed.
It was a ‘Sliding Doors’ moment. The idea of an alternative life based on the decisions I have made really intrigues me. To a certain extent, I think that I was meant to make the choices I did, when I did, in a nod to fate, but, nevertheless, imagining my own ‘Midnight Library’ has its attractions.
I recently read a book called ‘The Gentleman from Peru’ by André Aciman. I saw it in Waterstones and bought it just because I liked the cover. A group of American college friends are on a sailing trip in the Mediterranean when there is a problem with their yacht, and they have to stay at a hotel on the Amalfi Coast whilst it is being repaired. They meet an elderly gentleman, and the book centres on their relationship with this mysterious character. During one of their conversations he says:
“We may no longer be the person we once were, but what if this person did not necessarily die but continued his life in the shadowland of our own, so that you could say that our life is filled with shadow-selves who continue to tag along and to beckon us in all directions even as we live our own lives – all these selves clamouring to have their say, their time, their life, if only we listened and gave into them…
…The old self, the new self, the shadow-self, self number seven or eleven, the self we always knew we were but never became, the self we left behind and never recovered, the might-have-been self that couldn’t be but might still be, though we both fear yet hope it might come along one day and rescue us from the person we’ve had to be all our years.
But as I said, it’s not just the past that haunts us. What haunts us with equal magnitude is what has not happened yet, for there are shadow-selves and shadow-lives waiting in the wings all the time. We are constantly reworking or reinventing both the past and the future. Sometimes we’re in the street or in a crowded bus, and we just know: that one day this person whose glance we caught or whose path we just crossed is another version of someone we know we’ve loved before and have yet to love again. But that person could just as easily be us in another body. And the beauty of it is that they feel it just as much as we do. Is this other person us or is it someone destined for us whom we keep missing each lifetime? Us in others, isn’t this the definition of love?”.
How happy am I that my ‘might-have-been’ 18 year old shadow-self has finally caught up, and rescued me? Better late, than never.
One of my favourite actresses, Lesley Manville, was on Desert Island Discs a few weeks ago. On her divorce from one of my favourite actors, Gary Oldman, who left her a few months after she had given birth to their son, she said:
“I thought we’d be together forever and have a big family. But maybe if that had happened, maybe, I wouldn’t have had the career I have now. I think I’d have given up a lot for a good long marriage, but the price would have been something – I don’t know what.”
This reminded me of ‘The Cost of Living’ by Deborah Levy, in which Levy refers to the relationship between the French philosopher and writer, Simone de Beauvoir, and the American writer, Nelson Algren.
“Algren had written to her when he feared their transatlantic love affair was ending, to tell her the truth about the things he wanted: ‘a place of my own to live in, with a woman of my own and perhaps a child of my own. There’s nothing extraordinary about wanting such things.’
No, there is nothing extraordinary about all those nice things. Except she knew it would cost her more than it would cost him. In the end she decided she couldn’t afford it.”
‘The Cost of Living’ was my choice of inspirational text for our last session.
After listening to the actress, Billie Piper, speaking about it, coincidentally on Desert Island Discs, I thought I would give it a go. I have re-read it many times since, and gifted copies to friends at every opportunity.
Deborah Levy is South African by birth; her father was a political activist who had been imprisoned during Apartheid. The family subsequently relocated to England when she was nine years old.
It’s the second book in a series of three living autobiographies. It covers the period in her life when her marriage fell into difficulties, although her career was on the up having been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She decided that her marriage was a boat to which she didn’t want to swim back, and so she and her husband divorced. Her family home life no longer fulfilled her need to create, and so it was slowly dismantled.
“We sold the family house. This action of dismantling and packing up a long life lived together seemed to fliptime into a weird shape;a flashback to leaving South Africa, the country of my birth, when I was nine years old and a flash-forward to an unknown life I was yet to live at fifty. I was unmaking the home that I’d spent much of my life’s energy creating.
To strip the wallpaper off the fairy tale of The Family House in which the comfort and happiness of men and children have been the priority is to find behind it an unthanked, unloved, neglected, exhausted woman. It requires skill, time, dedication and empathy to create a home that everyone enjoys and that functions well. Above all else, it is an act of immense generosity to be the architect of everyone else’s well-being… To not feel at home in her family home is the beginning of the bigger story of society and its female discontents. If she is not too defeated by the societal story she has enacted with hope, pride, happiness, ambivalence and rage, she will change the story… To unmake a family home is like breaking a clock. So much time has passed through all the dimensions of that home. Apparently, a fox can hear a clock ticking from forty yards away. There was a clock on the kitchen wall of our family home, less than forty yards from the garden. The foxes must have heard it ticking for over a decade. It was now all packed up, lying face down in a box.”
There was a cost to this freedom; this way of living. She moves into a small sixth floor flat at the top of a hill in North London with her daughters and has to teach, and write pieces which she wouldn’t ordinarily choose to, in order to earn a living. She finds that she can’t write in the flat: she needs her own space, so she rents her friend’s garden shed in which she wrote this book and two others.
“It was calm and silent and dark in my shed. I had let go of the life I had planned and was probably out of my depth every day. It’s hard to write and be open and let things in when life is tough, but to keep everything out means there is nothing to work with.”
The book also deals with the death of her mother from cancer. This resonated with me profoundly when I re-read the book after the death of my own mother. There is a moving account of Levy having a meltdown in a local newsagents which had run out of the ice lollies which had been keeping her mother going, as well as her subsequent apology to the three Turkish brothers who owned it.
Another poignant moment is when she reflects on a postcard received from her mother:
“Love did find its way through the on and off war between myself and my mother. The poet Audre Lorde said it best: ‘I am a reflection of my mother’s secret poetry as well as of her hidden angers.’… My mother had made a biro’d X on the front of the postcard and written’ X is where I am’… It is this X that touches me most now, her hand holding the biro, pressing it into the postcard, marking where she is so that I can find her.”
She goes on to say:
“I lost all sense of geographical direction for a few weeks after my mother’s death. I was disorientated, as if some sort of internal navigation system was drifting… It was she who had raised her children and most childhood memories were twinned with her presence on earth. She was my primal satnav, but now the screen had gone blank.”
I love her way of writing: she can create an impactful image with a few words. Whilst on Eurostar to Paris, she is talking to a teenager sitting next to her, who is using a laptop to learn French, when a man gets on the train and asks the teenager to make space on the table.
” She moved it to her lap. This was a small rearrangement of space, but its outcome meant she had entirely removed herself from the table to make space for his newspaper, sandwich and apple.”
When she is asked to provide a list of the minor and major characters in one of her novels for film execs looking to option it, Levy considers the minor and major characters in her own life.
“If I ever felt free enough to write my life as I felt it, would the point be to feel more real? What was it that I was reaching for? Not for more reality, that was for sure. I certainly did not want to write the major female character that has always been written for Her. I was more interested in a major unwritten female character.”
And that is what I take away from this book, what inspires me: I should be the major character in my own story. It is for this reason that I am on this course, that I am making a change and adopting a new way of living.
This struck a chord with Dalal, who has been thinking a lot recently about the possibility of marriage and family, but is concerned how this might fit in with her need to be an artist. Alex had already established herself as an artist by the time she married and had a family, so her artistic practice had already marked out its boundaries. Pritish is not thinking long-term: his main concern at present is to concentrate on his artistic practice.
I was fascinated to hear about what inspires everyone else. Pritish is inspired by London, in particular, he likes the anonymity it provides and he referenced the photographer, John Deakin; Dalal is inspired by Kerouac’s ‘Satori in Paris’, Murakami’s ‘South of the Border, West of the Sun’ and Muayad H Hussain’s thesis on Khalifa Qattan and circulism; and Rachel Whitehead’s Turner Prize winning House (1993) inspires Alex, a sculpture formed from a concrete cast of the inside of a house condemned for destruction – something made out of nothing containing the past life of the house and its inhabitants, without utility but fascinating.
Now that I have cast myself as the main character in my story, how do I play her?
Kate McCalmont-Woods 