Wild Rocket

Painful progress on my tree picture. The colourful textures are so far comprised of splats (gold ink) and rubs (paint on Clingfilm). There's also some oil pastel (lower part of the picture). I'm thinking of tracing the whole thing again next, to find some solidity in the form, then maybe trying some kind of printing over what I've already done. Not sure yet.

I bought a pot of seeds from a pound store a few weeks ago. I sewed them and now I have seedlings. Wild Rocket. Every day I turn them away from the light and by evening they've found it again. I love that I share this same craving for sunshine. Makes me feel both at one with vegetable life and also, eerily insubstantial. I'd like to draw them leaning towards the light, one seedling tumbling over another in an attempt to soak up the most sunshine, just like people at a sale or struggling to be first on the train. So what I'm growing here, I suppose, isn't a pot of salad at all but a rat race in miniature!


How will I have the heart to put them on my sandwich now!

One thing about getting older is that I'm starting to think of my life as a story with flashbacks that occur in the text (totally randomly and for no reason) which tease the main narrative with hints at some meaning and subtlety that the protagonist mostly fails to understand.

I've always been self-conscious but this super-sense of myself riding the great whirling belt of life (holding all these explosive memories in my brain) is a new development. One day I imagine there will be more flashback than forward motion and the theatre of memory will become intertwined with the arena of the imagination. Maybe that won't be so bad afterall.


A lovely rainbow I photographed yesterday running through a hailstorm with G on Dover's Hill. It was truly wonderful watching the advancing clouds and the light transformed into something glorious. It didn't matter that I got half soaked at the end of it. Didn't find my pot of gold though.