Day 447: Art Too

Mmmmmmmmmmmm, Angela Dierks
www.facebook.com/angelaabstract

Thank you, first of all, for the juicy jpeg and lovely emails that arrived yesterday from Angela Dierks. Sarah Lonton and I met Angela in her own home on the Southgate Arts Trail on Sunday. She was welcoming and lovely and her art was very pleasing indeed. Even though this jpeg is delicious, nothing quite reaches the richness of the original, with colours deeper than your bones and textures that reach out to you. 


She's self-taught and German (no causal link, necessarily) and she inspired me to almost buy oil pastels today. What stopped me? The fact that I'm about to move again. The fact that I've bought oil pastels before and never used them. The fact that to use them would also require paper and right at the moment, saving money is of the essence. Silly, though. They were only £4 for about twenty of them, fat and new in their box. I bet I could have afforded a little bit of paper. Maybe I'll go back. 

Stop it

Speaking of saving money, I wonder how much richer my life would be if I didn't have a cafe habit. No longer a coffee habit, but the cafe habit is still strong. Part of it is the string of places I've been where I can't get internet at home (this is currently the case, and is about to be again in Brighton). Still, there are lots of places where you can get internet without having to buy something, especially in London. Anywhere, if you look hard enough. It's true that I'm lonely and bored sitting at home doing that, but is the café habit really helping? With the money I save on that, I could go to workshops (which I love, of course). Or I could by oil pastels and bobbly paper and sit in the park. If it rains, all the better. We get to see what rain does to pastel. And hair. 

Thank you, yesterday, for a job. I haven't taken it, as such, but I put it out there that I needed a job (and I had a particular sum of money in mind) and one came. This job more than covers that sum. It would sort me RIGHT out. It's for The Challenge, who I worked for last year. I loved it. This year, they're not paying travel expenses, so that sum is drastically cut. They've also upped the commitment (it's residential now, which brings with it a higher level of day-to-day teenager management), but not the pay, overall. All of that in the pie means that the actual rates are down on last year. Add to that the fact that for some reason, I provisionally said yes to Wolverhampton. I made a commitment to spend the summer in Brighton. Hmmm. Brighton vs Wolverhampton. What do you think?

Real people off of The Challenge

And I'm still considering it. If I can work for The Challenge again, I will. They rock. Check them out here: http://www.the-challenge.org/ Maybe the residential thing would be brilliant. I made a commitment to be curious recently. It's still on, that commitment, so perhaps this is the perfect opportunity to put that into practice. Let's see what we can do. And how good is that, to have a job just blossom like that in a day. Brilliant!

I'm grateful too for some very positive feedback from working there last year. When I started, I was actively afraid of teenagers, especially that 16ish age that most of the people there were. Quite quickly, and by making some glorious mistakes, I learnt lots about working with people of that age (in the context I was in). The first, which I ache with gratitude for, is to Show Them Some Fucking Respect. This lesson came as early as my very first group, as I tried to 'show them who's boss'. By being a bit shouty and controlling, basically. The opposite of what I wanted to be. I don't want to be everyone's 'best mate'. At all. Nor do I want that when I do a session with a group of adults. It's not the point. But I do want to treat them with respect and expect good things of them. So they gave me that. 

Would you put this in your mouth?

I like ferns. There's something about them that is like a young animal (a smeem - that's a word for a young animal that I like very much). Ferns and smeems. Pleasing things with similarities. They eat them in Canada, ferns, the little curly tips. EVEN THOUGH THEY'RE KIND OF POISONOUS.Radical!

As I type, Tony Robbins is talking to a Yorkshireman about intimacy in one ear (my new Gumy headphones work in the right ear only - until I send them back, that will do, and they're such a pleasing shade of orange. They are to replace the green ones, whose left ear died too). 

Massive face. Massive hands. Too much clapping

That's making me think about all sorts of things that I'm grateful for, and that my dreams are chewing over night after night, in all kinds of abstract and distant ways. Lots of things to think about and to chew even more before splurging them out. Oh, so much harder when there is (or even was) another person involved. 

Grateful for my dreams and grateful for a reason to rip myself away from them. I got on my yoga mat at six thirty this morning, thanks to Daniel Harvey. Thanks, Daniel. Let's do this yoga thing.