


Since ALL my events have now been cancelled (the last two just announced this week) it's been a scramble to try and make up for that with website sales and thinking about different ways of working. Last weekend I took part in an Online Show which replaced Crafted by Hand in Masham. It went ok and it might be the way forward, but how to do this without turning people off? Many of us will struggle financially due to the effects of this crisis and I hate doing the hard sell at the best of times.I wanted and intended to do all sorts of helpful and altruistic things with my art during lockdown but the fact is, the truth is, like a lot of people I struggled to concentrate on anything creative, I felt guilty about living in a beautiful place with space and fresh air so I didn't even want to share photos and obviously there were personal fears and worries too. I'm taking it gently, trying to recognise that it's pretty normal that anxiety bubbles up in odd ways because none of us have ever had to deal with this kind of thing before. I'm not even sure I can remember how to drive, everything seems much too fast and noisy and crossing the street in a suddenly packed Grasmere yesterday made me want to scurry back to my nest, back to April when we drifted about from one cup of tea to the next, watching the garden begin to unfurl, writing our journals like characters in a play.
Theres a new book being published next month called "Through the Locking Glass" which is about the artists and writers of Cumbria responding to lockdown. I made a cyanotype and stitch piece which was included in the book and was one of the few things I did during that time. As things began to ease I suddenly decided to have a go at something completely different ...
... My daughter took me (she's my chauffeur now) to visit a lovely friend, Janis Young, from Cumbria Printmakers who lent me an Xcut XPress . Originally designed as a hobbyist's die cutting machine it happens to work perfectly as a mini etching press. I was smitten and managed to buy myself one; now I just need to work out how to carry on improving on the beginners luck I had when I first tried it. I'm the messiest printmaker, ink on every surface and also my own worst critic, but sometimes I accidentally make something that I'm so pleased with it doesn't really feel as though I can have made it ( do you ever get that?) Here is Bookshop Bear, a card design with some additional yellows splodges, from a collagraph printed on the Xcut. He wants to be part of a story but that's still in the clouds.
So, there you have it, a brief round up with large gaps and omissions (the joyous birthdays, the tears and laughter, unfinished jigsaws and abandoned projects, the sleepless nights of worry, the olive branch messages sent to much missed friends that went unanswered, the realisation that Time is relentless, the survivors guilt...)I hope you are safe and warm and well and that everything will be ok.xReading: I'm in between books, dipping in and out of things, listening to Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell which is excellent and weirdly topical and also listening to Black and British by David Olusoga which should be a set text in schools, what weren't we taught this?!


