Lockdown displacement activity #23: making lists.

Emerging from this third lockdown has set me thinking about whether I could have managed the year better. It started with good intentions but instead of adhering to a formal structure for my time, I found that anything was better than focussing on what I should be doing.

My artistic output has been decimated by a recurring feeling that in the face of so much death, art is just intellectual masturbation and that the lack of physical venues to enable people the opportunity to see what is being produced renders the work meaningless. This feeling will pass but in the meantime I thought that I ought to at least review what I have been doing instead and find that its not all been pointless and certainly not where I thought my mind would go.

On reflection its not a great use of the time I had, but I have still managed to get some paintings completed and they are quite good: and hopefully I will find a venue and invite lots of people and they will all come and I will sell some work and I will get found by a gallery who will sell them for me .... but that's just the lockdown talking.

2021 : A new painting: Three Graces

Lockdown displacement activities 03/2020-03/2021

1. Sourdough baking: when yeast was impossible to get. (Along with everyone else).

2. Yorkshire puddings: these worked really well with advice from friends but I have tried recently and have lost it! Dammit.

3. Henry Bergson: Time and free will. Still don’t understand.

4. Tattoos: researching meaning and drawing.

5. Gin: How to make. Very successful.

6. Schnapps: Peach, Pear, Plum; Made loads. Very successful too!

7. Tuilles: Not much use but a lovely skill to have.

There's a pattern emerging here!

8. Colston’s memorial and Bristol’s merchant venturers: utter bastards!

9. Carpets: the making of carpets and rugs of my paintings.

10. Listing bands I’ve seen. (In a venue, not a pub and definitely not festivals).

11. Obsessive daily monitoring my pension fund growth against the amount lost at the start of lockdown even though the fund value is only updated weekly .

12. Wagner’s Ring cycle: Took a week. Tried Don Giovani later and found it to be irritatingly light and fluffy and not woke!

13. Tree portraiture; They are really lovely and I can’t stop doing these now.

14. All things Trumpian: Thankfully that’s over!

15. Basque burnt cheese cakes. all my family and friends all confirm that these are a total success.

16. The Lennox novels: binge read all of them.

17. Bread again: this time its no-knead bread and Berliner Schrippen (the rolls of my childhood) and they are both worth the effort.

18. Shodo: research, making and setting up an online shop. nearly but not yet online.

19. Building Sketchup models of imaginary galleries to show my work in: I have accidently geolocated one inside an office building in Boulder, Colorado. No one else seems to have found it.

20. Prog rock reaction videos: Why when there's so much more interesting stuff I've listened to since?

21. Messiaen: In an attempt to listen to some difficult music. Failed, as I did with Handel’s Messiah, but not because it was hard but because I know it too well and got bored.

22. Brain training using the Peak app: Much to the irritation of my immediate family.

23. Making lists and retyping recipes of meals that have worked.