Let’s start with the good news. We drove back from Worcester today, having retrieved my Set Apart exhibition from the Cathedral.* Everything went very smoothly, and we even managed to race the rain up the motorway. Comments in the visitors’ book were very warm and encouraging, and the staff there seemed genuinely to have appreciated my work. I really must put in more effort to secure more of this kind of exhibiting opportunity.
To my delight also I have found some good illustrations of magpies in flight….having spent fruitless hours actually looking for magpies. There was also the serendipitous discovery that the blue sheen in their wings will match exactly the colour I have given to the sweater won by the human figure in the composition, creating a nice resonance between them and bringing out the point of the picture. It would be good if I could finish it before I have to travel again at the end of the week.
My satisfaction with the Worcester exhibition was tarnished a little bit by the discovery that the new wonder-adhesive pads I had discovered, and used for securing some of the signs to the display boards, turns out to be pretty useless. The moral of the story is, of course, not to trust the advertising claims and test things like that before committing yourself to them. There are several varieties of these sticky pads on the market these days, and they all seem to be less than satisfactory, being either too weak (as in this case) or totally resistant to removal from any surface known to science. I keep looking.
Among the appreciative remarks in my visitors’ book in Worcester was a comment I found completely unintelligible. My wife described the writer as a “religious maniac” but I’m not sure it was that coherent. My response is just to feel sorry for somebody who must be detached to such an extent from the world in which the rest of us live.
*You can check out this material in the “gallery” with this title elsewhere in the web-site.