I was thinking today about the enormous contrast between the way in which life is lived now that I have left university teaching and research in order to occupy myself with painting, and how it used to be. The life of an academic did have its variety. After all, there was a huge difference between teaching an undergraduate course, conducting fieldwork in another country, and sitting in one’s study writing a paper for publication. Somehow, even so, there was never the sense I have these days that I am not sure from one day to the next what will happen next. Whereas yesterday’s preoccupation was the selection and preparation of my entry to the Bradford Open, most of today has been spent at the South Square Centre working on maintenance tasks (on this occasion the external paintwork.) There has been a certain amount of tidying and putting back into store items I had considered for my entry to the exhibition, and I varnished two pieces I completed some time ago but never got around to finishing properly. Tomorrow will be different again, in that I will be doing some correspondence and then taking the entire set of my Italian series to the framer, in the next stage of preparation for the exhibition of that material in October. An idea is maturing for another picture (a new contribution to my series on trees) and I would like to think that I could get down to starting that at some point over the week-end. And so it goes. Sometimes I do think that it would be nice to introduce a bit more stability and routine into life, but I’m really not sure how that would be possible. Am I just disorganised, or is how life has to be if I am an artist?
I think that this week must be our summer. It was good this afternoon to be able to put in some time in the garden with my wife. The combination of recent rain and summer sunshine has made things grow frantically, so that a weeding session had become imperative. In one part of the garden I had to cut back growth so that the path could continue to be usable. Having abandoned hope that the aubergines I planted earlier would ever come to something, because of the unseasonably cold weather earlier, I discovered today that all is not lost. The nicest part of it was the fact that my wife and I were both out there together. The garden has developed into an interest we share …. although she is very clear about the fact that one area is her part of the garden and I only do anything there by permission and under close supervision!