Red Shoes

Last night I slept downstairs on the sofa; it is so cool and peaceful down there. I woke in the night to hear running footsteps above me. I thought maybe it was one of the kids, though when I checked, no one was there.

It struck me this morning that, despite the initial withdrawal, I might start to enjoy not putting my work out on Instagram, just making in isolation, without critical eyes or judgement. These hermit-like habits come to me easily and shouldn’t be trusted.

Today Eden and I saw a kingfisher in the woods by the lake. It darted past, a flash of cerulean blue, and he looked at me open mouthed. We waited in silence, watching, and a few moments later it happened again.
“We should catch it,” he said.
“No,” I said, “we should let it be free.”

Perhaps it is in our nature to want to capture beautiful things and keep them for ourselves.

I’ve been blocking in the painting of him and his older brother at the table watching the Alexa. I think I’d better pull back and think what next, because I’m tempted to flip it.

I’m chewing over a comment by Hannah Murgatroyd that I read a few weeks ago, where she mentions working slower, deeper, in order to uncover what painting means to her at this stage of life. I feel this very strongly right now. I know these are just paintings, just objects, but when I’m working it’s as if there is some sort of portal where the forms and colours exist as their own place. It is transportive. There is frustration in trying to relate this living space in a finished painting.

I can see more sunlight starting to come into the corner where I paint. Prussian blue, Payne’s grey, cadmium yellow, Indian red, white. I hope I made the right choice committing to this limited palette, but I don’t want to introduce anything else. I am finding, however, that I can use the water based eggshell white furniture paint Eppie rejected for her room alongside the water based oils and acrylics. I don’t know how these combinations will age, but what does it matter?

Eden’s yellow hat in the woods made me think of the girl’s red coat in Don’t Look Now. I’ve also been obsessing over Kelly’s red shoes in the photograph of her as a child. The fairytale of The Red Shoes I have always found the most haunting. The girl is punished for wanting to wear her red shoes. They become enchanted, forcing her to dance endlessly and painfully, until eventually she has to cut her feet off to find relief. Yet the shoes continue to dance without her.

Kelly’s red shoes have become the focal point of the painting, a triptych which tries to imagine the afterlife of the photograph. The child leaves, a playground left empty.

This weekend I received feedback on the SDCC Bursary I applied for: Great work, fantastic project, but this is far too small a grant for this as it is more for the creation of an entire body of work rather than a research and development phase. The panel particularly liked the highlighting of the importance of flexibility around caregiving. Artist fee is very low for nine month duration.

So, pare it back, Nikki, and take more money next time, hah. I was sent a video recently about psychological time relativity, how time appears to speed up as you get older, how the brain compresses experience. But with these funding applications, I am stuck in a loop. On to the next.