April 1st, Easter Sunday ... it is still dark outside. This is a day i've been dreading. It is a day of anniversaries. April 1st is when Jon and I got together. And it was on Easter Sunday last year that our relationship finally broke beyond repair. I think this may be a dark blog. Although i may refer to events that happened before Jon left me my aim is to focus on the four years when we were apart, sometimes unconnected and sometimes not. It may offer explanation for why i am grieving so hard. A grief that often seems foolish and incomprehensible even to me and i'm living it. 
Here just for a moment i'll flick back into our time together as lovers and say that from the beginning of 2010 our relationship became incrementally worse, 60% good, 50%, 40%, until by 2013 when Jon left it was really at best a mean 10%. I held to that 10% he held to the 90% bad i think and that determined the outcome of our relationship. 
In 2013 when we broke up, it could easily be said and seen that we were flogging an almost dead horse. My hope was that after i graduated we would spend time together playing after years of intense work, that we would soften into our successes, his and mine, give ourselves time to hang out, hang loose, i felt that the world was our oyster, that we could work through our problems, make new memories (jam for the cupboard), and so and so on into a benign old age that would see us glowing and happy at the end of a long and fulfilled life. My hopes were played against his reason, things had gone wrong, it was not worth fixing, it was better to bail and get a brand new life. Was he wrong ? No. My hopes were fantasy, romantic and dreamy, they required work to make them come good, but without that work they would never have come to anything. His reasons were valid, our relationship was awful at this point, if we had gone to Gozo together our problems would have surely come with us. There was no escaping the reality our relationship needed work and determination to survive. I wanted to give it time and space in the sunshine, he wanted time and space in the sunshine but he wanted it without me in the picture. 
The fact is a relationship is a mutual agreement and if one party does not want to be with the other it's a pretty much done deal. This is a dance we are all engaged in all the time, with everyone, at work, at home, in our everyday lives, to a greater or less extent depending on how close we are to those we are dancing with.
So there we are, Jon's reason trumped my hope and he left in a blaze of virtuous glory, off to a new more glamorous and exciting life. I too had a brand new life because all my hopes and dreams and plans had been taken from me, i too was starting anew but not out of choice.
At first i was like a bird whose cage door is open but who quietly sits starving on the floor unable to take the freedom it has been given. I didn't know what to do. For a while i was furious and behaved very badly. I wrote emails, raging, yearning, pretending i was fine. I sent some emails, no doubt as deranged as the ones i sent Jon, to his family. Of course I wish i hadn't, they didn't reply, i was Jon's godawful lunatic ex that he was well rid of. I didn't understand. I didn't understand anything. Jon's departure from my life had wrenched my heart from it's bearings. I didn't care what his family thought of me. I wanted him/them to see me. I couldn't stand the awful cool superiority any more. I imagine it just made his family feel more cooly superior. This is a hard thing to say, but looking back Jon's leaving could be seen as an act of kindness. He let me go.  
He let me go, and yet he didn't. His response to my crazy fuck-mess weirdness was magnanimous, his new happiness vindicated his decision, "you are the love of my life" he said "but things hadn't worked out". I, in my heat, thought "damn you, if i am the love of your life and you are the love of mine, why aren't we together loving each other". I wanted to know that all the other women in his life had been called the love of his life so that then i could discard the notion, put it in the box marked "empty words". Who knows what the truth behind those words was, maybe one day i'll meet one of his ex-partners and they'll say "oh yes, he said that to me too, it's just a string along phrase he threw out to keep his options open". 
And so and so and so on. I drive myself mad with my round and round thoughts. I don't really know where i'm going now. There are parts of the four years when Jon and i were apart where our stories do not link. Our lives went their separate ways. I know my life but the details of his that i know are few and sketchy. I know that at some point between our parting and our reconnecting he began to drink again. I don't know when it became problem drinking but i'm guessing it was a fair time before he and i reconnected in 2015 because he was hospitalised not long after we began a fragile exploratory friendship by email in early summer that year. I think he had injured his foot which had stopped him walking, he said that his girlfriend had wanted too much commitment, his sister in law said that his girlfriend had not been able to cope with his drinking. None of that belongs to me, it is his life with another woman. But suffice it to say by the time Jon and I "re-met" he was not well. 
I had continued to email Jon while he and i were out of contact but he had not answered and so i assumed that my emails went straight to his junk, or that he had a new email address. I don't know when he stopped responding maybe around autumn 2014 when i briefly was kind of seeing someone, kind of not really, walking and kissing and touching and eating together, a thing, but not a thing which lasted maybe a couple of months. Jon had informed me that he was seeing someone new the summer before which had put a full stop and a capital letter on to the end of our lives together. We were both moving on, as you do, as you have to. 
But in the summer of 2015 i was burgled and Jon was one of the first people i messaged. And he got back to me. Almost immediately. At first i didn't know what to do about his emails. For so long he'd been out of my life, and i'd begun picking up the pieces. I loved him still but i was scared. I was at that point volunteering with a support group for recovering addicts led by a gentle and generous woman who in lieu of wages got her volunteers on to a host of courses about addiction. This learning was eye-opening, i'd gone into my relationship with Jon in a state of innocence. When he'd told me about his past life i took him as tabla rasa, a blank page, not realising that the rest of his life was written on the back and sometimes the pen had been pressed so hard it had forced it's ways through to the front. So it is with everyone but to a greater or lesser extent the marks on the back of us make more or less of a difference to our life ongoing. I had not taken into account how Jon's life before me as a drinker, an alcoholic, would affect all the other relationships he had that were important. Naive to be sure. 
Back to the moment his name appeared in my inbox. I was grieving him. After i was burgled one of the things that i struggled with most was finding, a day or so later, the bundle of love notes he'd given me scattered and tumbled out of a draw that the burglar had rummaged through. That and the loss of my dad's camera made me feel sad everything else was replaceable. But there in my inbox was the name "Jon H" it brought me out in a muck sweat. 
I didn't open it immediately, fear and longing wrestled within me. I had spent two years getting over him. Earlier in the year I had submitted a proposal to the curator of the Waveney River Sculpture Trail for a piece of work that had taken me back to the early days of our love affair, making the piece had involved me re-treading the footpaths and life that we had shared. I was still in love with him. But I was also deeply wounded. Did i want to reconnect with the man who had left me so callously two years ago. In the end love got the better of me. I opened his email and so began the next stage of our knowing each other. 
He made no mention of his drinking at this point, i think he thought he could hide it. But just weeks after he fell down in the street and was taken to hospital. I emailed his sister-in-law to let her know. They didn't know. She got back to me told me he'd been ill, ill how ? drinking again, and so i found out.  
So that was the deal. Jon was in hospital for a few days, i think he then discharged himself, decided to go to Venice, asked me to meet him there. I wasn't going to go to Venice to meet a drunk ex who had dumped me without care even if i did still love him. That he thought I would pick up the threads with him just like that as if nothing had happened is a sign of how out of kilter with reason his mind had become. And anyway my son Richard was once again off to foreign lands, Singapore for two years, i was making the most of his last days in relative proximity, and also the WRST was up and running and i wanted to keep an eye on my work to make sure it stayed good and to watch how it weathered. He had built a new life, and i too had built a new life. 
Jon went to Venice, and came back very shortly because he got bored. We emailed. We emailed more. He made a will. Went to his barbers to get his hair cut. After his death an old colleague said that he'd said we were back together, we weren't we were just emailing but the intensity of our feelings for each other was still apparent. Our relationship had picked up, but how was still ambiguous, i asked him to come to England to meet me for coffee, for a walk, i knew my family would hate it but we had unfinished business, i was offering friendship, my trust had been broken, i loved him, i wanted him still, but i was wary, very wary, and needed him to meet me in my space. 
Over that summer i'm guessing he was drinking but maybe picked up a little, we emailed regularly, did we speak on the phone ? i'm not sure, it was still all quite tentative on my part, i was there for him but i needed to know he was there for me too. By autumn i think we were likely emailing most days. Both of us often up in the small hours of the morning we would check in with each other, we'd talk about life and love, it was flirty and sweet, there was old tenderness and new tenderness too. Our relationship at this point was still rooted in our love affair. There were times we'd argue i remember  but distance meant that our fights were more quickly resolved,  his silences were not so commanding, and his spite more easily repudiated and what could he do that was worse than leaving me and taking up with another woman ? 
I remember Jon as someone physically well. We never saw each other after he left. In my head he is still the man who left me, strong, handsome, lordly. He sent me a photograph of himself that summer, well two in fact, a selfie of him in his mirror, face obscured by the camera but wearing shorts and looking ok tho' in shadow. The other, he sent while he was in Venice, it was a picture of him on his balcony with a chameleon on his shoulder gazing lovingly at someone, not me, i didn't look at that picture long, I didn't want to see it. I thought it was probably taken by his last girlfriend and was their affair and not mine. Later when my friend David took pictures of me i didn't send those to Jon, not the good ones or the ones where i'm gurning or looking fat. My relationship with David was as friends not lovers but Jon was funny about our friendship. He was cross about me going for walks and visiting churches with David. I thought he had a cheek being jealous quite frankly. 
But I skip forward. There must have been a point in our re-acquaintance when we re-connected as something more than ex-lovers catching up. That he was drinking was clear, we had occasional phone calls that year 2015 when his speech would be slurred, and sometimes his emails were obviously the hand of a drunk, mis-spelt, mis-worded, sexually gross. I had known Jon as someone very careful, sober his spirit when dark erred towards mean-ness, drunk it became base but also sometimes i'd catch a glimpse of the light that i'd known when we were first together. Lux lucet in tenebris. It was this light i sought to reflect back at him. It was a dangerous game perhaps to have entered into but not one that i thought about. Our relationship was rooted in our love affair, that we talked about sex was not weird it was part of our knowing each other, it wasn't the focus, i would flip him pictures and songs and articles, names of bloggers i liked, we talked about books, films, life, walking, art, poetry, Jon was very clever. I'd tell him about going to the library he started going to his library and i think this was a life saver for him. And our relationship became a meeting of minds, in a way it became deeper than it had been before, without the softness of shared physical experience, touch, taste, sound, sight, smell, we were forced into an etheric connection, a meeting of consciousness if you will. We merged as we had when we were lovers but our merging was spiritual, he'd been my soul mate before and that soul bond became more entwined. I gave him my light, he gave me his darkness. Sometimes i gave him my darkness and he gave me his light. 
All this time he was drinking heavily, he said that he was living on vodka and milk. We emailed every day, quite often i emailed several times a day, not long emails, images more often not, not stuff that required a reply just nudges to let him know that someone was thinking about him and cared if he was alive or dead. Later after his hospitalisation in 2016 he said that my emails had kept him going, that otherwise he'd have had no human contact, and likely be dead, he said he was eternally grateful but Jon's eternally grateful never did last long. 
After his hospitalisation he seemed to plateau. He was still drinking, sometimes a lot, but he seemed to be out of his hole. I knew that the last hospitalisation had come after he'd given up drinking cold turkey, and i knew from the courses i'd done that he could easily have died and that he hadn't had been a lucky chance. After his death i read the term kindling which is used to describe the effect of these near misses, each time they happen the nervous system gets more broken and the chances of survival slimmer. Dark matter. 
But there, so Jon did survive that hospitalisation, that was the one where his family told me not to bother them again and that it was up to him to stop. I had thought that if only we could have pulled together and got him into rehab i could have got him long distance walking to take his mind off things, maybe that was my saviour complex kicking in. Maybe Jon needed and wanted to die, maybe he had stopped coping with life. He said when he left me that we couldn't fight our demons, i was cross with him about that i thought "i'm fighting my demons lets fight off our demons together" but maybe he knew that his had got him and that he needed to leave life as he he had led his life prior to our knowing each other drinking and sleeping with women who gave him no mental distress. 
I'm diary-ing. Am i being very boring ? I think i may be. But I'm getting out of me that which i am no longer able to carry, or carry alone, releasing by recording, and in so doing giving space in my being to life after Jon. There is no way i can set down the whole of the ten years we knew each other or put on a page the intensity of our connection, the page would burst into flame. But the little i set out may one day serve me as a memory jogger when the life we shared is trod over, invisible and overlaid by new experience.
I had begun this blog with the intention of taking it up to Easter Sunday last year which is when we lost contact again. But I realise that the events that led up to our losing contact are still too close for me to give form to. I suppose in all truth i am thinking of the year and half before he died really, from his hospitalisation in 2016 to Easter Sunday 2017 and then to his death later that year on October 11th. I have three unopened emails from Jon. One from Easter and two from about a month before he died. And an unheard voicemail on my phone. The emails sit ticking in the folder marked Jon, buried under the mountains of emails i have sent him after his death and the emails i made myself not send him and so sent to myself in the months between Easter and the time i knew he was dead. Will i ever read them ? will my regrets and my sadness ever be soft enough to let me witness the last few scraps of time he gave me ? The email from Easter is likely to be unkind. The two from the month before he died charming and sweet, tho' I cannot be sure of that. All of them will hurt i think. I have a feeling that one day i will hear the voicemail by accident and that it will drop me to my knees. RIP Jon. RIP Fella.  

It is gone 11am now  

Some pictures .. tomorrow is the day of the private view .. everyone is welcome .. and after that the exhibition runs for a month. I do not know if my standing sticks will last the whole duration .. so it is with love, so many chances for it to fail, luck is involved but also courage, determination, forgiveness, forbearance, kindness, respect and a willingness to be vulnerable, not an easy road but if you give yourself up to it it is the sweetest. 
Have I suggested that in the work I have put out ? I don't know .. I don't know if anyone but me will see that .. to many it will just be a line of sticks, it may even be an irritant to some .. but that's love for you .. you can't control the responses of others, it's a gamble ... love is a leap of faith, an act of hope, it is light breaking though darkness, joy taking the hand of grief and making good that which was bad. Love is a risk, but a risk that's a wonderful gift ... 

  
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General election week and the heat from the fire has been crazy. For reference; Theresa May got most seats but lost all of her majority, and some, and Jeremy Corbyn won seats, more than he had before -but less than May, so he now has more power to his elbow to oppose, which is good, but cannot follow through on his manifesto as he is not the government. 
It would be a hung parliament .. and for a wonderful half hour or so I wondered if maybe it was the beginning of a new politics in Britain. 
But, May has formed a government with the DUP ( a somewhat backwards Irish party with ten MP's) which my gut says is unwise and might easily undo the fragile peace brokered in Northern Ireland in the Good Friday Agreement. Time will tell. 
As a nobody all I can do is wait and see, and hope. Corbyn feels like hope, like a light in the darkness, but he can do no more than he is able. 
In my heart I believe that good will out .. that good will win the day .. I daresay my version of good is different from others. I suppose I see good as the weed that breaks through the crack in the pavement, the bees drinking from my birdbath, the small family of wrens that fluttered up from the ground when I was in my garden the other day, the robin on a gate post with a beak full of worm-y things. And in the people I know who lighten my heart and load (this is a good that my beautiful daughter wrote about yesterday, thanks for the reminder Jessamy) 
One of my long term creative projects is finding a way to illustrate the Tarot deck, both the major and minor arcanas. For the past couple of weeks I have had two cards at the forefront of my thoughts. The Hanged Man, still work in progress but close to being. And, the ten of cups, finished yesterday at about 9 am, after a hung parliament was called, and before May gave notice of her intention to form a government with the DUP. 
The meaning of the ten of cups as given by Alfred Douglas in "The Tarot" is; in upright position: a peaceful and secure environment. The search for fulfilment is crowned with success. Perfect love and concord between people .. and in reverse: disruption of an ordered routine, antisocial actions, selfish exploitation of the goodwill of others. Manipulation of society for personal ends. 
The image I'm putting up is of the ten of cups in upright position because that is how it came to me. I feel that May's political manoeuvres are more towards the reverse but my belief is that "lux lucet in tenebris" 

Autumn is here and it's gorgeous, the leaves are turning and whatever the weather the skies are full of moisture which makes them glisten. This is all good. The turning of the seasons, year on year, is a quiet rhythm, a beat that holds steady all the lives that live upon the earth. 
But art-wise I'm feeling a little out of sorts. It's not long since I graduated, two years is a fair while from student-hood but it's a long way from being an established artist. I am essentially one drop in an ocean of artists. 
Sometimes I look at other people's work and I wish that had as much presence and drive as they seem to have. I wish that my work was better. I wish that I felt more sure of myself. I wish I felt more sure that what I am doing is the right way forward.
I think to myself "this is autumn. I am pulling in the harvest". And if I think over the course of the year and evaluate what I have done I think I've done o.k. I have banked experience and created one piece of work of which I am fully proud and also made some successful experimental forays into other ways of working. 
But I am still so very far from finding out who I am, and I am still making horrible amateur ugly work. Maybe that never goes away. Maybe my mistakes, my malformed babies, are the dark matter from which the good stuff eventually appears but while I'm doing that how do I pay the bills, how do I keep motivated when I feel useless and weary.
In the age of the internet there is a flood of images of other people's work, it's inspiring, and wonderful, but also somewhat daunting. A part of me believes that all these other people who are striding forward, making brilliant work are doing this all the time. But is that for real ? Or maybe they too spend lots of time, plodding, keeping on, doubting, hoping, holding on by the skin of their teeth, just making ends meet. Maybe they are doing that and what I see is the "here I am", the "look at me" because I put that out too. In reality I'm just a hopeful nobody. My hope is that I will make work that feels honest. And that sometimes it will speak to someone else. Once in a while I do but perhaps those moments, those meetings are actually as rare as real friends.  
Maybe that is what is so dispiriting about the work that fails, like messed up conversations that took two, or more, people in the wrong direction. Maybe that is what is so hard when work I love gets passed by, disregarded or rubbished, it's like giving my heart to someone and being told it's not good enough. 
I'm thinking out loud, musing because I cannot see a clear way forward and I feel a great need to be still and do nothing. Living in an active, fast paced, performance culture just being is never quite enough. There is little patience for passivity, for waiting. Is it is o.k to be quiet ? Is it o.k to fall into emptiness and take comfort from the silence and beautiful darkness and rare light of winter ?    

I'm re-posting this so I can put it on the Illustration Friday website in response to their call for illustrations on the theme of "invisible". It is held within the notes I have made for the project Lux Lucet In Tenebris of which I have spoken earlier and is my illustration of how it feels to be invisible.

 

It's been a little while since I posted on my blog, I've been playing with  paper,  folding it and crumpling it and using it as cloth. As I have mentioned previously one idea leads to another and so my Lux Lucet In Tenebris project has moved on a little. 
This project began as a response to a long and painful relationship with a recovering alcoholic. I had never come up against alcoholism before and in my naivety I thought that if he wasn't drinking he wasn't an alcoholic but he self-medicated with other things. Both my heart and spirit got broken. I was told I was nothing, a useless whore, worthless, that no-one cared so often that in the end I believed it. The final four or five years of my time with him were some of my darkest days. But. In that darkness is light. Being constantly told by your lover that your thoughts, your feelings, your needs are unimportant is emotionally abusive. But on another level it was a gift because being reduced to nothing allowed me to feel myself as part of a greater whole, connected in my nothingness to everything. My non-existence gave me a sense of belonging to something bigger than the small space my body occupies. That was the chink of light, the crack in the wall. It is that light that I found while plunged into horrible black space and that I am trying to put across in my sketches and notes for this project which I sporadically post on my blog. 
As a post script I would also like to say that the way he behaved was not o.k and I have tagged him because one of the things abusers count upon is your silence. This project is something I am doing to help me soothe the parts of me that are still blighted by years of being rubbished. It is a labyrinth of pain if I am truly honest with myself. I have gained a little understanding but lost trust. 

Lux Lucet In Tenebris - Sketch 9

It's nearly a year since I graduated, and at Christmas I signed up to be a part of NNOS 14 http://www.nnopenstudios.org.uk/ as I thought it would be a good way to mark the anniversary. My studio will be open for three weekends May 24th/25th, 31st/1st & June 7th/8th but I still have a long way to go before it is presentable so making work is on a bit of a back burner at the moment. 
However, over the weekend I gave myself time to play because the sun was shining and I had painted up some cloth and paper to begin experimenting with cyanotype printing. I did a little bit of this last summer but the sun is stronger in summer and the prints this time were more experimental and my motive less focused. Most of the ones that I made for a project about love were not very successful. There may be a metaphor in that. But the ones I made for a new body of work called "Lux Lucet In Tenebris" that I am sampling for were good for samples. The cyanotype process seems particularly suited to this project but I have also been working with discharge and devore and cut paper. I never really know where an idea will take me, and I have found that the best thing to do is to follow my fingers, and accept that whatever comes of it I will learn from making and playing and letting myself be. Occasionally I make something I love and that is such a tremendous feeling that the chance of that happening is enough to keep me going through the dull or not so happening days and work.