New writing in response to painting; the energy of longing and nostalgia; how my paintings think about me…

In a dream we’re going through a field of tall crops, hovering, we go through the middle, hovering, we’re propelled with some force, we go to a house, we’re looking for a key, we’re searching, we go into a place beneath the stairs, we find it, I tell you where it is, I give you one of my painted books.

There is a room of water, I bathe in it. I’m helping a woman with fire.

This work, in progress, explores my current theme ‘Lovers Not Lovers’ and Baptism; also different kinds of love.

I’m feeling anxious today, worried. I have pain in my right shoulder blade, close to the spine, the place where a wing would grow from. I’m full of longing.

In the painting the lovers seem to be changing into small birds, songbirds, finches or tits. I raise my spirits by thinking about the spirit of things in their beautiful abundance.

I see the man pouring salt into all my holes:making towers of them, tall, swaying, balancing columns of salt. I want to do this work but I don’t want it to hurt so much.

In the painting the two Angels are about to pass through one another/each other. Or an Angel about to pass through (me). The Man she meets on the path.

There is another man (or is he an Angel?) in the painting; he appeared last, beside the woman, on her right. He is pointing upwards, reminding her of her path perhaps. He is roughly indicated, as though not quite materialised, only just beginning to take on physical form; or perhaps about to leave again, just wearing enough flesh for me to grasp a slight sense of him, this Thursday afternoon, when I am also perhaps only just here.

Later I watch Ch 4 news about the women who are raped and have their children shot in front of them. It cannot be borne. I lose my appetite. I count my blessings.

19th March

It comes down through a halo. The funnel mouth is a halo – I’ve only just seen it. The halo also resembles a spent seed case.

Notes about meeting and passing through the Angel, (and the Angel passing through me): both beings altered (nothing lost or taken)

Notes from all the World an Icon P 120

“The feminine images are not the Eros itself, but objects of its longing….we fall in and out of love or are carried and redeemed, or cursed, through its working, but that which love works upon is not love but soul.”
P126 “the most familiar creature a thing unknown.”

I make a tiny drawing in my notebook about Spirit descending through the crown of the holy horse, to emerge from its mouth (or penis/udders/pores/birth canal?) as breath or semen or sweat or milk or creamy white saliva.

18th March

I have a dream about my body being inhabited by a man, we can swap places with each other, we blend energetically. There are doors opening and closing. He is there. I ask: Is this how the phallus comes to inhabit me? I’m painting inwardly as I sit across the room, I move across the room, or around the room. You are still, you my pole in the south for these minutes. I’m a star revolving, breathing, expanding and shrinking. I feed myself by absorbing the atoms I sense around you. They come to me easily. They are agitated, fiery, they show me how not still you are, how you are as intense as me in your stillness.

And I think about how to express the feeling which comes upon me when I sense you are thinking of me (little painting). It’s like my flesh is a grating mesh, full of holes, and you slot into all those holes. You arrive, suddenly. Even if I’m absorbed in another’s conversation, or perhaps a film, my awareness becomes filled by you. There is a sense of catching, or of being caught; of the tiny teeth or barbs nature uses to spread herself about; of being a seeded head in a meadow, and of being carried away dry and free in an animal’s coat, taken off somewhere by your hairy scented pelt to a den, a nest, a lair. I ride your extremities. Your rough tongue rolls around me. Sometimes you know, and sometimes you don’t know if I’m there.