Friday 22 May 2009

And so it begins


Purbeck Art Week begins today. Lots of hard work to get ready. Imagine if I ever did a major national show! Hope people like my show...

This picture is from Swanage, recently. I like this one, I like the sunlight on the tarmac and the tiny blue flower. Vick doesn't. Ho hum. One of my favourite things is reflected sunlight on tarmac, and this, though direct light and dappled, is close to that.

It was taken here.

Monday 18 May 2009

Art Week, Hurtling Towards Me


Every year I tell myself that I'll be ready early for Dorset / Purbeck Art Week and every year I find myself in a crazy rush the week before. This is the week before and I'm now in a crazy rush, sitting here putting way too many £££s worth of ink on lovely lovely paper that costs more than I like to think about and I know that if I want I could be sat here doing this til midnight... and you never really know if it's worth it until the Art Week is over. Even then sometimes you wonder why you put yourself through it!

However. I know why I do it. If I didn't I'd have less incentive to get my work together and to a point nearing finished. This is a never-ending project and I'm hopeless without a deadline, so the imposition of a deadline makes me get things done. And every year since I started this thing I find myself meeting strange and interesting people who express a fascination with what I'm doing. Hence the 'strange'! But that makes it more than worthwhile. It makes it wonderful, and it makes me keep going.

This is a heart found at Studland, a few miles from here. Being a local picture it stands a chance of selling during Purbeck Art Week! I don't do these pictures necessarilly to sell of course - I'd have given up a long time ago if that was the case. I do them because that's what I do, and each picture tells a little story about the place it was in or the person who put it there. Then when they're put together in a book, they tell a story about Love and about People In Love and about the world we live in, with all its love and hate and anger and warmth and how we cope with that as a species. So I really hope to sell some books, as there's an awful lot to learn in there!

This heart at Studland is here.

Tuesday 5 May 2009

The Density of Cities

I spent the Bank Holiday weekend on a Transition Training course - learning how to help create a town that is ready for the world after the Age of Cheap Oil. Thinking globally and acting locally, how will we avoid the worst of climate change, and what will we do when we can't afford the energy we use day-to-day today because the price of oil is inevatably going to rise and everything we do relies upon it? The course assumed an acceptance amongst participants that change was necessary and was designed to enable us to spread the word, expand our local groups and to understand a lot more about the psychology of change, and of the psychology of resistance to change, as resistance is surely what we will meet a lot along the way.

I should also add that the course was amazing. This was an incredibly inspiring weekend - to meet people from all over Dorset who are working towards sustainable communities at all levels fills me with hope. I would urge anyone with an interest in a positive, sustainable future to make contact with their local Transition group and to add their skills and dreams to the mix.

The Transition Network website might help if you want to know more about what I'm on about.

I didn't mention my New York trip last year... I felt too guilty about the carbon footprint of the trip. I did think, however, about the differences in community resilience between a village, a town, and a big city. Villages are reliant on the car for survival and nowadays lack the necessary facilities for everyday living, though they do have land, required if we are to grow food for our own communities. Towns can often be reliant on a larger neighbour (Swanage lacks facilities because our County Council assumes that we will travel to Wareham or to Poole to reach them), but they have more potential to regain resilience, to grow food on surrounding land and so to be sustainable environmentally and as a community. Big cities can do this too - many cities are a collection of towns and villages that have merged together to become a larger entity, but they may lack the green space they'd need if they were to be self supporting.

The Transition Handbook has an interesting quote about New York. New Yorkers have some of the smallest carbon footprints in the USA because of the way they live within a dense city, so in a sense they are getting something right. In a recent pwer outage, however, the structures the city dwellers were dependent on began to crumble, however - without energy based on fossil fuels the modern city cannot function. New york does have a Transition movement though - it'll be great to see how they get along. Maybe next time I go, which I hope will be soon, I'll travel there by boat and pay the Transition people a visit ... wouldn't that be nice!

This picture, taken from the Brooklyn Bridge, shows the density of the city and the lack of anything natural. It's an exageration of course, the whole city doesn't look like this, but it paints a picture of an artificial space that we need to work back from towards sustainability.