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| Westminster Bridge |
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| Southbank |
Portrait Galleries. I often wish I might paint or
photograph the people in the gallery floors – two women both with red skirts
and one with a dark hat are quietly chatting in a dark window seat in deep
shadows.
Quote: The best portraits are
treasured because they lead us to understand those individuals who are
important to us. The crucial element is the relationship between artist and
sitter and the particular intimacy of a set of portrait sittings.
I remind
myself to look up Patti Boyd – model, muse, artist and photographer.
The Southbank. Traditional songs wafted over the
southbank paths – Scarborough Fair and
new classic Imagine. An energetic
south American band played sunshine rhythms under the Waterloo
bridge where the passers by cast long shadows and the river Thames
glimmered under the low afternoon light.
The people
on the tube escalators don’t appear like individuals but rather a long line of
humanity. On my trips to London I remember the London venues and London gigs
you did.
Retro is
popular today and perhaps our world rushes by too fast for us to understand and
we need something to hold on to. All the while what I love about London as a city though
is that its creativity is very much about the NOW while keeping its feet firmly
in the city’s diverse past.
I wonder
why I start notebooks from the back, why nothing seems black and white and why
the road is never straight….
Digging Poem by Seamus Heaney he quoted
from at a talk at Edinburgh Book Festival -
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.
Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.
Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
The cold smell of potato mould, the
squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an
edge
Through living roots awaken in my
head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like
them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
In the past
two weeks in my close family I’ve had a wedding and a funeral – those life
defining days.
Paul Simon
You need to go back to being a child
to be creative – re his Graceland album. And I need to rediscover hope…
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| Covent Garden |
