I read this through and found it very self-absorbed. However,
it is honest and maybe sometimes people like to read other people’s self-reflections,
especially when those reflections are about struggle. So, I apologise for
starting the year with a reflection about me but here it is.
What does January
mean? Well, to so many of us it means a new start, it feels impossible to
escape that. Written bold in the digits of 2026 is the possibility of casting
off 2025, and maybe more than that and starting afresh. I have to say as an
artist who is a Christian my hope is the possibility of being a new creation in
Christ. (2 Corinthians 5:17, So if anyone is in Christ there is a new creation:
everything old has passed away; see everything has become new!) So goodbye 2025
and everything that has gone before, hello 2026. Or maybe hello today. It is
not enough to step away from the past even if the past was pretty good, we have
to live today, with an eye on the future.
I have said this over and over but rarely managed to really
step into the now or the new, I hope it is enough that I keep trying.
It is with an amount of trepidation that I type this. Where
have I been? Where am I now? Where am I heading?
I have been in what seems like a long time of uncertainty, I
long for stability and security, confidence in being in the right place in the
right time. Where am I now? It feels like no change, but taking the choice to
be a new creation, maybe the circumstances are similar, but I need to change. So,
I need to find a balance between all work (as in the work that brings money
into the household) and living. To complicate things more, art can bring money
into the household but only a little, and it takes so much time it can impinge
on everything. However, my strange mind makes focusing on one thing and keeping
going with that one thing, with the exclusion of all else, very easy. I run on
obsessive focus, (that turns things on and off) and I find balance very
difficult.
Right now, today I aim to be a wife and a daughter and an
artist. Next week I will have to fit being a supply teacher and a mother and
grandmother into that mix. I need to fight my inability to stop one task and to
start another. Last week Andy, my
husband, used the idiom ‘don’t through the baby out with the bathwater’ and I
think that is a useful thought for me. Life does not have to be all one thing,
it can be a balance of all those pressing things; some of which we love to do,
some of which we have to do and some we should do. Earning money fits into my
have to do, being a wife, mother, grandmother and daughter, I really want to do,
but art is something I should do. Art constantly comes at the end of the list,
maybe there should not be a list. Maybe there should just be all of it in
balance, maybe?
Consequently, my new start is not about change of
circumstance but about change of how I address those circumstances, I cannot
paint every day, I cannot let running a household and extended family consume
all my time, I cannot expect to work in schools everyday of the week. But I can
try to do all of that at some point in the week, I can be self-aware, make a
conscious effort to start a thing (mainly pick up a paint brush or pencil and
not shrug off the lack of time). Why
does creating art need a concerted effort?
Possibly because an artist is who I am, not what I do. It is too easy
not to bother; in all honesty I have spent most of my life not bothering. I
have a tendency to demand perfection from myself and everyone, that stops
creation, it does not make it better.
My focus on ‘new creation’ is me. How I handle the mess of
being me.
So, what follows is every image I have created over the last
eight years or so. My challenge is to add to this body of work, and to accept
each piece may not be perfect, none of it may help with the finances (in fact
it might actually cost money), but by drawing, painting and creating
artistically I am being who I God created me to be.
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