On Painting

.. because I have started again. I had a look at two of my abstract works in progress, seen here in quick colour sketches,










and did a lot of glazing (thin layers of translucent colour) on one of them. It's an 80*80cm square.
















I'm planning to take it further tomorrow when this layer has dried and get started with more of the lower, opaque layers on the second one, which should eventually look more shimmery like the sketch.












This is a 60*60 square and has a companion piece for which I have only painted a plain background so far.

All of these came out of a kind of prayer/meditation type of session I sometimes do with a set of oil pastels and a sketch book handy.

I know I am, but what are you?

People in churches seem to feel a great need to classify people. I get put in the Anglo-Catholic box. That’s the elegantly proportioned stone one with all the Gothic tracery, lined with slightly faded and shredded rose-coloured fiddleback chasubles.

Being in this box suits me in some ways. There is plenty to look at, some of it very engaging and most of it not too kitsch. In other ways it doesn’t – some people think women really don’t belong in this box, though others insist that the box has been updated, Anglo-Catholic 2.0, and so on. Others think I spend too much time reading the bible for a proper A-C, despite the fact that the founders of the Oxford Movement might be horrified by that statement. Compared to most of the others, I am about as musical as a brick. Allowances need to be made.

I don’t really use the bible the same way the open evangelicals over there do, though, and I couldn’t stay in their box with all its over-exuberant worship songs (especially not the ones with arm movements). I don’t really fit with the self-described liberals as I believe too much old-fashioned orthodox stuff, and can’t cope with lurex-threaded seventies fabrics or pottery chalices. In the far distance there are the fundies, and that’s the way I’d like them to stay.

Yeah, I’m stereotyping. That’s kind of the point.

But I am going to find out more about recent church history, for a church in which “recent” probably means nineteenth century.

On not painting

I have a bad habit of getting blocked. I’ll find myself constitutionally incapable of writing for a few weeks or months, or with painting the block can last years. This is exasperating.

At the moment I am going great guns learning ancient languages in preparation for the whole vicar school adventure – far more than I will be forced to learn, especially as we ancient over-thirties get special dispensation to be lazy about them – but something I want to do. I definitely want to arrive at college having some idea whether I want to take Greek further or start Hebrew or both. I am also studying some basic theology and reviewing the stuff I learned on my diocese’s excellent certificate course a few years ago.

I don’t know whether it is the study or the uncertainty that is getting to my creativity. The lack of clarity is currently around which degree I’ll be studying, funded how, and for how long. There is nothing much I can do about this other than turn around the extraordinary number of requests for pieces of work and long forms to fill in coming in from various churchy directions. I’ve given out more personal statements than the average continental European president’s mistress over the last couple of months, but considerably less interesting, I’m afraid.

I know what I have to do to push my creativity back up – it usually works when I start with small exercises or simply go into my studio and clear up, or re-read an earlier piece of writing. So it’s just a matter of doing it. Meanwhile, back to those Greek participles.

spot the difference

For people who have been forced to attend "all-age" worship, a seventies nostalgia-fest, or anything that got just a little bit too syncretistic lately:

Q. How do you tell the difference between Sydney Carton and Sydney Carter?

A. Sydney Carton was guillotined and shouldn't have been.

So what, neither has Shakespeare

So I haven’t written much lately. (title from a postcard that all foreign visitors to London with any literary pretensions are statutorily required to purchase – ask my ex).

I’ve done a bit of editing on “The Rural Nietzsche Experiment,” but only a bit. My spiritual director suggested that I write something about one of my soon-to-be-ex churches, so I have done some of that. I might publish some of it on here, suitably anonymised. The church in question partakes of many of the classic annoyances when a bunch of variously reconstructed people get together and try and get all holy – this might be interesting and instructive to me in future years, and then again it might not. All unhappy families being different in their own ways, and all that.

It’s also an inexorable law of blogging that sooner or later you have to describe what you had for lunch, so I’ll just mention that I have developed a thing for cucumber sandwiches lately. What can it possibly mean?!

vicar school

Slight change of life plan: I shall be moving to a new city this autumn to start vicar school, with a view to being ordained in the Church of England. I expect to be there for two years on a full time residential course, the exact details still to be decided.

Currently frantically studying all the stuff all the really holy people probably know already. Till yesterday, I used to think postmodernism had Foucault to do with theology.

NaNoWriMo 2010

I've signed up for my third year of the madness.

Go to nanowrimo.org to follow suit.