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.

O Rose thou art sick

I've been painting flowers, something I haven't done for a couple of years. I'd forgotten how quickly they change, coming into full bloom and then losing vitality and falling. That's to be expected, and the different types take different times - the sweet peas brought by a visitor lasted three days, if that. Even roses change every few hours, going through a process when you think they've opened fully but they continue to get bigger.

This makes painting them difficult to fit into an already busy schedule. Last time I did a series of flower sketches I used to come home from work reasonably early to catch a couple of hours of light, it being high summer. At the moment my painting practice is more to do an hour or so several days a week.

I quite like the idea that if something unexpected turns up I can rearrange my schedule to paint it before it disappears. The practice was a bit different, as I ran out of time with the roses and am going to have to finish them from a photograph. With both of these pictures I started with a very quick charcoal outline and painted some rough colours in to cover the whole canvas. Then when I returned the next day I could get more detail - working with the fact that the flowers had changed drastically overnight. Another time it might make more sense to get a more detailed alla prima painting done on day one, and maybe even several colour sketches over several days, but as I said, I am still a bit out of practice.

Redrafting

It's great in my head...
I can write.
I can't write.
I can write.
I can't write.
I wonder if I've got any email?
I can't write.
I can write.
I'm going to put the kettle on.
... and so on.

I am currently trying to finish a novel draft. The first ten or so chapters were more or less OK, bar a few minor continuity errors; the next five were just about hanging together as a coherent development of what went before. The final five: a random slurry of unconnected incidents, with a few notes here and there saying, "FIX this!" or, "Did that happen yet?" and so on. All of which messes with my always-fragile confidence.

And NaNoWriMo is only a few months away - and one of my ideas had to do with a resurrected Frida Kahlo hosting a gameshow. Maybe better pick one of the other six?

At least I can more or less paint at the moment, if technical exercises involving flowers counts as painting.