Spring Fever

Maybe it's true that as you get older, the years pass faster! I've never known a year to slip by so effortlessly, and invisibly. Perhaps it's because I have been busy with painting, and busy with Life Events. My niece had a major operation, I've set up my own website (which required many hours, to study the manual on how to do it), and I've been occupied taking paintings to Birmingham be digitally scanned for inclusion on a website that sells prints to 4 and 5 star hotels internationally.

My paintings became more concerned with overworking, to find the right balance of colours and shapes to convey my internal world as well as the external image. Consequently, while I have made many watercolours in situ this year, the numbers of my oil paintings fell, as I worked very intensely on a group of 8. I like the idea that I am free to take them in any direction the painting demands, and the sense of confidence that comes from fearlessly destroying whole paintings, knowing that sooner or later the true form will emerge. And if it never emerges, then the 'failed' painting becomes the foundation for something new.

Increasingly, my paintings either evolve from watercolours painted in the land, or from drawings made from the memory of a place, or concept, or dream. Sometimes all my sources overlap.

(Paintings: 'Women Behind the Trees,' Watercolour, 16ins by 12ins/'Diving into Green,' oil & acrylic, 91cms x 61cms)

Living on the Green Line, Nicosia

At the time I lived in Nicosia, from 1984 to 1998, the memories of the Turkish Invasion of 1974 were still fresh in people's minds. We were always aware of scuffles and tensions along the Green Line, the line that divided the Turkish-Cypriot northern third of the island from the Greek Cypriot southern two-thirds. I lived not far from the Green Line that ran through Nicosia, and I was inspired to write a novel about life in an unstable country from an artist's perspective. Here is an excerpt from my novel:

'At four in the morning we heard a man chanting a Turkish prayer from one of the mosques in the other side of Nicosia. The hauntingly beautiful melody sent a delicious shudder through my warm, naked body as I lay next to Tom. Drowsily, I thought about the Green Line, and the many people hidden from us beyond it. Hearing the same prayers, breathing the same fragrant night air.

From the Guest House you could see the flags that marked the Green Line. It was only since I moved there that I had become truly aware of its presence. The long street ended abruptly, cut by blue and white striped barricades and an unyielding check-point. I lingered nearby, squinted to try to see the derelict yellow villas and walls of broken windows trapped in the buffer zone beyond the check-point. I glanced in disbelief at the young soldiers standing there with their guns tucked casually under their arms............ Is this real? It looks like a scene from a film! Surely these angry young men were partying at some nightclub last night?

Sometimes, when I wandered along the section of old Nicosia that lined the partition, I looked at houses on the other side and imagined figures moving behind the curtains. Were they also looking at me, wondering about life on this side of the wall?

Deserted houses merged seamlessly and silently into the partition. Then it continued its determined path behind and between crumbling buildings, and meandered along the top of ancient, stone walls, mutating into barbed wire and sandbags. Its uncompromising form glared at me, taunting: 'On my other side, not very far away from where you stand, you could see...'"

Now the Greek Cypriot side of Cyprus is in the EU, and attitudes have changed along with the interest in MTV, and the internet. I often wonder what changes another 10 years will bring. In my opinion artists have a lot more freedom than they did when I lived there. I used to paint on the streets and get chided by Tom's friends!