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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 16 June 2019
“To be excellent at anything, it must cost you something“, a direct quote from ‘In Pieces’ by Sally Field. A book that she spent seven years writing, without ghost writers, unusual for her circle. This book made me weep this week. It’s a beautifully written intimate memoir as well as a gut wrenching self portrait, bordering on a personal investigation. Now at 71, Field felt the compelling need to assemble her fragmented past. Contrast that with ‘Normal People’ by Sally Rooney, another book I have been reading, a future classic by all accounts and a book the BBC are working on for a new tv drama. It’s a story written…
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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 2 June 2019
As humans, we have the unique ability of utilising our skill of habit, to our own disadvantage. We can fail to take note of what is always around us. Thus, we suffer emotionally because we lose sight of the value of what we have and then yearn for imagined attractions elsewhere. We live on auto pilot. As an example, if you think back, to when first learning to ride a bicycle, we become hyper aware of everything, as we sit on the saddle and place one foot on a pedal and the other on the ground, to steady us. As we try to push off and bring up the other…
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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 19 May 2019
“Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.” ―E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops and the first book that I immediately reread thrice, when I was thirteen. It was the first book that interrupted my thought processes enough to relieve me of outside pressures. It was transient,…
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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 12 May 2019
My daughter’s school prom this week manifested into the creation of a taut, magnificently controlled week, with smidgen’s, in my case, of personal survival. The entire week was one of lucid reflection as the period of her school days came to an end with an almost surrealist picture of her leavers celebration. The limpid clarity as an observer and witness to the life changes as she transgresses can only be compared to Claude Cahun’s photomontages, it looks like life, but it’s not life, exactly. Only art can achieve this degree of realism. I end this week, with a juddering heart, strangely close to tears, knowing that the true emotional nature…
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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 28 April 2019
“If you’re paying attention and making your own life as beautiful and rich and fun as it can be, you might just attract someone who’s doing the same thing, you can give up on tracking someone down with your butterfly net.” Words by Anne Lamott, who married this week at Deer Park Villa, in Fairfax, California. She met her husband through a dating site, called OurTime, a matchmaking site for the over 50’s. She had been single for a long period and felt absolutely no wanton feelings to change that. When asked, by the New York Times writer, Lois Smith Brady, 26th April 2019, why she stayed single so long,…
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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 7 April 20019
After scoring a hat trick, I am back! As some of you will have noticed, I was off last week. Not one to take life easy, I managed to cram it with, Mother’s Day, my 50th birthday and a serious lung infection. An accomplishment even by my own standards. The lung infection leading the way, I spent my days and continue to do so, (desperately trying to avoid another hospital admission), dosing up with antibiotics, sleeping sitting upright (it can be done, I’ve learnt, once complete exhaustion sets in) and reading a wide variety of books. I got it down to two books every two days, a record for me.…
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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 24 February 2019
“Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.” ― Toni Morrison, Beloved. I read a lot as a child and I still read a good deal as a adult. Beloved, by Toni Morrison is one book that I read as a teenager, that really stayed with me. My great friend Rachel and I were hungry for literature, we read the same books, at the same times and then studied and reviewed them together. Rachel went on to teach A level literature at a grammar school. Beloved is not an easy read, compared I suppose with something like To Kill a Mocking Bird and by saying that, I…
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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 17 February 2019
When my eldest son was at boarding school, there was the most incredible sensory garden for all the children to enjoy, it was an empowering experience and helped many of the children to blossom. A sensory garden has the ability in many ways to become a sensory room. If you’re not familiar with the umbrella term ‘sensory room’ they are essentially rooms, with special lighting, music and objects, a therapeutic place, one of safety in which to deescalate experiences and promote self care, resilience and recovery. When we view art, it’s important to use all five senses too, as much as possible, to not just look and move on but…
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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 10 February 2019
“The feelings of desperation and unhappinness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappinness stretch your whole sensibility”. A quote by Francis Bacon but one I’m inclined to disagree with. Rufus Wainwright once admitted that he was terrified to settle down into a happy relationship, because without the emotional drama that came from all those dysfunctional love affairs, he was afraid of losing access to ‘that dark lake of pain’ he felt was critical to his music. I disagree that we should all be addicted to suffering, we need to be able to trust pleasure and utilise it to help create art. Too…
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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 3 February 2019
The path of true love… did it ever run smoothly? I don’t think anyone can say agree positively with that. Arguing the toss with someone you love – can be futile and the consequences make it uncomfortable. Disagreeing with restraint, is the ideal but how many of us do that, all of the time? Whether this week has meant you’ve loaded the dishwasher in silence with your partner, or with strong words and broken crockery, we have to make a time to come together and try not to cross some of the ideological lines. So, how do we do that? How do we get back to that initial feeling of…
