The Vestibule.

That vision of the Vestibule of Inferno where the Futiles hang out has been troubling me lately...

All is well. Halimatou has bought a new fridge for the team in Timbuktu. They  digitized 518 images last week. In Djenne the crepissage is taking place on my house and the studio. After painstaking  research at the  V&A  library I  have successfully convinced the curators at Auckland castle that we should use the Woodchester Roman pavement as a model for the floorcloth I will paint for the dining room this summer. There seems to be no clouds on the horizon. All is well.  Ho hum. 

But I feel as if I am in a waiting room. The only thing is I don’t know what I am waiting for. The Next Thing.  Life has always moved  forward through crises of various  kinds:  a problem needs solving.  My response has normally been to hurl myself into a creative frenzy.  In 1980 I put my life back in order by spending three days  and nights by my sewing machine making a spectacular pair of patchwork brocade New Romantics pirate trousers.  Another crisis made me take up petit point embroidery and I eventually saved myself through a sofa cushion which took a month to sew- but not until I spiralled into a psychopathic  embroidery frenzy when  my fingers started to bleed...

Dear Jeremiah invited me to get over an emotional catastrophe about 12 years ago  by working on an art exhibition  (it became  the very first at Europe House 12 Star Gallery!) so  I started throwing plates out of the window and gluing them back together again, thus  eventually gluing my life back together as well, while  I was at it.  

But what to do if there is no crisis to overcome? If all is well? Or fairly OK?  So far life has proceeded in some desperate giant leap every ten years or so, when I am propelled – or propel myself- into an orbit from which I eventually land onto a new territory: sometimes literally, like when I found myself landing in Mali and I built my hotel. Now I am waiting.  Like that chrysalis again, hanging on a branch, waiting for the change of state. Maybe it will not be so spectacular this time around? Surely I can't be so perverse that I can only progress by overcoming disasters?

It seems clear that there is going to have to be some creative involvement in order to bring out the new Thing though.  No good just sitting around rolling my thumbs. Therefore  I enrolled for the Open Studio at Heatherleys school of Art in Chelsea today... it was perhaps twenty years ago I used to go for life drawing there.  It was lovely  to draw again!