Nov 142013
 

PAGE 28

Belsen-esque

My ex-partner invents this word for my new physique – her take on it. We spend Easter together to avoid our families. Not good. She passes judgement on my Prozac. I pass judgement on her chain-smoking. I don’t mention her exams. She doesn’t mention my novel.

It’s too soon. Not yet two years. Still too many issues.

In fact it’s her fault I’m a scrawn-bag. She was my cook for seventeen years. She de-skilled me. I don’t know how to feed myself.

Victoria emailed an acknowledgement of receipt!


This week’s topic

28. The elusiveness of happiness
In episode 8‘s topic I asked whether obesity is a sign of spiritual under-nourishment. If that is so, then what is an exceptionally skinny body a sign of?
Click on this episode’s topic title (28) to add your thoughts.

NOTE FROM ADMIN: Suki’s manager Sue Vickerman and I continue to ply Suki with cake – with little success. ‘They want bones’, says Suki.

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Noticeboard

1. Bel and I were recently called to a regional gallery to discuss a potential (watch this space!) residency to explore the artist-model relationship (the 1970s-80s ‘male gaze’ debate revisited – see Bel’s 28-minute audio-visual piece on this subject).
Bel now has her knickers in a twist about a comment that she interpreted as ‘dismissive’, which was that one group (not all) of her photographs was ‘documentary’ (and by implication not, therefore, ‘art’).
Please add your opinions to Bel’s slightly deranged blog post on this subject. I already have.

2. Please come to my and Sue Vickerman‘s second launch-reading of our joint poetry collection THIN BONES LIKE WISH-BONES on Friday 29th November 2013 at 7.30pm at the Quaker Meeting House in lovely rural Settle (North Yorkshire, UK). See our poster , or try here. That very meeting house is where some of the poems were written.

3. It’s not that I’m not eating cake; I’m currently skinny because I’ve finally had a repair-job done on the botch-up I suffered last December at the hands of a surgeon whom I dare not name and shame because the b*****d would be able to get a better lawyer than me, so let’s just call him the Butcher of Bradford.
It’s the kind of operation that makes you never want to eat again, due to the thought of ‘what goes in must come out’. Yes, that’s already too much information. Enough!
But I’m 2 kilos down.

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Artist of the week

DAVID MACE, retired specialist in Art in Education in the UK, describes his own artistic development thus:

Back in the ‘fifties I was brought up in the old art school Fine Art system of strenuous study of the visual image relating to tone and anatomical structure rather than to expressive colour and interpretation. What used to be termed ‘academic’. This […] was resented by most of us… [it felt] very old-hat. But we were allowed Sickert as supreme model (the Professor had been a student of Sickert) and we were later allowed to temper the system with a bit of Cezanne for modernity. Looking back on it I’m grateful…

Read more of David’s words on Redbrick Mill artist Tom Wood‘s famous blog HERE.

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