Walk Eighteen - On trying to fit in art, no matter what

At lunch today I drove my friend Natalie to the Childwickbury estate. Completely unrelated to my Walk Two post about Childwickbury, Natalie had gone to an arts fair and had fallen in love with a print of Looking Through Glass by Katharina Kubrick Hobbs so we were going to pick up the print she had bought. I mentioned to Katharina that I was interested in going on one of her oil painting courses, so she showed us around the studios and showed us her original paintings. I’m afraid my little green jealousy monster made an appearance. The buildings and surrounding pastoral landscape were stunningly beautiful, however I think what I really envied was when she told us that she had spent a year on ‘Looking Through Glass’ and she showed us a tiny blue reflection of a window that she had noticed – some way into working on the painting – which had really lifted that part of the picture. Now the thought of being able to leave a still life composition in place together with a painting on an easel for a year – that I really would love.
In the afternoon Xavier fell asleep so I caught up with paid work. Then when my older sons returned home from school I thought I’d leave them to babysit and sneak off with my watercolours and dog to do my mile and picture. However Xavier woke up and demanded to join me. He was an absolute angel. We picked cow parsley and buttercups. And when we got to the spot where I wanted to sit down and paint, he was a joy, playing with pine cones that we’d collected and reading his book about alien monsters. Then just as I was putting the finishing touches to my sketch he decided the most interesting thing to do would be to jump on Mummy’s pallette and watercolours, rub his hand all over the wet edges to the sketch and throw the water bottle all over the painting! Now you see why I envied Katharina just for a moment.