Yes, as L.P. Hartley said, 'the past is a foreign country'...and you are a stranger in a strange land there. So there I am circa 1987 in my first London digs which I'd been in for about a year, thinking to myself 'The streets aren't paved with gold!' An Ornette Coleman album in the alcove, ready to impress all the hip young chicks I would lure into my den - ha-ha!
Who was I?
A younger person, before the wrinkles and blemishes grew; before grey hair replaced the brown. A painter, no less! But before the internet there was no-one to see my work, except friends and...those chicks (I probably hid the paintings away rather than proudly displayed them...or at least, I should have done if I wanted any 'success'!).
No emails. A communal phone on the wall outside on the landing above the stairs. A communal kitchen across the hall and a bath further down, shared by girls working, like me, for the NHS. I welcomed and pushed patients in wheelchairs around the hospital by day and went to Jazz clubs and gigs at night.
What I imagined was in my future I have no idea. What I could not have imagined, despite using a typewriter for letters and poems, is that decades on a typewriter would become my most-used tool for art. Here's my latest. Title: TDS
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| RTomens, 2024 |
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