It’s been so long since I wrote a post. So much of what is going on in the world is dumbfounding.

The main project I am working on at the moment is a collaborative graphic novel. Still under wraps, it is all about what happens when one group of people dehumanise another group. And the re-humanising potential of art, no matter how dire the circumstances.

Painting, poetry: I’ve been relying on them for decades to help get me through unavoidable reality onslaughts from within or without.

The graphic novel is heavy, though shot through with odd shafts of light. Alongside this – to my great surprise, I have taken up watercolour.

Painting from life – or direct observation, was something I was trying to learn all through my youth and into my early twenties. I wanted to stare and wonder and get down what I saw as honestly as possible.

Then at art school in the 80s it felt incredibly retrograde and uncool to be assembling still lives, and trying to find and mix the exact colour in my palette to match the shadow on the far side of a jug. It wasn’t seen as an acceptable end in itself, more like practicing scales.

Why wasn’t I using video? Finding a way to express my indignation at the sudden appearance of homelessness in my own city? Making work about the miners’ strike? I mean – fair point. So I began to use ink, to document my own and my peers’ daily life as young people in London, trying to make relationships and a living. We still had our small grants, no tuition fees, and were able to sign on and subsist in college holidays, even as Thatcher was dismantling the benefit system (and almost everything else that had been set up for the common good.)

I branched out from ‘straight’ observation to a combination of ways of responding – to the city, it’s voices and the stories I found. Eventually I suppose this led me to all the ways I still work. Writing and drawing the days and the places where words and image meet.

In September 2023, I was the lucky recipient of a second Hawthornden Foundation writers’ fellowship, this time in Italy, at the magnificent Casa Ecco, beside Lake Como.

And maybe at a writers’ fellowship – where language really is the currency – it was my contrariness that took me straight towards paint again. Well it was partly that, and partly another resolve.

I was to stay there for six weeks of concentrated writing time, with a small group of international writers who also had projects to be getting on with.

I was blown away by the landscape, the house and the support such an opportunity offered me. I could devote most of every day to the dark and complicated project in progress.

It was looking around Villa Carlotta one afternoon, a nearby grand mansion open to the public, that I saw something else that inspired me. Some sepia studies of the locality made by anonymous visitors in the nineteenth century – whilst on the grand tour. These tiny ink drawings had an everyday charm – nothing of ‘being an artist’ – just the act of looking. And making a modest record of beauty courted and encountered.

I began painting every day – as counterpoint to war – both as it haunts my book project, and as it unfolds it’s current horror onto the passing days. Painting became imperative. I chose to concentrate on what I could see in front of me.

As I saw and heard news from Israel and Gaza I had a burning sense of fury, helplessness and shame. I am, as poet Charles Bernstein put it, ‘a Jewish man trapped in the body of a Jewish man’ and although I wasn’t raised speaking about Jewish history, I have done enough work on related projects, including the ongoing one, to know exactly where these spirals of hatred and violence end up. Anything anyone says next to the daily reality of seeing children slain becomes unsayable. The rise of both the far right and the water levels makes it hard to imagine a peaceful future (yet we must.)

A real help then, that fellow Casa Ecco guest, novelist Anuradha Roy, turned out to enjoy painting too. We both raided the stationery shop in Bellagio, and most afternoons, together or separately – we’d make a small painting or drawing of something or somewhere we could actually look at.

This added the bonus of comradeship to the bounteous sop already offered by the mysterious colours and shifting light on water, on mountains.

We both found our watercolours improving the more we looked and copied the life in front of us. I posted some of my paintings on Instagram, and the response was encouraging. A couple of nice insta pals expressed hopes that I’d carry on painting even when I got back home.

I was back in London for November – and the big catch up: family, teaching, friends and other projects that had been jumping up and down stamping holes in my diary. I found that watercolouring around the edges of my days was still possible, if I got up early or was prepared for the painting to be very rough – just a small attempt to be present to what is there, in my own field of vision.

Here’s the view from Deborah Alma’s top window at The Poetry Pharmacy – where I went to help launch her latest book, Poetry Projects (for which I papercut – cover, and in which I have an essay that details elements of my path only touched on here.)

Slightly acid note: When I take my watercolour set to events or round to friends, it is so tempting to give the paintings away. It’s the hard to vanquish people-pleaser in me. But I can’t afford to give work away, it’s still my work, even if this part of it seems rather like a hobby. If someone offers to buy it however, even splitting the money with a donation to Women Wage Peace or Women of the Sun or Save the Children, I will likely be both pleased and amenable.

I have a lot of watercolours piling up now, and it would be great to show and sell them in a gallery one day. Another stuffy dream from my art school years was having a dealer and selling my paintings! Imagine! It just seems so old fashioned, like painting from life, fossil fuels and war.

If you are a gallerist and have an interest in this or any of my other work, do get in touch. Meanwhile, thanks to all who read my blog, and thanks to all who contribute to sustaining life in its complicated glory, in whatever way is possible with imaginative work: especially in caring or creative practice. We really need it.

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