By the time I left the cathedral, it had changed into already darkish, mizzling, the type of rain that looks as if mist but drenches you in minutes. I walked speedily, head down. In the marketplace, the Friday-night time bonanza was correctly below way, ladies in tight dresses and vertiginous heels, teetering alongside in noisy businesses, watched by boys who pretended indifference and returned to their mates, guffawing. How did ladies walk in the one’s things? I should barely manage inside the heels I’m carrying, and they have been nowhere close to as high. Mind, I don’t generally wear heels. Jeans and running shoes, that’s me. Only, that afternoon I’d felt the want to make an effort due to the fact I’d been supervising the hanging of my artwork in the Galilee Chapel. My first solo exhibition.
As I became Silver Street, I became hardly ever aware of my environment; I became still on foot around the exhibition in my head. All the latest paintings all on the subject matter of metamorphosis. Women are becoming hares, foxes, crows, cows, fish, seals, timber. I’d been searching for this artwork for goodbye. I couldn’t see them anymore. Sometimes, while artwork first departs home, they seem a piece susceptible, clingy—as though all they need to do is get returned to the studio as fast aas spossiblee—but these felt special. Strong, impartial, even a bit supercilious. What do we have to do with you? They were regarded to be asking, sitting there, smug interior their glossy black frames. A good signal, perhaps? I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye, but it changed into the handiest, my very own shadow flitting throughout the clean windows where Marks & Spencer was.
Was it there that I picked up a 2d shadow? I don’t know what I did of the route.
By the time I reached domestic, I had changed into moist and bloodless. I kicked off the tormenting footwear, threw off the skirt and sweater, and wrapped myself in my dressing gown. Then I knelt, lit the fire, drew the curtains, appeared around me, and thought: tea. And then, rebelling: No, bugger tea. Wine. Being an artist is at fine a chancy, unrewarding enterprise, and one of the few methods I’ve determined of coping is to celebrate each little appropriate element that takes place. And the exhibition wasn’t all that small.
