I walked past this beautiful Street bench on my way to Hackney City Farm where I’ve enrolled in an art class. It inspired me to take a photograph to celebrate the kind person who placed it there.
We all know life can be a storm and that’s certainly true right now. I haven’t felt so furious, frustrated and unsafe since Brexit – which as it turns out, was a dress rehearsal, with many of the same actors, for what privileged and entitled white men (yes, they are mostly men, that’s a feature not a bug as far as they’re concerned) are creating in the USA.
I have been trying to respond by looking for hope and positivity where I can find it. My art class is one way I’m doing this. I loved art and painting as a young person, studied it to A Level, went to art school before I went to university, got very confused about what I was doing there and dropped out. Somehow this became an internalised commandment not to draw or paint again, because I’d ‘failed’.
Anyway, I’m in the Hackney Fine Arts class, charmingly situated in a city farm, giving myself permission to make art again. We are copying paintings in charcoal and afterwards in paint – I’m working on a Hockney tree tunnel, as I’ve realised landscapes inspire me more than portraits.
But I’m taking this as a jumping off point. I will allow myself to be messy, and real, and fail. Because perfection is not the end point of creation – it is its death. We need to hold on to our imperfect, creative selves. Our creations are our shelter.
I’m also celebrating new beginnings with my podcast, Story Radio, which has just incorporated at Companies House as a Community Interest Company. A Community Interest Company is a social enterprise or not-for-profit. Our object has always been to help emerging writers and actors and benefit the writing community as a whole, and now we’re formalising that. We’ve run the podcast for three years as volunteers, paying costs ourselves, but it’s time to try and put it on a more secure footing so we can sustain and grow it.
If you’d like to support our fledgling CIC in any way, please get in touch! You can donate to us, but you can also advertise on our show. We’d love to promote your bookshop, for example. And writers, please keep sending us your stories. We have some exciting plans for the future!
