London Pride Inspired Art (by sarah)

I have been working on a concept of a picture for a long time - since I was a teenager but could never get it right. Then yesturday I saw a friend's quotes as to why London Pride mattered and it sparked the desire to try and capture this picture again.

So I started painting - its not a picture about being gay or anything really that's linked to London Pride but it is about Intolerance.

Its called The Strange Fruit of Intolerance:

There is a bigger picture over on Salaric Craft along with how it was painted. The colours are a bit washed out due to me having taking the photo with flash - I'll attempt to get a better pic later.

Here are the twitter quotes that sparked it:

owenblacker: Gay Pride is important because we still don't have equality. And schoolkids (& Chris Moyles) still think "gay" is worthy as a term of abuse

scottbert: Gay Pride is important because of rising homophobia and violent attacks in East London #PrideLondon

serialseb: Gay Pride is important because lgbt people still get killed, arrested or sent to "reassignment" therapies and commit suicide

DavidWaldock: Gay Pride is also important as a way to take a stand against extremist, fascist political parties like the BNP and Tories

DavidWaldock: Gay Pride is important because there are still health inequalities faced by LGBT-types, and we deserve better. #PrideLONDON

I saw most of them as retweets but still!

As I said the picture is not about Gay Pride but it is about intolerance - and as those quotes show this is an area of great intolerance and as I have been watching this country enter a slipper slope of hate against those not percieved as main stream I felt it was time I started saying what I think and feel before we end up in a regime where this is not allowed. People do not realise how quickly a society can slip into a Nazi-esk situation do to apathy - people do not notice or bother with the little things like play ground name calling and posters up in the local boys school and then when it gets bad it is no longer safe to say anything and you end up with social scapgoats and mass murder.

So before this country slips into something like V for Ventetter I shall say what needs to be said because I am a chicken and once things are 'dangerous' I'll be as quiet as a mouse.

I am no great crusader.

The picture is full of symbolism, and is a symbol - this is going to be a long post I'm afraid!

It is called The Strange Fruit of Intolerance - during my GCSE's I had a set text called To Kill a Mocking Bird and I was so touched by this story that I kept the book and have re-read it many time. The entire book is pretty much about intolerance - most people know or see the racism in it straight away but it is full of other examples too - there is sexism, class-ism and with Boo a social recluse mental health and being just plain different is covered. The scorn of the old towards the young is also heavily featured.

I was disturbed by the out come of the American legal system in the book and so endlessly chatted about to anyone who would listen and started work on a fantasy story that was directly seeded from this noval by Mary Lee Haper.

As a result I ended up part of a team raising money for the homeless the efforts of which appeared in local newspapers and even got mentioned higher up the media chain - I also ended reading out bits I'd written about countries that still existed under totalatrian regimes earning me an evening at local church where we presented out, poetry and the like to try and raise awearness of the intolerances and inequalities around the world.

Obviously I also went to Kenya in 2000 and where I was horrified that the other young people with me discovered that street children even existed - I myself had been watching documentrys on Brizilian street children who at the time were being hunted down like animals and lived in the cities sewer systems.

When I say young I was 19.

Anyway I digress - in all of this at some point someone played me a song that wrapped itself around my heart I've only heard it once and it was from an old scratchy record - I remembered it wrongly it turns out but I will say what I remembered first:

What strange Fruit is this - blood at the roots and blood at the tips?

The actual words are:

Southern trees bear strange fruit,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

It is by Billie Holiday and obviously about the racism that was (I use the past tense in hope there) preverlent in the American South at the time.

There is a video of her singing it here

The lyrics themselves were based on a poem written by a Jewish school teacher after a lynching.

My picture shows a tress with strange fruit i.e. drops of blood that fall to make a tide of blood which well up into hearts and that are chained by barbed wire - the hearts get smaller as you go up until they fall as drops of blood on the tree which is also wrapped in the same loop of barbed wire.

The tree is white - it is bones of society laid bare, when the fruit become to heavy they distort the frame work of the tree pulling the branches down to the sea of blood. Some of the branch tips are not imprisioned by the barbed wire and are untouched by the strange fruits - these are the areas where hope lays.

The 'ground' is the past dark and murky reaching to a future clouded but as yet untainted by the violence. The sea also becomes deeper and more turbulent as you move away from the tree - this is to represent how on tiny drop - some insignificant unthinking piece of cruelty can lead to war.

The picture shows how intolerance chains our hearts leading to a cyclic cascade of volience and pain. Crippling society.

I am pleased with this picture - it has only taken a decade or so to get to this junksure, I have painted many of these white trees and some have the strange fruit upon them but this is the symbolism I sought.

The colours are more vibrant than the photo shows and the barbed wire which is a continual length with out end twisted around both the hearts and society is done in enamel and so shines matalic which can never come across in a photo.

Life Fail (by alaric)

For too many years now, it's seemed like we've being dragged from situation to situation, at the whim of events rather than steering our own course...

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Rebooting Me (by sarah)

So I have done what the Dr suggested and then thanks to responses to my other posts i.e. this one, this one and this one have no reached a situation were I can again see a future for me.

One; that involves me going with the flow of my life and not fighting against things so much. Saying - yeah ok I do actually need to do 3-4 hours of physio during the day and long hot baths to keep things under control with my back. And this goes with the science and business stuff too.

For a long time I have supressed, ignored or ridiculed my artistic self - just stuff to entertain Jean or just a way of being able to afford gifts for people. I had to choose between art and science at A'levels though I kept a toe hold with the creative writing short course.

I chose science - I chose A'levels when I could have been off to St Martins to do a Foundation course - I do and don't regret this decission. At the end of the day I have a 2:1 from Imperial College and I worked hard to get it and learnt skills that have fed into many other areas of my life. I don't think I can even be pure art in the same why I could never be a pure scientist am both.

This is my issue - I love geology and rocks and people who understand what I'm talking about if I start spouting geology terms.

And I have been assessing what I actually want out of science - what is my altermate goal?

I realised in the autum that I want to communicate science - I want to build bridges - I am not a lab monkey. But I didn't realise lab monkeys existed until I tried to go back to science. I found that during my course I loved the lectures and I adored writing the two essays on science subjects I hadn't seen before and joining it all together, pooling the knowledge that was spread out amoungst all those journals all those papers - seeing connections that others had not noticed - suggesting things to try from other branches of my knowlegde for ecology stuff and so on.

I want to write popular science and show kids that science is fun. I want to learn new things and make links that might well be lost. In a Stephen Lawhead book (can't remember what it was called but it involved Hindu gods, dreaming and Mars) they actually had a position in academia called a Bridge - a person whos job was to know a little bit about everything - to talk to people and see where the needs were and have the ability to see what connections between subjects or people needed to be made.

This is sort of I supposes Holistic stuff for science and society - looking at how it all fits together - if you are focused on one area you can't see that the answer you need is over there in the humanities departement.

I have a depressing tale where this would have been a very valuable person to have around.

At an EANA conference just before Jean came into the picture (I wont say she wasnt there becuase she was! Just!) I heard the sad tale of money time and effort and we are talking alot of money and lot of time (years) that some people spent on designing a special drill for sample return missions.

When the person I was talking too looked at what they had done he noticed that they had from first principles designed exactly the sort of thing the oil industry has been using for decades. How could this have happened?

The research group where all physists - they didn't even think to look at the mining and oil industries - it didn't occure to them that those industries had to take samples under hard conditions.

Academia at least is getting a bit better with this but only becuase inderviduals have decided to have lateral careers - ie they move from Chemistry to Physics or from Medicine to Geology and so one.

I ask myself why do I want a PhD and they answer seems to be - so that people will actually take my science writing seriously. But to do a PhD you have to be passionate about one topic, or slice of topic and be focused on that alone for 3-4 yrs. Now I still want a PhD to have tasted the science world beyound where I am now but I can't cope with doing it part time whilst trying to do everything else so I think it is going to have to wait until I am older and yes this means I am probably giving up the shining career I have gilmpsed from time to time, for the family life but hey what else am I going to do with my retirement ;)

In the mean time there is the webstuff, my blogs and art I can do in my own time at home - hopefully moving forward.

Art and writing is not just something I do to fill the time - and so I am awaiting a book of free poems becuase I happen to be one of the poets and I am going to send off more - now that I have started to have things accepted - its taken me what? 3 years from when I started submitting to things again - I have to confess I got disheartened and tend to do rashes of sending stuff off!

If I can raise the money I may go for the Craftsmen Guild - they get your stuff displayed and only demand you steward a few exhibates for a few days a year - I think I could handle that - but there would be prep work so its a maybe at the mo - I would have to get a portfolio of crafts stuff put together which would take some time I think. Plus I would like to get the dragon case mod finished before I start down that sort of root.

The writing is still all ticking away there and will continue to do so - but where does this leave the science and my course?

I'm not sure if college will agree to this but I want to drop down to the one year course and get a diplomer in reseach and so that at some point in the future I can go for a full time PhD (way in the future this is at the moment).

I want to do my pacing (part of the pain management) with 1/2 of sitting down doing computer stuff ie writing or websites and 1/2 up and at them with sorting the house and Jean out etc...

This has been working well the last few weeks though obviously pacing is far harder to actually do with Jean about.

Hopscotch Poem (by sarah)

I was so fuming after the post the other day that I found myself expressing the stupidness in poem form.

Feed back welcome!

It's called Hopscotch in case you were wondering:

Here's some chalk

Now go and play

Hopscotch was fun, in my day

A small child smiles up at his mum

Then runs outside in the sun

And begins to draw

the hopscotch grid

When out pops his friend - Sid

Then there's Jane, Marther, Mary and May

They've all come outside to play

Throwing stones

to mark their place

the hopscotch moves on a pace

until that is...

sirens rent the sky

And two burly police

come to spy

And tell them that their game's a fraud

Hopscotch - it turns out

is against the law!

And so with tears

they must scrub away

Chalk with which they should play

Stupidity in huge great measure

Stealing away childhood treasure

Whilst prisons burst at the seams

Police down size crimes - to please...

Those Powers That Be

So that they can get more votes

Seizing the UK securely by the throat

Sweeping troubles under the rug

By proclaiming a 5 yr old - THUG

And so without childhood games

I predict arson flames

as our youth grows in discontent

Violence shows as angers vent

So please - I beg

Government Sir!

Why not let childhood naturally unfurl?

And all those games of yester-year

be played in our streets

without fear

Sorting things out (by sarah)

I'm currently sorting things out for a fun weekend of family wedding and meeting up with people - there have been a few hicups already ie getting the wronge weekend for the wedding in Al's diary and concequently issues with his dad's visit!

A friends just had a baby so I'm bring some things down for her as well and have made the wedding presant and card.

I have also been sorting out paper work and my craft supplies and through talking to the local arts and craft people have been instilled with the idea of selling the cards I've been making.

Generally I've had people saying I really should be displaying my art work and things but I just don't know how to do this and have no money to join anything or hire galleries etc...

As Alaric said in hind sight giving up the art classes and writing group to go back to my course right at the point lots of things fell to pieces for me (Alex dying, mum's last lot of cancer and the realisation that we had miss understood/miscalculated money issues plus the situation with being stuffed by my main client) was a bad trade off.

I'm not even sure if I blogged back in the autum that one of my pictures was on display locally thanks to the art teacher.

This is leading me to thinking though - I love science and geology and feel it is part of me but it is easier with pain flare ups and tummy stuff to be at home writing, making websites and doing arty things - but what will make me happy?

I have never react well to having to choose between the two Art and Science. They are not even distinct in my mind but then I have a slightly odd take on things and veiw it all as creative.

I want to try and finish at least the first year of my course but it means more money we don't have but on the other hand if I don't we loose that money already invested in it.

And then the art world is so uncertain - publishing is going through the mill at the moment - big changes the industry are failing to cope with and so traditional avenues are closed but I have noticed new ones opening up - but I am beginner at this game and have no idea how to muscel my way in.

I interact with an extended communitee of writers on twitter but mainly we discuess our kids and the like. I also have science friends on there and a healthy dose of computer people and a few arty crafties but this is only making my dissusions harder.

I am all of these things but modern society doesn't really allow for Jack of all trades especially one who has intermitent health. And so by not choosing I risk achieving nothing.

But I don't think I can choose - my life feels unbalance when I do not have a mix of things.

And at the same time I feel that the house and Jean are priority - I get sick even for a few days and the house descends into chaos and I can not really allow this and so I feel an instinct to nest build until it is all easy to maintain with out me looking over everyones shoulders all the time.

I started this post thinking I was going somewhere and that I had sorted part of my life out but realised as I was writing it that it is all still open questions and discuissions to be made.

The Dr pointed out that I was one person and one person only - I am trying to take this into account with what I plan to do next.