Lately ...
Lately, so much has happened that I seem to have lost my ability to process it all ... and to write the stories. I so very much want to write the stories. From Genova, Lake Como, and Norway.
Italy was intense, followed by a stint at home where I played 'catch-up' ... which was intense. Before flying out to Norway, to give a photography workshop that was all about more intensity and more beauty. Day after day after day when the electricity of a life lived intensely hummed inside of me.
Home again to an impressive 'to-do' list that has me dreaming of two weeks of doing absolutely nothing. But I think the problem is mine, no one else's. I suspect, even if I were set down on a deserted island, a castaway or two would wash up and we'd talk for days and nights until rescued.
I'm like that. Intensely curious, intensely interested, in almost everything. I'm beginning to understand this thing about me. I don't rest but it's my fault.
Kim and AP came over from England last week and that was so good. Then I caught up with Marcia, my lovely Irish colour therapist friend, from Brussels. We had another kind of day filled with a different intensity ... one that involved everything from walking and singing to her 8 week old baby, to talking of e-courses and all kinds of other things too.
In-between times I photographed two lovely Belgian families, laughing but intense as we worked with the bright light and 5 beautiful children under 8 years of age. I rode home on the tram, jeans splattered with mud, exhausted but happy.
Then today ... an unplanned visit to the city, because I was almost out of coffee beans, netted an unexpected bonus. 5 fabulous books!
A Mountain in Tibet by Colin Thubron.
Tim Parks, Dreams of Rivers and Seas. A novel. I already loved his book, A Season With Verona.
Then, Jon Snow, one of my favourite journalists wrote a book i didn't know about. Lately I've been finding so many good books by and about war journalists and photographers. His book, Shooting History, was published in 2004. Jon had already spent 25 years reporting and is 'one of the most highly regarded newsmen of our time, renowned for his independence of mind and his unerring ability to get to the heart of the matter.'
I particularly love this, 'he presents his uncensored views on the new world order: how the West's constant search for an enemy has helped unhinge the world, and why the media have been less than helpful in drawing attention to key political and global developments'.
And then there was a book I had forgotten I was waiting for. Daniel Pearl's wife wrote about her husband's life and death in A Mighty Heart. ' A journalist in her own right, Mariane is, as was her husband, profoundly committed to the idea that a more informed public makes for a better world, and to the idea that risks have to be taken to uncover a story.'
And the final book, before I stepped away from that dangerous 50% off shelf is one by New Zealander, William Brandt. Titled The Book of the Film of the Story of my Life, I couldn't resist.
It's been a good day here in the flatlands of Belgium. I'm also working on the very first A New Way of Seeing Newsletter. And processing the family photography session, and trying to decide which book I should begin reading while knowing that, at this very moment in time, I should step away from the computer and go organise dinner.
Home ...
You know, if the truth were known I have a perfect passion for the island where I was born. Well, in the early morning there I always remember feeling that this little island has dipped back into the dark blue sea during the night only to rise again at gleam of day, all hung with bright spangles and glittering drops . . . I tried to catch that moment . . . I tried to lift that mist from my people and let them be seen and then to hide them again.
Katherine Mansfield, Writer.
I am returning to Genova in July and already my head has begun to fill with what I would like to achieve while there this time. That city brings me alive in a way that no other place has so far. Perhaps Istanbul came close but Genova has everything ... in just the right proportions. It is imperfectly perfect for me.
Genova, once known as La Superba, is an ancient Italian city (at least 2,000 years in the making), nestled in the arms of hills that are topped by ancient fortresses. And at the feet of the city you have Ligurian Sea.
The first time I saw that sea tears filled my eyes. It had been a long time since I had been anyplace where the sea looked like home. I was out at Nervi, photographing a Genovese family, and suddenly I was overcome by this strange sense of being back in a place that was completely familiar.
I have been thinking about things and have this idea that if you ever leave the country you were born in and move someplace else, far away, then eventually the idea of returning home can become as strange or as foreign as living in another country.
And so you move countries and become 'the other', living amongst people who are 'the other' to you. But when you go home you realise you have become something else there as well.
And so my place on the edge of lives and cultures is confirmed, probably for life. That said, there is something else that happens out here. I love people. I love when they invite me into their worlds. In Istanbul there were Turkish families I adored because they took care of me when I lived alone in their city. That experience of being a guest, of being invited inside, to be a part of this celebration or that, here in Belgium, in Berlin during those months spent living and working there. Cairo. Naples. France. Italy. It's those insider journeys that make this lifestyle of mine so very very worthwhile.
Lately I've been reading a series of biographies and fictions about New Zealand author, Katherine Mansfield ... searching for clues I think. Something about her story speaks to me.
She left NZ in 1908 aged 20. By 1923, she was dead from TB but not before she had revolutionised the 20th Century English short story. She was a part of the English literary scene at the time and yet very much the colonial from the Antipodes.
Her masterpieces—the long stories ‘At the Bay’ and ‘Prelude’—are lovingly detailed recreations of a New Zealand childhood, reports from the fringe—the edge of the world as she felt it to be. She wrote as if she’d stayed. Of course these luminous re-imaginings are lit with the affection and nostalgia of the expatriate. They would not exist without their author’s estrangement from the scenes and places and people she describes. They are set in a New Zealand of the mind, composed at the edge of Mansfield’s memory.
Source: NZ Edge.com
I'm curious about her because I relate to her on so many levels. I feel like reading her story might tell me more about mine. I yearn for home. Adore it, am passionate about it and yet ... could I go back and live there again? I really don't know anymore.
Ahhh but all of this when really I came to post a photograph I took at the antiques market in Genova, back in May. 
A Fabulous Book by Andrew Simonet, Founder and Director at Artists U
Taking power as an artist means going from beggar to partner. Artists who are strong partners thrive. They find resources, connections, and audiences. They don’t wait for opportunities; they create opportunities. Everyone we deal with is a partner (not a parent). Funders, presenters, museums, record labels, and critics are all partners. When we step up as responsive, responsible partners, we can go anywhere.
Simonet, extracted from his book, Making Your Life as an Artist - a guide to building a balanced, sustainable artistic life.
Every artist should read this.
Really. It's that important.
As Val wrote when I posted the link on Facebook, Good resource and point of view with concrete actions to take. They need to give this to students in school.
Val Oliver, an Originator/Creator/Writer/Director/Producer.
Making art will never be an entirely reasonable, rational pursuit. Excess, immersion, wildness, and obsessiveness can all fuel our work. But that doesn’t have to be the way we deal with all aspects of our lives.
Protect the wildness of your art practice. Keep the radical parts radical by cutting out the chaos.
Sustainable means your life can work over the long term. A lot of artists’ lives are built for 23-year-old single, frenetic, healthy, childless workaholics. That doesn’t last. Our lives change and our needs change.
Sustaining is radical.
(Starving is not.)
Dani Shapiro, on identifying our natural habitat
Ralph Hotere, New Zealand Artist
He was very gentle but held strong views and was extremely inquisitive and interested in many things.
Jeanne Macaskill, artist, describing Ralph Hotere
I think, sometimes, we can grow lacking appropriate role models. We assume we fit the world wrong and that we carry the burden to change. But it's untrue. I think it is more that the institutions that define and model 'correct' behaviour often have it all wrong.
Rather than exploring the full range of what it is to be human, we are shaped so as to fit the structure already in place.
I wish someone had told that it was possible to be gentle and hold strong views. That one didn't cancel out all possibility of the other. Strong views do not a monster make.
The word most used in describing Ralph is the word generous. That is how friends and colleagues remembered him and yet, he was a man of strong political views ... a man who believed 'art and politics are not separate things, because life does not allow them to be.'
He was described as a warrior artist. His greatest works embraced great causes. He used elegance, power, and beauty. He was a builder of bridges between people. These are just a handful of the things I've read about Ralph Hotere.
Source: Mirata Mita's documentary series at the end of this post
New Zealand poet Cilla McQueen, one of Hotere's 3 wives wrote 3 beautiful fragments on the Listener magazine's memorial page to Ralph after his death in 2013. She wrote of time spent in Avignon as a family, 'We knew these were precious days, of dappled sunlight, warm earth, lavender, grapes, melons, rosé wine. I wrote because a camera was not enough.'
He was a talented artist, a stunningly generous man who gave away more then half of his art - gifts to friends, a silent man who believed that 'there are very few things I can say about my work that are better than saying nothing', a man who understood 'precious days' ... a man I don't want to forget because he shows that it's okay to be everything, to own that character that makes us so uniquely ourselves.