I can’t stop painting and drawing trees. I’ve been doing it since I was a kid.
I think it’s some kind of throwback to when we lived in them, some kind of collective subconscious thing – they’re ingrained in my imagination and they turn up even when I’m trying not to draw them.

Internal dialogue sample: ‘Hey, I need to design a ____.  Right, Ruth.  Let’s do something different.  Don’t do a tree.  Don’t do a tree.  … Ah, crap.  I’ve drawn a tree!’  Case in point: I have a logo to design for a church related thing and I have already had an idea for another tree design.  An olive tree – you know, peace and healing, that kind of thing.  Idea firmly rejected, of course but I know it’ll creep back later when I stop paying attention, like some kind of fucking mind triffid.

Maybe there’s something significant in that or maybe I’m just a bit uninspired as an artist.

I was really chuffed to be asked by a friend to paint a picture as a gift for her husband.  Guess what she asked me to paint?  Thankfully, I am not short of practice!  Progress pictures above.  I’ve made a bit of a pig’s ear of it, so far…  Hope she doesn’t see this – I need the work, after all!

Today’s Sketchy Sundays are an empty cage and an open hand.  Bit skew-iff in both cases, but I had too much coffee this morning and I couldn’t draw a straight line for shit.  No, seriously – jittery as fook.

In my head, there was a tiger in the cage.  But I didn’t get around to it in the end.

Drawing at church takes me back to my childhood when I was made to sit through sermons by my mum.  However, I have yet to receive a disapproving look for the drawing or indeed for keeping my eyes open during prayer times.  In your face, childhood discipline!

Talk today at Re:Hope was on Posture.  Summary: Postures matter to God so pay attention to what your body is saying.  Mine was saying ‘Caffeine overload!’ today, but I think God understood.

I haven’t signed on for years.

I had an extended period of unemployment (as Douglas Coupland puts it, my ‘mid-twenties breakdown’) when I found myself out of the institutional structures I’d been part of since I was five and had no confidence in my ability to find work and no idea of what exactly I could do with the qualifications I had somehow managed to achieve despite having no basic understanding of the subjects I’d studied.  Knowledge, yes.  Understanding, no.  The understanding came a little later.

Anyway, my trip to the Jobcentre yesterday was an eye-opener.  The system is antiquated and truely weird in some ways.  And I realised how well-designed the barriers put in place are.  They communicate in every way ‘you don’t get to know what’s going on behind the scenes’.  From the complete lack of signage, to the total lack of clear instruction about where you are supposed to go.

I think the thing I found most odd was the inability for people using the Jobcentre to print off documents.  I mean, they ask for evidence of earning and a copy of your CV.  I don’t have a printer and everything is done online, as with MANY other people.  So I bring a USB stick with my documents and they tell me they can’t print anything off.  And I understand the reasons, which the patronising arse behind the counter explained in great detail because as an unemployed person, I can’t possibly grasp the simple concept of computer security.  So today I am having to go to the library to print the shit off and hand in to the front desk at the Jobcentre, just because they can’t just put the facility of a computer isolated from their network in place for the benefit of jobseekers.  SAKE!

Don’t misunderstand – I’m not saying that the unemployed should not be given every possible encouragement to find work.  No, no.  I want to work.  As do the majority of the people going into Jobcentres. And the majority of the staff were very courteous and helpful.  I just find the place more of a hindrance than a help.

I’ve never been good at remembering church sermons.  I mean, I have no problems keeping my attention on speakers but for some reason it was like water through a sieve when it came to actual content.   So  I started to take notes a few years ago to try and retain some memory.  To no avail.  (I suspect this also applies to an extent to my university career…)

Then I started to draw during services.  I have a very visual mind. If someone tells me something, it’s gone.  I have a better chance if I see it written, but still not great.  But, I finally figured out that I have a good chance of remembering the main points of a sermon if I draw it in some kind of pictorial way.

Sometimes, what I produce is totally at odds with what is being said – as in this case.  The teaching was on anointing with oil at Re:Hope (http://www.rehope.co.uk/media/) and I draw a waterlily with petals drifting off.  Go figure!

The lotus seems to resonate – it has a central role in various eastern religions: Buddhism, Hinduism as well as being important to the Ancient Egyptians and Greeks.  For me, what speaks to me is the fact that they can float far and wide and seem unrooted, and yet their roots go deep.  I  have a half-finished (actually barely started) painting of waterlilies going off into the distance that I felt I wanted to try.  But as usual, time has been at a premium.  I’ll get around to it!

To be fair, I also drew a jug of oil.

I am now unemployed and although it might be hard to make ends meet, I feel strangely liberated. I plan to start doing some freelance graphic design, bit of painting and selling arty things and I have a business idea that I need to investigate. Might be even busier now than I was when I was working full time!
Mostly, I want to spend more time with my little girl, who has barely seen me in recent years. Not that working 9-5 was completely unmanageable, but I have been kind of absent for much of her life and the time I have had with her has had to be crammed with all the things I can’t do during the week. Poor kid – her early memories will be me dragging her around the city.

Current pieces of work are:

• Painting for a friend of mine
• Graphic Design coursework
• 2 other half finished paintings
• More bookcovers for lovely husband Al
• And of course, finish this website which is currently only partly functional. Ha!