GAH BUMHUG

Ugh..not another blog of Christmas woe I hear you mutter.

Tough, I need to get this all off my chest before the Christmas pudding explodes in a fiery finale.

It doesn’t help that I have 3 birthdays between 11^th and 18^th December, one of which is my own.  Additionally it’s the most wonderful (for that read manic) time of the business year for me, with 3 VAT quarter ends to deal with, one year end and enough PAT testing paperwork to re-sink the Titanic.

Officially the misgivings started when the tree was picked up 16^th December and further as I sat surrounded the next day by baubles, pine needles and tatty tinsel.  A sudden flash thought occurred as my left L4-5 lumbosacral joint began to whine about all the extra strain:

“Bah, 2 weeks and I’ll be pulling this glitter off and dragging the mini-forest outside for firewood”.

It’s the time of year ladies when you’re other half throws all 360 day abandon of the year out the window and is reminiscent of a toddler rampaging through Tesco on a Saturday afternoon with handfuls of “we’ll have this”, “I’d like that” foot-stamping, plea-bargaining, wretched waste and wanton lust all blended with occasional bouts of Merry on High, Fah la la and Ding Dong.

Normally I have hoards to cater for on Christmas Day, all family mostly but sometimes a sprinkle of friends otherwise on their own.  The lounge becomes an extension of the dining room with a concoction of tables, chairs and dogs, breakfast, lunch and dinner.  I don’t mind this one bit, it is fun and takes all day to eat, un-wrap gifts, play games and clear up before collapsing into a chair with a bottle of Port.

This year my eldest daughter & fiancé are off to his family, the youngest is half working, half at the boyfriends family, my parents are hosting my sister and nieces so we were going to be home alone with the possibility of the in-laws turning up for lunch.  In fact I was squealing inside with glee at the thought of a quiet Christmas with just hubby, lying in bed forever playing hunt the toy soldiers.

As it is, there could be 4 of us at the table on the big day, but the fridge wants to know why it's holding enough for 40.  I have yet to tell it that by New Years Day we may just have gone through that many.

I want to get to Christmas Eve and be baking miniature madeleines in the morning, painting my nails by lunchtime and dancing a waltz with the one I love by candlelight at 11pm whilst the turkey cooks itself.

No chance.

Due to the fact some family members have already started the wind down and are at a loose end (so they believe you are too) I found myself at 10pm last night wrapping everything I had hoped to have under the tree a week ago, hunting for hidden gifts until I acknowledged they actually hadn't turned up yet, discovering broken ones and realising I had to make an early morning dash to exchange that before work and finally sitting down at 11pm before someone announces “I’m off to bed, don’t be too long…” ….eh???

I end up dreaming of running naked with my phone clamped around my head through British Homes Stores at 8.30am with armfuls of 5p bags covering modesty.

As for venturing onto the roads, I could have dedicated a whole TV show with some of the parking shenanigans witnessed in the last week.  Anyone who was caught up in the 6 hrs it took to exit Bluewater on Monday, 21 December - you had my deepest sympathy.

This baby supposedly born 2015 years ago in a stable has a lot to answer for.  As for those 3 wise men, do me a favour – it was their idea on the gift thing.  How did we get in this hilarious muddle? What did everyone do before this madness?   Well if you really want to know pull up a chair and the tipple of choice to watch this 45 minute documentary, it's eye-opening and covers the whole thing (but come back here for my jig at the end):

"In late December do not let your children and servants run too much abroad at night!" Families, friends and Christmas are what it's all about even if it does bring out the worst and the best of us.  What do we owe to friends and families?  We owe them our time, love, patience and smiles for that day if nothing else.  Be kind to each other, even if at some point you do feel like burying that one person alive.  Let your heart sing to whatever makes you happy at this time of year. So on my last day of work before I start getting my head into the freezer contents, at 5pm in the office I'll be raving along to this song, the lyrics say it all.  Enjoy and Merry Christmas (whatever...). "Been doing this song a long time and the longer I do it the better it gets...I'm just getting started".

TO GO FORWARD....WE NEED TO GO BACK

This is the story of a piece of Art.

On 13 September 2015 whilst I was soaking up rays by the pool of The Wyndham International Drive, Orlando, I received an IM from my friend Henna Khan in Mumbai founder of @UnivSimplified regarding a competition she was promoting for lunar and space exploration.   Henna remembered my rocket launch drawings and asked if I would like to enter.  I remember vaguely looking at The Lunar Initiatives Flash Art Competition website at the time but in bright sunshine on an iPhone the text and details were hard to see.

I didn't actually respond to Henna until the following day due to intermittent Wi-Fi, but said I would try to find some time on my return after 29 September.

In fact, by the pool I had already begun to think about the possibilities for composition.

So much goes on in my mind before starting a piece of Art, particularly in this case as I wasn't going to be drawing something I had seen or was in front of me, it would be more conceptual than actual.  It takes time and patience to let creative stuff flow and more often than not most of that happens as it evolves from thought to paper and conclusion.

After 3 weeks in the US, life is never easy when you help run a family business, there was huge amounts of catch up work to do and I didn't actually draw breath and start sitting at the drawing board until 10 October.

This was my tweet around the start:

And so it begins, challenge accepted #Drawing #Space pic.twitter.com/0a332In5g4

— Wendy Clark (@twinklespinalot) October 10, 2015

As you can see there was a variety of post it notes on the board. This is how I started, building a theme, a storyline of the Art before pen even touched paper.  I decided straight away that art pens not graphite would be used.

Some questions I asked myself: Where are we going, what are we doing, how are we doing it, what are we missing? How do we change that?

The Post it Archive

For the next 3 weeks on my non-working days, I added content to the drawing based on my answers.  Rockets I could draw, have drawn and continue to draw. Lunar landscapes?  Never.  Time to start.  It transpired that my choices worked out better than imagined, a landscape caught on camera on my birthday in 1972 by the last human crew to land on the Moon became a focal point for celebrating.

I follow satellite passes quite a bit and one had caught my eye on several occasions, a real live experimental space habitat in orbit.  From the small icon on my iPhone tracking app I could gauge the shape, but had to research further for more detail.

Remembering the iconic photo of Buzz Aldrin taken by Neil Armstrong on Apollo 11 with Neil's reflection in the visor, I took that vision and extended it further with a different reflection, one that we are all familiar with.  The pale blue dot we call home..Earth.

Because of my love of retro, the drawing had to go back as well as forward in time, a current theme was also a requirement. I finished the artwork 2 days before the deadline for submission to the Art Challenge.  Curious as to how long it had exactly been since Apollo 17 had landed on the Moon, I looked this up and translated the years, months and days into hours, minutes and seconds that it had taken me to complete.  To reflect that, this was the next tweet:

#Drawing stopped and finished at 42 hrs 10 mins 18 secs, these numbers will become apparent #Space (1/2)

— Wendy Clark (@twinklespinalot) October 28, 2015

Now and then in between the start and finish time, I had also given very subtle hints within most of my tweets as to the drawing content, it was a little fun which just added sparkle to the story and a few people began to pick up on it.  There were loads of tweet hints to be honest!

There are however subtle clues as to the #drawing content in virtually every tweet I've made since 10 October

— Wendy Clark (@twinklespinalot) October 28, 2015

I detest photographing my art because of compression rates but this had to be done for submitting a JPEG of the artwork. Thankfully the next day was dry, sunny and windless. I took the drawing outside on an easel, pegged straight and snapped a few times. The result was uploaded later that day and locked into my Flickr account as private. I felt that as the competition had not quite ended, it would be unfair to others and myself to broadcast an entry before anyone else had submitted to the deadline, which as it happened ended up being extended from 30 October to 30 November!

During this time following my submission, I discovered part of my decision to include a space habitat into the Artwork was more than just the final interest in the anti-clockwise view I had envisaged. This experimental 'hab' in an updated form is to be launched aboard Space X's Dragon CRS-8 re-supply mission in early 2016 for testing and attachment to the International Space Station, something I shall follow.  The company that built this test habitat is at the forefront of habitable space structures.  On 8 December following months of bad weather in the UK, I finally had a clear sky that enabled me to capture Genesis I with my DSLR, crossing my sky at 17.47 GMT.

I had already decided exactly when to release the drawing for general viewing and pinned that tweet to the top of my timeline:

Well tweeps, on a lighter note in 9 days time 19:54 UTC I'll be releasing my latest #space drawing, special day for more than 1 reason #Art

— Wendy Clark (@twinklespinalot) December 2, 2015

It followed days of complete madness on twitter over the Paris attacks. Sometimes the internet brings out the worst in people.

So today, being the 43rd anniversary of Apollo 17 landing on the moon brings me to the end of this Art story. It was quite a journey and a big turning point for me in terms of belief. Every time I start a major drawing there is a little fear of my own capabilities, it doesn't last long, fading within a few minutes. I don't think I shall ever be afraid of myself ever again.

The link to the Flickr submission for the competition is here. We were only given 1000 words to describe the work, hence this post on my blog to expand the story. I hope you enjoy seeing this as much as I enjoyed drawing it, every dot on the paper taught me further patience with myself, the world and humanity.

Of the Moon I speak

In regolith tone

Rising, falling

Through the ink of space

We've run this race

Planning, drawing

It's time we left home

To share what we seek