Category: Flowers

When big isn’t necessarily better

angela findlay4 Comments

Reflections on: IN PROCESS… a life, a film, a book, an exhibition, The Vaults, Stroud. Sunday 19th October, 11am-5pm and by appointment until 1st November.

 

“We must, we must, we must increase the bust.

The bigger the better, the tighter the sweater, the boys depend on us.”

I remember chanting that with my boarding school roommates as a teenager, elbows flung back in a futile attempt – in my case at least – to inflate our adolescent chests. Bigger was definitely better, or so we believed.

Burj Khalifa, Dubai

Skyscrapers, cars, salaries, houses… In so many areas of modern society, ‘big’ still equals ‘better.’ More followers, more likes, more headlines, more sales. The biggest countries led by the most powerful leaders and largest militaries make the most noise. And yet we know, quantity doesn’t equate to quality. Magnitude doesn’t always reflect meaning or value.

This idea – that bigger isn’t always better – is something I’ve seen reflected both in the trajectory of my great great aunt Joan’s life and in my own development as an artist. (If you are new to Joan’s story, please see my previous blogs for background.)

Patshull Hall, Staffordshire

Joan’s tent

Joan grew up in a 147-room stately home in Staffordshire. Yet she spent her final weeks in a single, often soggy Meade tent pitched in a remote Himalayan Valley, surrounded not by grandeur but by shepherds, wildflowers and the sound of rain. She had traded scale for purpose. And her joy, it seems, had grown as her material load had lessened.

My own artistic journey has followed a similarly inverse curve.

Painting a mural in Sydney, 1987

I began large, unable to contain any drawing or painting within the boundaries of paper or canvas. My work spilled onto walls, first private then public, then grew further to fill stage backdrops for theatres or touring bands. Various mishaps including a paint-splattered boss’s car and a disastrous commission to paint the backdrop for INXS KICK album tour in 1987, which promptly cracked and fell off in large chunks when rolled up, nudged me toward the more forgiving surface of prison walls. There, no amount of damage could make the environment worse than it already was.

The light danced, 120x120cm

Years later, I turned my focus to canvases of my own, their size dictated by the available studio space and commercial considerations of galleries. And most recently, to works just 28x28cm – or smaller. I have replaced the vast audiences of art fairs with the quiet intimacy of just six or seven visitors at a time into the two vaults beneath my home in Stroud’s Cemetery.

The Vaults

Those vaults now house In Process… a deeply personal exhibition about Joan, her life and the resonance her death still holds for me, our family and small communities she encountered in India.

In one vault, where gravediggers once hung their tools and I now hang mine, visitors watch a short film projected into the open lid of an old trunk telling the story of Joan Margaret Legge.

In the other, where those same workers drank tea, ghostly white plaster casts hang like three-dimensional botanical drawings reminiscent of the specimens Joan collected and sent to Kew Gardens.

‘138 days’

A series of square sketchbooks chart the 138 days I followed Joan’s 1939 diary entries. Starting on 17th February when I stepped into her shoes as she boarded a ship to India, I step out of them again on 4th July, the day she slipped off the edge of a Himalayan path to her death. One photograph, one sketchbook page, each day a quiet re-embodiment across time. Not a recreation of her journey, but a chance to listen more deeply to the changing tone of her voice in the final months of her life.

At the heart of the exhibition is its smallest piece: a re-working of a first edition of Frank Smythe’s Valley of Flowers, the very book that inspired Joan’s expedition. Through collage, drawings and pressed flowers, it now tells the stories of three visitors to the valley rather than just one: his, hers and mine. Wrapped in brown paper and tied with string like an archival package, the book invites visitors to wear white gloves to turn its delicate pages, not because it is precious in a monetary sense, but out of respect, Unlike most artworks, these ones are meant to be handled and engaged with.

‘Three journeys in one’

There is nothing for sale. No press campaign. No sponsorship. Just a quiet space, tucked away in a garden, found by invitation or chance. A strange but deliberate choice, and to me, a more authentic reflection of the humbleness of where Joan’s life ended than any traditional gallery could offer.

What Joan lost in material possessions, she gained in purpose and joy. Her life distilled into what nine porters could carry. She found a sense of completeness long before she had completed her journey.

That’s what I hope to convey in the improvised, immersive pieces shown in the warm belly of my limestone vaults. People forgive imperfection and lack of polish as they connect with Joan’s story through their hands, senses and bodies.

Just as artists learn to see not just form but negative space – the shapes between things – so Joan’s outwardly abundant life transformed into an inner world: slower, quieter, less visible, but not lesser in any way.

Maybe this is a natural outcome of ageing… the gentle decluttering of ambition and a reshuffling of values. Or maybe Joan’s story is a simple reminder that richness cannot always be seen and meaning doesn’t always require an audience.

The symmetry in our shrinking trajectories is just an observation.

But it feels strangely right.

IN PROCESS…

Sunday 19th October, 11am-5pm and by appointment until 1st November.

The Vaults, 114 Bisley Road, Stroud

 

 

 

Creativity in times of destruction…

angela findlay8 Comments

“It’s brutal.”

That’s how a friend recently described being an artist. He had been a student at Goldsmiths in the late eighties and early nineties, during the rise of the Young British Artists (YBAs) like Damien Hirst, Tracy Emin and Sarah Lucas, names that would go on to dominate the art world, thanks in part to the patronage of Charles Saatchi.

We ran into each other at the local paint shop—a regular stop for him in his current life as a decorator. Across a spread of tester pots and fillers, the conversation effortlessly turned to the day-to-day grind of being an artist. Over the summer I have been preparing for my forthcoming exhibition, In Process… (which opens today, 27th September!) and was feeling the impact of long, solitary studio days, wrestling with questions only I was posing and whose answers seemed only to matter to me. It can be a struggle: adhering to a discipline of showing up as captain to a ship with no passengers, steering a course to a nebulous destination, deep-diving into the depths of the soul, mind or body – wherever the well of creativity bubbles up – to haul tiny gems to the surface. Exhaustion and self-doubt often creep in.

‘What’s the point?’ is the main saboteur. The work seems irrelevant, the purpose elusive. There’s no financial gain, just costs. In the isolation of the studio, there’s no one to argue with those thoughts. Indeed it is easy to agree with them: Why bother?

And in times of widespread destruction – whether global or even personal – that sense of futility can grow.

This summer, for example, parts of my home were stripped back to their foundations. My life was overtaken by builders, noise, dusty cups of coffee and chaos. Creativity felt all but impossible. In the grand scheme of things, this was a minor inconvenience. Soon, things would return to normal. But what about those whose lives have been shattered by larger forces… wars, displacement, destruction and poverty on a massive scale? How does creativity find its place amidst the rubble of Gaza, Ukraine, or other war-torn regions? Or even amongst the devastating images that make their way into our minds?

History has shown that creativity can thrive in the moments when everything appears to be falling apart. Creative expression becomes a form of resilience, opposition, even survival. It can be a small act of regaining control in an otherwise uncontrollable situation; a conduit for grief, an out-breath for trauma, a balm for moral wounds. Marks on walls or scraps of paper cry out: I am still here.

In today’s news-filled world where conflicts and politics pitch people against each other while social media distracts and distorts, I feel the call to act. To do or say something that will make a difference. I contemplate taking to the streets and marching in protest. Or superglueing myself to a pavement. I wonder if ‘speaking out’ involves publishing endless blogs and posts on social media denouncing what (I feel) is wrong? Ineffectuality wears one down. 

But to me, the direction of the human race is a force majeure, too big for even the Trump to halt. We find ourselves swept in its rampageous current, both unwilling cogs in the destruction of things we once valued, and parts of an optimistic surge to re-build better. I feel feeble and impotent. When I can’t even open the lid on a jar of gherkins, how can I shift anything of significance? But maybe this disorientating maelstrom is precisely the context in which creativity becomes most vital. Maybe the internal orientation creativity demands provides a space for the mind to process, to breathe, to make light of the weight and sense of the senseless, and to find fragments of meaning in what frequently seems like an overwhelming mess.

Destruction can’t defeat creativity; it calls it forth, demanding that we seek beauty, purpose and points of connection. That process can feel ‘brutal’.  What’s the point? is never far away. But I try to remember: The point is not always to create something monumental. Nor is it to offer neat answers. Sometimes, the point is simply to make something that wasn’t there before, to keep moving forward and to hold onto the belief that every act of creation – however small and seemingly insignificant – is a counter movement, an act of defiance, a stand against that which threatens to destroy us. 

In Process… at The Vaults in Stroud

I have heaved my most recent exhibition out of a time of dark chaos. But as I – and it – clawed our way to the surface, it grew its own wings. Help came from unexpected places. Beauty emerged. And now it is there, in the Vaults, among the grapes on my vine, fruits to share.

There was a point!

You are so welcome to visit.

IN PROCESS…

In Process… Opening Times:  

  • Saturday & Sunday 27th/28th September, 11am-4pm
  • Monday 29th September – Friday 3rd October, 2-5pm
  • Saturday & Sunday 4th/5th October, 11am-5pm
  • Sunday 19th October 11am-5pm
  • And by appointment at other times throughout October (excluding 10th–17th and 22nd–26th October)

If you would like more context to the work in the exhibition prior to coming, please read my previous three blogs: Following Joan… Parts One, Two & Three.

Following Joan… Part Three

angela findlay6 Comments

(If you are joining Joan’s story now, you might want to read Following Joan… Parts One and Two first.) 

‘Do you think she jumped… or did she fall?’

It’s 2020 and I am sitting opposite my uncle, a grandfather clock tick-tocking the present into the past.

That question has always lingered around the name of my Great Great Aunt Joan. She was said to have been troubled, never having recovered from the death of her beloved older brother, Gerald, killed at Gallipoli in the First World War. Ill health had dogged her. And as another war loomed on the horizon, perhaps she could not bear to witness more loss. 

I sometimes wish I could type ‘Joan Legge’ into the search box of my life’s hard drive to locate the exact moment her story began to intrigue me. Perhaps it was a conversation with my grandmother, Joan’s niece. Both she and her younger sister had believed, independently, that Joan would not return from her trip to the Himalayas in 1939. Their mother was said to have ‘the gift’ – an unfathomable intuition, a form of knowing that slips past reason. 

That fascinated me, for even as a child I sensed there were hidden channels of communication and knowledge beneath the surface of ordinary life. Perhaps their foreboding of no return planted the idea that Joan’s death had been deliberate.

Joan 1905

Or maybe it came from the anecdotes I gleaned over time from my father and uncle about this eccentric spinster who, after Gerald’s death, cast off the frills and trappings of aristocracy and privilege to forge a life of farming, service and adventure. A life that ended in solitude, in a remote valley half a world away. 

Some lives close with a sense of completeness, even peace. Death may be welcomed after a struggle with illness or the slow wear of age. Others remain unfinished, wrapped in mystery, unresolved, tugging at the conscience of descendants like a child clutching at its mother’s apron strings. 

Joan’s sudden death was of that latter kind. It sent shock waves through the generations, softening with distance into small ripples. Even now they lap at the shores of my own soul. 

Map of the Valley of Flowers, the site of Joan’s camp, death & grave marked in red
©Staffordshire History Centre

It was only last year, travelling to the Valley of Flowers with three of Joan’s descendants, that I fully grasped the scale of her courage. And the violence of her end. The monsoon rains offered us just a fleeting glimpse of the place she fell, its position traced on a map sketched in the days after her death. Yet it was enough to shatter the gentler image I had long created of her tumbling down a wooded slope. The truth was starker. Joan had fallen clean over the edge of a sheer granite cliff.

Her fall haunts me. Those unthinkable seconds of awareness, knowing you are hurtling toward your end. How different from a death that comes inch by inch, offering time to prepare, to resist, to rage, or to reconcile. In July 2024, when I left the Valley of Flowers and Joan’s remote grave, a sudden grief overwhelmed me, buckling my legs and landing me in a pile of donkey droppings. Yet Joan’s own words leave no room for doubt. Her diaries brimmed with excitement for the months ahead, with awe for the surrounding peaks, and with delight in her adventure. She did not choose death. She was very much alive.

So why does her story touch me so deeply? Why not my great grandmother, killed in a car crash?  Why not my grandfather, the ‘muck and magic man’, pioneer of organic farming? Why Joan? And why me – the only one in the family drawn, again and again, to the lives behind us rather than those unfolding ahead? Is it because I have no children to anchor my gaze forward? Or is it that I have no children precisely because the voices behind me insisted on my attention?

Gerald (far left), Joan’s father (seated left), Joan (centre) and others, 1907

Perhaps neither, or both. What I do know is that the dead have enriched my life. And in honouring them, in breaking the silence of the unspoken, in unravelling the mysteries and untangling the knots they left behind, I believe their presence has enriched the lives of others’ too. 

Through my recent studies in Family Constellations, I have increasingly come to experience life as a river, flowing on with or without us. We step into its current for longer or shorter spans, mingling in the same waters where our predecessors once moved. What matters is not the length of time, but the resonance we leave behind. Not quantity, but quality.

Birth is the one beginning we all share. But our endings are as varied as our lives. Accident, chance, destiny, choice… no one can know death’s moment or manner, only its inevitability.

So was Joan’s death a tragedy as her obituaries mourned? Or was it a brilliant ending to a life lived fully right into its final breath? 

Draft for Joan’s eulogy by her sister: ‘If in another world kindred spirits dwell together there Joan & her brother Gerald will be found, I think, among a happy throng of pioneers and explorers of all ages. Courage, endurance and an indomitable will were possessed by this devoted brother and sister and both lie buried in a mountain grave & as one of her friends wrote, ‘”already halfway to Heaven”. She started on her greatest hazardous adventure joyfully and she died as she had lived, unafraid – ‘

Joan and Gerald, 1907

I dedicate this blog to my dear friend in Australia, Tas. Over the past six years, corticobasal syndrome (CBS) has been claiming his body, his movement, his speech. And yet his spirit, his humour, his integrity and his enduring delight in friends, family and life itself still blaze. To know him is both an inspiration and a gift I deeply treasure.  

Further details of my exhibition / event on Joan will follow in my next Blog.  

Following Joan… Part Two

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(If you are joining Joan’s story now, you might like to read ‘Following Joan… Part One’ first)

‘Goal reached, Valley of Flowers. Fritillaries nodding their heads around me. Men off.’ 

On 20th June 1939, just over four months after leaving England, 54-year-old Joan and her troop of porters reached the Valley of Flowers in the northern Indian Himalayas. 

It was ‘a morning in a thousand’. Firs and jasmine scented the air, dew drops sparkled & everyone was cheerful & happy. The track wound up and down until it suddenly dropped sheer to the river. At the bottom, the worst native bridge Joan had encountered yet stretched precariously across a particularly turbulent section. ‘If I had met it in the early days I don’t think I could have faced it.’  

Then came a real climb, so steep she had to crawl part of the way. Even with ice axe and climbing boots, she couldn’t stay upright. The path clung to the side of a mountain which plummeted several hundred feet into the raging waters below, the ground crumbly and uncertain. But she pressed on. ‘One is so busy placing feet that one hasn’t time to think of possibilities.’ 

They slid down a precipice, hanging on to rhododendron bushes, crossed another snow field, then climbed again. Ganga Ram & Amba Dath – two of Joan’s three most loyal young guides – clearly thought she was too slow. ‘Each took a hand & ran me up paying no heed if I was on my feet or not. I had to beg for mercy twice as really they nearly finished me off,’ she wrote. And then they were there. The goal reached. The Valley of Flowers.

Tents were pitched exactly where mountaineer and author Frank Smythe had camped for several months in 1937. With three men managing the camp and plans to stay there until October, Joan was free to roam and explore the terrain of her new home in search of alpine flowers. The monsoon rains were gathering. Conditions would soon become unimaginably wet and the ground increasingly treacherous. But Joan was deeply happy.

July 2nd. ‘It was the most glorious evening, every way you looked magnificent, through the gorge range upon range of perfect mountains…’ The descent from these dizzying heights, however, was less glorious. Rains had rotted much of the ground and the final stretch was so steep that she had no choice but to descend on her seat, using the ice axe as a brake. Yet Joan revelled in challenge and beauty alike, undaunted by danger, enchanted by flowers and alive to every shifting shadow. ‘All the way back to camp I had the great joy of watching the last sun on the peaks across the river, orangey pink… the rest of the snow getting white & harder, then that green when they look so severe & unapproachable.‘

That night was lovely but cold. A bright moon rose over the range, catching the snowy summits in the east. Though Joan’s camp lay in darkness, the moonlight made the mountains glow. ‘A fairy world,’ she wrote, ‘beautiful beyond words.’

July 3rd. ‘The men started singing before 5 o’clock this morning, it sounded so nice. The ground has all dried up & things are extremely lovely. If we get spells of two days fine, it will be a great help. Everything is growing very fast.

The following day, Joan was dead.

©Staffordshire History Centre

As abruptly as her life ended, her diary – so alive with wonder – skids to a halt.

Silence.

A telegram or letter from the sub-postmaster in Joshimath informed her family. Joan had slipped, fallen and died instantly. Due to the remote terrain, her body was carried back to camp and preserved in the snow until a magistrate could formally record the death. When her sister, Dossy, requested that Joan be buried in the valley, a small grave was made. A year later a headstone was erected, apparently delivered by Dossy herself.

Except that last bit has been deemed most unlikely by Dossy’s grandchildren who can find no record of their grandmother having made the long, arduous journey to India in the first year of the Second World War.

Without Joan’s detailed voice to explain what happened, conflicting accounts have taken root, a Chinese whisper of history… herstory. Was she reaching for a flower to add to her collection of specimens for Kew Gardens? Did she just slip, the edge of the cliff invisible in dense fog? For several years, I’ve tried to disentangle fact from error and in late July 2024, I and three of Joan’s descendants travelled to Ghanghariya, a colourful, bustling shanty town of damp hotels, pilgrims and donkeys, ready to make the long climb into the Valley of Flowers. The landscape might not reveal the past, but it could not lie.

Ghanghariya

We were warmly welcomed at the impressive Information Centre, honoured guests of the great-great-grandchildren of shepherds, villagers, and guides from Joan’s time each eager to share their version of what had happened to ‘Legge Ma’am’. Soon I had scribbled five different endings to Joan’s life in my little green notebook, the one that would mysteriously vanish a few days later as if to tell me: it didn’t really matter. The only truth that did, was that Joan had not been forgotten.

The next day we set off, once again retracing Joan’s footsteps, traversing the same raging river (via a slightly less terrifying bridge) and climbing the steep slopes into the valley.

Low cloud concealed Joan’s snowy ‘majesties’ and even the valley itself. Flowers, shoulder high, lined the narrow trail until a small hand-painted sign forked it and directed us to the right.

‘Leggy Grave’ could not have been more remote. With the original, broken headstone having been generously replaced by Infinity Outdoor Explorers and the area lovingly tended by villagers, Joan rested, Ophelia-like, among geraniums, potentillas and flowers whose names I don’t know. But she did.

Buried under snow for eight months of the year, this was where my intrepid great-great aunt found peace. A ‘lost daughter of the Himalayas’. And in the prophetic words of the sub-postmaster written over eight decades ago, ‘though death is inevitable, her death in a lonely forest under the tragic circumstances will always be mourned.’

While Joan lives on in the hearts and imaginations of people in northern India – many of whom have trekked miles to pay their respects – back in England, her name, her journey and her collection of flowers had all but vanished into the obscurity of family attics and forgotten archives. She entered my orbit in my twenties, a bright star that inspired independence, courage, a different way to be a woman in the world. I’ve followed her willingly, right to the edge. Imagined her fall… falling… falling… time stretching to infinity like a bungee… then snapping.

A tragic death, or an enviable end to a life well-lived? I’ll let Joan speak for herself.

‘… if we would only give up struggling after worldly things. They don’t count much when you come face to face with what the old Sardou calls the sublimity of the Himalayas whose magnificence, serenity and everlastingness grip one right to the core. You will probably think I am mad, but I don’t think so. There are things that stand and are I think increased, they are love and gratitude.’

Joan, June 1939

Forthcoming Event:

At the end of September, you are warmly invited to an exhibition/series of events showing research and art created in honour of Joan. Exact dates and details to be confirmed, but it will be in the beautiful Chapels of Rest in Stroud Cemetery.

Following Joan… Part One

angela findlay3 Comments

On 17th February 1939, Joan Margaret Legge boarded the T.S.S. Hector at Birkenhead’s Vittoria Docks and set sail for India. Surrounded by a flurry of last-minute flowers, letters and good wishes as well as Leica cameras, rolls of Kodak film and 17 packages from Fortnum & Mason, she began a four-week sea voyage that would deposit her in Mumbai. From there she would travel north by train to the Himalayan hill town of Ranikhet. And so, aged 54, began her greatest adventure.

The year before, Joan had read mountaineer Frank Smythe’s newly published book The Valley of Flowers and was so captivated by his descriptions of the majestic Himalayas that she resolved to go there herself. With the intention of adding to the collection of flower specimens Smythe had collected, she offered her services as a keen albeit amateur botanist to Kew Gardens, who willingly accepted sending her flower presses and detailed instructions on how to collect and preserve flora from the field. 

Some of Joan’s specimens from N. India in 1939, recently digitalised ©Kew Gardens

Her daily diary entries – written in tiny, meticulous script – and a remarkable collection of surviving photographs, now housed at the Stafford Archives, paint vivid scenes of rural life in northern India. As a woman navigating imperial times, Joan observed the stark poverty, the tangled legacy of British rule, and the troubling presence of Christian missionaries amid deeply rooted local faiths. Yet she did so with sensitivity and genuine curiosity, not the arrogance or entitlement so often associated with her era. She taught herself enough Hindustani to converse with those she met along the way, delighting in children, cups of tea, goats with saddle bags and botanical novelties in equal measure.

©Staffordshire History Centre

Several months of acclimatisation treks around Ranikhet gave her time to assemble a team of guides and porters and to test her equipment – tents, a canvas bath, ice axe and other supplies – in preparation for the ultimate trek to her final destination: the remote, high-altitude Bhyundar Valley, nestled just south of the Tibetan border. On May 22nd, they headed north.

31st May, 1939. Arrival at the Kuari Pass: “A very great day in one’s life”

As I have mentioned in earlier blogs, Joan was my great-great aunt on my father’s side. And last July, three other descendants and I retraced her Indian footsteps. Together with local guides who were already familiar with ‘Legge Ma’am’ as they fondly and reverently called her, we made our way to some of the same hills and valleys she once walked, recognising waterfalls, temples, holy trees, bridges and landscapes she had captured in both writing and image.

Like all pilgrimages to places of memory, her story seemed to reassemble itself in the elements around us: the humid air, the scent of pine needles crunching underfoot, the wind and monkeys dancing through the trees, the sheer drops and raging rivers, the saffron-clad pilgrims, and the fleeting glimpses of snow-covered peaks – ‘the Glories’, as Joan called them in her awe – emerging through shifting skies. As the four of us dipped our toes into the trials of that wild and beautiful land, its altitudes, its weather, its unfamiliar rhythms, her quiet courage and unflinching resilience rose steadily in our esteem.

Nilkanta 1939 ©Staffordshire History Centre
Nilkanta 2025

Joan’s story is that of an intrepid 54-year-old woman who displayed the same grit and independence as her more famous contemporaries, such as Gertrude Bell or Evelyn Cobbold. But unlike them, her path was quieter, deeply personal and largely unsung. Her modesty, her self-deprecating wit, and the sense of spiritual joy and serenity captured in her letters and journals only deepen the power of her achievement. The beauty and the tragedy of what came to pass have lifted Joan’s journey into something more than biography. It is a story that asks, gently but insistently, to be remembered. Maybe I am the last in our lineage to feel her so vividly. Maybe I am the one meant to tell it.

Vittoria Dock, Birkenhead 17.02.2025

With that in mind, on 17th February 2025, exactly 86 years after Joan set sail, I stood at Vittoria Docks in Birkenhead to symbolically wave her off. I imagined the Hector gliding down the Mersey, carrying with it not just Joan and her belongings, but the promise of new horizons and adventure. I walked beside the ghost of that ship until it reached the sea, trying to feel what she might have felt… the thrill and anxiety as she watched the landmass she called home and all that was familiar fade from view.

Daily Instagram posts: @ angela_findlay

Since that day, as some of you will know, I’ve been following Joan’s diary in real time, reenacting something she saw or did each day, capturing it through a single square photograph, posting it to Instagram, and translating it into an artistic rendition on a page in one of several dedicated sketchbooks.

Just as she did, I keep a written diary threading her life into my own. These past months have served as a reintroduction to my artistic practice, long abandoned as my brain grappled for a decade with words rather than images to write the story of my German grandfather. The process has involved an exploration of techniques in visual storytelling as I reacquaint myself with paints and brushes, scissors and glue, clay and plaster. Layers of collage stitch tenuous patterns between past and present, India and England, flowers living and long dead.

As today’s world echoes the precariousness of Joan’s, my gaze drifts over flowers and leaves, tracing their delicate lines in quiet wonder, both with my eyes and the tip of my pencil. My studio has stirred to life. And the steady rhythm of commitment and focus have birthed new creative ideas and potential collaborations.

Joan died on 4th July 1939. As that date approaches once again, I’m nearing the end of our shared journey. I will miss her – a courageous companion and inspiration. A daily reminder of a world that predated the horrors of WW2, ecological destruction, plastic waste and the proliferation of smart phones. But Joan’s story didn’t end with her death. And my telling of it doesn’t end in the fourth incomplete sketchbook.   

A personal meditation on the loss of summer

angela findlay11 Comments

I associate the first half of September with painful muscle memories of returning to school for the start of the new academic year. That dreaded countdown to the end of the summer holidays… a slow but intense process of loss. Now it’s the waning warmth and hours of daylight. The demise of peaceful silence as the hum of activity and traffic re-clutter mornings. Leaves, not long ago the fresh green of youth, yellow and fall like aging teeth while flower heads darken and shrivel shedding their petals like hair.  

(As you can see, my mood and thoughts plummet in September! Early September that is. It gets better though, if you care to read on…)

Expanded thoughts stretching lazily into the great outdoors are reined in. Earth’s gravitational pull sucks sap and life forces back into its bosom, simultaneously draining me of mine. I grieve the death of summer. My optimism falters. It requires an act of will to stop my spirits from sinking into a deep, weary sigh.  

Dying… death, the sole inevitable event in each of our lives, yet about which we know so little and only talk reluctantly. 

As if mirroring the fading light and life in nature, death in various guises fell close to home during the last months. The natural passing of a dear, elderly godfather. The sudden, wholly tragic demise of the 14-year-old son of close friends of my sister’s family. Further afield but landing in our days nonetheless, the nameless numbers of violent deaths from conflicts or upturned boats. And in my regular dips into churches and cathedrals while walking the 215-mile Severn Way, I encounter those who have long gone, some preserved in perpetuity in grand tombs, others lost in overgrown cemeteries.

Worcester Cathedral

Still clinging to my scanty summer wardrobe while shivering in stubborn refusal to turn on the heating, everything changes for me as we pass through the portal of the Equinox and turn the corner into autumn. The sense of loss and gradual dying shift into a graceful letting go; an embracing of our interior worlds and the gifts of the encroaching darkness that, like the tide, cannot be stopped. The worst period of mourning is over.

Earlier this week I was privileged to witness a beautiful example of joy and laughter in the wake of loss and grief. It came in the form of a fellow visitor to the Museum of Royal Worcester. Cabinets of china artefacts do not belong to my usual aesthetic, but I was there with my 90-year-old mother for whom they do. In a far room, sitting at a table covered in brushes and bottles of ceramic paints, a woman, maybe in her sixties, sat with her head bent over a bare clay mug impressed with an owl design. I soon learned that she had come here to honour her late parents, with whom she had always lived, in the most profound way she could think of. As lovers of porcelain themselves, they would have been beyond overjoyed to see the cups, bowls, vases and ornaments on display. Now, she was painting an owl mug for each of them, carefully outlining the wings in darker slip and stopping her excited chat to concentrate on the beak or pupils. She shone with the simplicity and profundity of her action. It touched me deeply. She was doing a far better job of overcoming a far greater loss than I had been with my summertime blues.

Then a cool night in my camper van with the visceral thrust of Severn Bores pushed and pulled upstream and over the banks by a full moon boldly rising in defiance of the descending sun. Reminders that the deep in- and out- breaths of the tidal river are part of the larger breaths of the Earth, the Seasons, Nature, Life… and Death.

Reminders that nothing is either lost or dead. That all is well and all will come again. 

A small 3* Severn Bore

Welcome to you, Autumn, with all your outer splendour and inner hope!

Random, chance, God… or what?

angela findlay15 Comments

Zinc Oxide Tape. Waterproofing Wax. Leech socks.

These were the entries listed on the first page of my new notebook. And I ignored all three.

The fourth, written in slightly brighter blue ink read ‘Tanya Vad… Thank you’. I had arrived in India. Dhanyavaad was the most important word I wanted to learn.

This small 11 x 7.5cm notebook would accompany me for the next 18 days, safely tucked away like a baby joey in the blue pouch strapped to my tummy. I would dig it out regularly, flip the turquoise-green cover over the black spiral spine and scribble something, often illegibly, as I walked or rattled round a hairpin bend in our bus dodging landslides. Over the weeks it gathered names, email addresses, dates, details and ideas for my new creative project.

As anybody who has travelled with a purpose knows, the notes you take become an invaluable aide-memoire for when you return home. As you re-enter your everyday, the sharp outlines of a foreign, multicoloured present seal into a soft-focus bubble that drifts away to bob among other memory balloons in skies gone by. Experiences fade and jumble in a cacophony of impressions. Verbal re-tellings omit details as they settle into a condensed narrative designed for low attention spans. Bring out the notebook, however, and you instantly have a co-witness; a means to tangibly touch the past. 

I have boxes of such notebooks. They have helped me write or paint, jolting my memory, filling in gaps. That is why losing this little green one, felt like the end of the world.

It happened a few days before the end of the trip. I mentioned my impending adventure in my previous blog, how I was about to embark on a journey following in the 1939 footsteps of my Great Great Aunt Joan to the Valley of Flowers in Northern India. Our happy, harmonious group consisted of my sister, two female cousins, three or sometimes more local guides plus a driver. We made a dream team and I am telling you about this specific incident because I can’t yet put the bigger whole into words. And because in essence it captures the magic of the entire trip. The many small miracles we experienced and the power of stories.

On this particular day, just as Joan had done 85 years earlier, we were visiting the temple in Badrinath. An atmosphere of noisy celebration, dancing and orange-coloured joy pervaded the streets of this small but hugely important Hindu town located at an elevation of around 3,100 meters in the Garhwal Himalayas. Inaccessible and closed for six months of the year due to extreme weather, it is one of the most visited pilgrim destinations in India attracting 5-mile queues in the summer months as people line up to pay their respects to the 2000-year-old black granite deity of Lord Badrinath housed in the main temple building. 

Being slightly off-season due to the monsoons, we were able to simply kick off our shoes and, bearing wreaths of marigolds, join the gentle flow of pilgrims, many of whom would have travelled for days to be here. Once inside we planted ourselves on some steps to watch people of all ages circling the inner temple, taking (prohibited) selfies and videos and gathering goodie-bags of holy sweets, sultanas and nuts for their families. After some time, we shuffled out again in a bubbling counter stream that spilled onto the temple forecourt, an architectural wonder that miraculously clung to the riverbank while other sections downstream had succumbed to gravity and slipped into the raging, milky-beige waters of the Alaknanda River. 

We retrieved our shoes and stood discussing where to go for lunch. That’s when I noticed it was gone. My pouch was open and empty. An all-too familiar plummeting sensation drained my face and body as a memory surfaced from the depths of 1987, my last visit to India, when my bag containing 3-months of undeveloped film, diaries, recordings not to mention passport, visa, ticket home and money were stolen on a train, never to be seen again. A small wave of panic broke out within our group, scooping strangers into its current. The men in charge of storing shoes searched their patch; sister, cousins and guides dispersed in all directions to scour corners, dustbins and donations boxes both in and outside the temple complex. Our main guide, by now friend, Kiran, took me to a small nearby room stuffed with five uniformed security guards and fifteen or so screens of surveillance footage. We fast forwarded our way through videos following my movements – me feeling both relief that I had refrained from taking a sneaky photo and slight concern that a hidden camera might have caught me ducking behind a wall to remove my leggings. The loss of ‘a little green diary’ was announced over the temple’s Tannoy system, but our efforts were to no avail. 

Thoughts raced through my head as I searched the grainy grey images both for the moment of its disappearance and any possible symbolic significance I could attach to it. Maybe I am not meant to be doing a project on Joan – or Legge Ma’am as she is known in these parts. Maybe this is a sign I should have just experienced the trip and trusted I would remember what is important rather than constantly jotting things down. [This is just how my mind works.] Will this ruin the trip for me, for everyone? How could I have dropped it? Who could have taken it… why would they? Maybe…

Then the phone call came. The little green diary had been found. I restrained myself from hugging the guards in the rush of relief and hope. But for me to fully believe it, I had to see it. 

Our other guide, also now friend, Naresh, had re-entered the complex and gone to the place where people were gathered to listen to the teachings. The door of the temple was firmly locked for the daily offerings – the prasadam – so he made his way to the middle of the crowd and started reciting the beautiful story of Legge Ma’am and why we, her four descendants had come here. He was an excellent story-teller. And that’s when “the magic happened,” he told us afterwards. “It was so strong, so strong that everybody came near to me and started listening to the story. And they were very curious… finally they get to know the importance of this notebook, for all of us and for them as well.” 

A young boy then came forward. He had found the notebook but hadn’t known what to do with it so had put it in the main donation box at the foot of Lord Badrinath in the temple…. which was closed. Naresh called us back into the complex and we waited. We gained fresh red teekas (or bindis) between our eyebrows and more handfuls of sticky white sugar balls and showered the young hero, Shriansh (which fittingly means Part of God) with all the muesli bars we could scramble together from the bottom of our bags.

By now, people were very keen to help, including the priest. When the temple finally re-opened, we were all ushered in. The bright viridian green of the notebook cover could be spotted through the glass walls of the donation box, nestling on a bed of faded rupee notes. So close and yet… Only one man had the authority to open the box. A District Officer (DO) based 200 km away. He was the sole person to hold a key. And he came to Badrinath just once a month. 

That was the point when Naresh, who hadn’t planned on praying that day, asked the deity of Lord Badrinath to help us, just as some of us had already been asking St Anthony, the Christian finder of lost objects. One, or both, stepped in. 

The priest told Naresh to look behind him. There was the DO. Not on his official monthly visit, but by some serendipitous miracle, he had come to pray that day. He willingly fished the key out of his pocket and a little while later, a policewoman handed me my precious notebook. Hugs, tears, smiles and many clasped hands and bows followed… ridiculous really, but we all knew the true value of these spiral-bound pages.

With Shriansh, the finder of the little green notebook

Each one of us will interpret this story differently. For some it might be a random string of events with a lucky outcome. For others it might be evidence of God, a sign that Joan was watching over us, a meant-to-be moment or proof of the power of stories that need to be told. Meaning, just like beauty and truth, is made within. For me personally, the magic of the story lies in the glimpse it gave me of a huge force for good that works behind the scenes we snap with our phones and try to capture in words. Like the evasive Himalayan peaks – or ‘Majesties’ as Joan called them – that briefly appeared in their full glory between parted clouds only to vanish again, this benign power shone through the many eyes that sought contact and connection. It was what I saw in the faces that so readily broke into smiles and laughter; in the hearts that were wide, wide open inviting us to open ours too.  

The ghosts of lost flowers

angela findlay6 Comments

On 4th July, while the minds and eyes of many people in Britain and further afield were firmly focused on Election Day, mine were occupied with my Great Great Aunt who died on this day 85 years ago. In one of those unintentionally magical examples of serendipity, I had managed to secure an appointment at Kew Gardens, London to view some of the fruits of her trekking and gathering in the Himalayas in 1939 just prior to her sudden death.

I introduced Joan Margaret Legge in a recent blog and talked a little on how, while the Second World War was rumbling towards its beginning, she had travelled to the Valley of Flowers, otherwise known as the Bhyundar Valley, in Northern India.

As a keen amateur botanist she had been inspired by the recent discovery of the valley in 1931 by a team of three lost British mountaineers returning from an ascent of Mount Kamet and seeking shelter from inclement weather. One of the climbers, Frank S. Smythe, had been so entranced by the valley that he returned in the monsoons of 1937 to explore and collect examples of its flora. His book, published in 1938, was the inspiration for my great great aunt to set sail in February 1939 and travel up through India to her base camp in the lower hills around Ranikhet. Waiting there for the snows higher up to melt, she spent two months acclimatising, doing practice hikes and organising porters and equipment for the big trek to her destination where she planned to spend the summer gathering seeds and samples for Kew.

Between 22nd May and 20th June she trekked north sleeping in precariously pitched tents with a hardy team of local men carrying provisions. Usually on her feet but sometimes on her bottom, she scrambled and climbed her solitary way through the mountains in a state of sweaty or rain-drenched awe of the ‘Glories’ as she called the soaring peaks that emerged and disappeared in the sky. She took cameras, presses supplied by Kew, wrote diaries and filled collectors’ notebooks with minuscule handwriting describing calyxes and tuberous roots while always scanning the terrain for flowers to press and send to the Herbarium in the hope of filling some of the gaps in Smythe’s earlier, spoiled-by-mould attempts to record what grew there. 

On my first visit to Kew in 2022 I had been told that none of her notebooks or specimens could be located, that they had probably not survived or had been of insufficient quality or significance. It was impossible to search for them… understandably so, the Herbarium houses an incredible seven million specimens!  

The Herbarium at Kew, founded in 1852

When I research I sometimes get this dogged instinct not to accept the first claim of something no longer existing or being lost in the annals of some past archival system and, not quite ready to give up, I renewed my quest to locate them. Following a string of helpful leads, several kind employees at the Herbarium, intrigued by my aunt’s story, joined me in my search. They soon discovered that a collector’s notebook and an as-yet unknown quantity of her specimens had indeed survived and the latter had been recently digitalised as part of a huge project to create a digital catalogue of the contents of Kew’s filing cabinets.

Digitalised specimens of Joan Margaret Legge ©Kew Gardens

And so, on the anniversary of Joan’s death, dodging ballot papers and predictive polls, I immersed myself in the sepia papers of a time and world that no longer exists.

Joan’s Collector’s Notebook, 1939  ©Kew Gardens

Exhumed from their graves and held in place by tiny straps, I was able to connect to Joan through the physical ghosts of the plants she had harvested. Traces of earth still clung to their roots, potent yellow pollen spilled from crumpled and flattened flowers, residual colours blushed petals and leaves as their ethereal beauty gently concertinaed the 85-year stretch of time between Joan’s picking and my viewing into a space in which I could almost touch her. 

Strange to think that these faded blooms had made it back to England while she hadn’t… It was a poignant preamble to an impending trip with my sister and two first cousins, all female descendants of Joan, designed to follow in her footsteps through the monsoon rains and soaring peaks of Uttarakhand, from Ranikhet to Joshimath and Badrinath and on to her isolated grave in the Valley of Flowers. As far as I know, we will be the first members of her family to visit Joan. It will be the realisation of a dying wish of my dear uncle who had long wanted to travel there himself but, unable to fulfil his dream, invited us to go there in his place.

Time marches on, history is made. We have a new prime minister and his government’s actions and inactions will make it into the newspapers and history books. Meanwhile, the silent and unseen reside as untold stories pressed between their pages awaiting discovery.

All images are © copyright of the Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and/or The Herbarium Catalogue, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Published on the Internet http://www.kew.org/herbcat [accessed on 04/07/2024]

 

Oh dear, what’s happening in Germany…? Could this be the result of a lingering attribution of collective guilt to generations that can’t by definition of the word be ‘guilty’?

angela findlay4 Comments

“Sometimes in moral philosophy it’s important to think about plants.” I heard these words in last week’s In Our Time and they chimed with my current shift of focus from war to flowers. They were said by the leading philosopher, Philippa Foot, to a room full of Oxford males. She was basically saying that moral evaluation should be see as a continuum of the way in which we see other living things.

A week earlier, I was sent a link to a video by Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece, whose proposed speech in April at the Palestine Congress in Berlin was stormed by police and banned. [You can have a listen to his reconstruction of it here.] Somehow I found the two were connected.

So what is happening in Germany in relation to Israel’s war on Gaza? Some reports are pretty concerning. It is understandable that Israel’s security and right to exist has long been Germany’s ‘Staatsräson’ (reason of state). However, since the Hamas-instigated horrors of October 7th, the belief in Israel’s right to defend itself has evolved into a fairly uncompromising pro-Israel position that seems to equate any criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies with anti-Semitism. Friends in Germany relate how alarmed people are by the shutting down of debate and silencing of different voices, both painfully reminiscent of the authoritarianism and loss of democracy of Nazi Germany. 

The German government’s unswayable support of Israel in whatever it does is a result of Germany’s past. It is seen as morally the right thing to do. But could nearly eighty years of the world’s media placing Germany and Guilt in the same sentence to explain everything, from its open-arm policy towards refugees to its hesitancy to supply weapons for use against Russia, now be backfiring?

My German mother will be 90 this weekend. She was 11 years old when the Second World War ended and is one of increasingly few Germans who experienced Nazism first hand.

My mother, Jutta, aged 11

In the post-war decades, collective guilt and accusations of complicity in the Nazi atrocities were attributed to the entire German population. Plenty of people consider subsequent generations guilty too, by way of blood / nationality / family association. You might remember my 2018 blog  ‘Shot for what you represent’ with the incident of the English woman who, on hearing I was half-German, picked up her hand off the table, turned her fingers into a gun and shot me in the face! In her eyes, all Germans are unquestionably guilty and “jolly well should feel guilty” too.

This is in stark contrast to many Holocaust survivors such as Sabina Wolanski, who said at the inauguration of Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial in 2005: I do not believe in collective guilt. The children of the killers are not killers. We must never blame them for what the elders did, but we can hold them responsible for what they do with the memory of their elders’ crime. Similarly Viktor Frankl, author of the seminal book “Man’s Search for Meaning”, who in a 1988 speech spoke out against the very concept of ‘collective guilt’ describing it as a continuation of Nazi-ideology.

I believe they are right. I understand how Germans, myself included, might feel shame for being part of a group who allowed genocide to happen. Many also feel a deep sense of responsibility for not allowing it to be forgotten and making sure it doesn’t happen again. But guilt?

Let’s explore the dynamics of this word for a moment. 

Guilt is the result of an action within our control and responsibility. To be guilty, you have to have done (or failed to do) something that falls out of the framework of what is socially acceptable by the group with consequences of harm to an ‘other’. Frequently ‘guilty’ parties will not feel guilt or shame as they see their actions as having been justified, necessary, righteous even, within the context in which they were committed. Resentment and retaliation for being deemed ‘guilty’ can follow.

In Who’s to Blame? Collective Guilt on Trial, Coline Covington describes how Judeo-Christian cultures place particular emphasis on guilt, forgiveness and atonement alongside rituals that are supposed to restore moral order, cleanse the groups of shame and hatred, and prevent or close cycles of vengeance. For a long time, I have believed this was right and Germany’s culture of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung (working through the past) and counter memorials was an example to all of us of how things could (and should?) be done. I am no longer sure that is what’s needed now.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe by Peter Eisenman, Berlin

The problem is, Covington says, that most restorative rituals for peace-building are built on a binary understanding of good and evil, right and wrong, victims and offenders. “The finger of blame is pointed and yet true healing is meant to eradicate blame. This inherent contradiction contains the seeds of failure.” Could it be that we are witnessing this failure in Germany, Israel/Gaza, Russia/ Ukraine and elsewhere, resulting in new perpetrators and victims of atrocity and trauma? 

If so, how do we overcome binaries? I tried a couple of weeks ago in an online group of Jews, non-Jewish Germans, my own Anglo-German mix and others. Someone had been talking about the frightening increase in anti-Semitic acts and some members of the group had dismissed those behind them as ‘idiots’. A common reaction to unacceptable behaviour, and I have said the same many times in relation to certain members of the Tory party! But it got me thinking… because when we proclaim a shocked judgment: “How could they!” How stupid!” “How awful / evil / weak!”, we are basically believing: If I were them, I wouldn’t do what they are doing. We are seeing ourselves as morally superior, stronger, more intelligent and right, while ‘they’ are inferior, guilty, ignorant, wrong. 

Does this dynamic not replicate, in an initially small but precise way, the dynamics behind the Nazi, or indeed any, discriminations and judgments against apparent ‘lesser mortals’?

Do Ho Suh, Karma Juggler, Thread embedded in cotton paper

In this particular constellation, I naturally belonged in the ‘German perpetrator’ rather than the ‘Jewish victim’ category. It’s an uncomfortable place to be, but I have noticed that since finishing my book, the label no longer sticks as well. My grandfather’s shadow that once draped over my identity like a huge cloak has been so comprehensively unpicked, understood, transformed and woven into the fabric of my whole being that I can no longer see people in such binary terms. Like the beautiful art of the Korean artist, Do Ho Suh, whose exhibition Tracing Time I saw on a recent trip to Edinburgh, I can see how we are all threaded together into a colourful tangle of humanity, each one necessary and part of the whole. 

Do Ho Suh: Blueprint (2013), Thread embedded in cotton paper

There were people in the group who suggested I was ‘absolving’ myself and wanting to free myself of the burden of guilt, almost as if this was utterly impossible or prohibited. I do understand that response and how for descendants of survivors, this could feel an affront. But, without diminishing any of the suffering of and compassion for the descendants of survivors, I myself choose to no longer see people in terms of “my side/your side”, as one member put it. I believe that in order to overcome the judgmental binaries of ‘us-good’ and ‘them-bad’, we all need to make a greater effort to understand what lies behind bad or evil deeds. We not only need to step into the other person’s shoes, but into their entire situation. Only then can we recognise that if we were in the totality of their internal and external life, we would act, or would have acted in exactly the same way as them. The results of Milgram’s 1961 experiment with obedience to authority suggested something similar. Apparently good people, like us, can also become capable of extreme bad.

You will all I am sure now know about the horrendous, inhumane conditions of HMP Wandsworth and so many of Britain’s jails, and the decades of glaring failures of our Criminal Justice System in general. (If not, you can get an impression here and here and here) None of us live very far away from a jail, and yet so many of my Art Behind Bars talk audiences say they had “no idea.” Will we too one day be judged and found guilty of the stigmatisation of offenders that enables this shamefully degrading system to exist in our name as a fulfillment of our wish for governments to be ‘tough on crime’? Will we be accused of turning a blind eye, not acting and later claiming ‘we didn’t know’?

I am deliberately being a little provocative to make a point. Because as far as I can see, the only way we have a chance of breaking the catastrophic cycles of blaming and shaming, violence, retribution – all outcomes of seeing each other as ‘other’, separate and different from ourselves – is to create a level playing field of mutual respect where both (or all) sides are treated equally. And it can start within each one of us. In everyday situations. Now.

This is the African concept of ‘Ubuntu’, a philosophy of interconnectedness, sometimes translated as ‘humanity towards others’ or ‘I am because we are’. The most recent definition provided by the African Journal of Social Work (AJSW) describes Ubuntu as: A collection of values and practices that people of Africa or of African origin view as making people authentic human beings. While the nuances of these values and practices vary across different ethnic groups, they all point to one thing – an authentic individual human being is part of a larger and more significant relational, communal, societal, environmental and spiritual world.

According to Charles Eisenstein, author of The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible, aligning ourselves with the truth that ‘if I were in the totality of your circumstances, I wouldn’t do differently from you,’ and the compassion that arises from putting ourselves in another’s shoes and seeing us as one, is “perhaps the most powerful way to magnify our effectiveness as agents of change.” I think I agree.

Further Reading / Listening (as always, not necessarily my opinion)

What’s behind Germany’s support of Israel? – Inside Story Podcast, 10th April 2024

As war in Gaza rages, what’s behind Germany’s support of Israel? – Al Jazeera

Historical Reckoning gone haywire – Susan Neiman, The New York Review

Germany’s crackdown on criticism of Israel betrays European values – Al Jazeera

Germany’s historical guilt haunts opponents of Israeli war in Gaza – France 24

A Clean Break by Tom Holland – A Point of View, BBC Radio 4

A Bonanza of Beauty and Art

angela findlay9 Comments

In a radical departure from my usual darker themes, I’ve got something special for you. (You may find it more rewarding to view April’s blog on my blog site rather than as an email where the layout sometimes gets a little garbled.)

I have just returned from a three-day trip to Amsterdam with my nearly 89-year-old mother. After her stroke in 2016, talking and understanding became difficult, at times impossible. This trip was designed to bypass both and provide delightful experiences in some of the areas of life we both love – art and flowers. The main components would be the Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum and the Keukenhof Tulip Festival. Both exceeded our already high expectations as we were treated to a visual and sensory bonanza. We bathed in beauty, feasted on colour, immersed ourselves in the scents and sounds of sunlit spring…

Sold out within two days of its opening in February, this exhibition presents the largest collection of Vermeer paintings ever – 28 out of the 37 known works. Words feel inadequate to describe the quiet intimacy of these often tiny paintings that offer immaculately observed, snapshot-like glimpses into Dutch domestic interiors where mid-17th century women work, play instruments, read or write.

A strong relationship between internal and external worlds is created through letters and the subject’s gaze turned towards open windows or us, the viewers.

Crisp, almost silhouetted figures against potent negative spaces of ‘white’ wall backdrops; droplets of light falling on the brass studs of a chair or the beads of an earring; sumptuous folds of silk sleeves and curtains… the details are breath-taking.

In complete contrast was the loud exuberance of the 7 million bulbs planted by 50 gardeners for the two month Keukenhof Tulip Festival. The cold weather had meant that daffodils, hyacinths, narcissi, muscari, tulips and cherry blossoms were all blooming in a form of perfect synchrony. A heady mix for which no words are needed… just enjoy!

Back at our beautiful hotel – a rare indulgence – the themes of interiors and flowers continued in a creative meeting of design, texture, pattern and nature…

And then finally to the fields and the lovely words of my trooper of a mother that pretty much sum up the special days for both of us: “I don’t want to leave…”