Small Acts of Kindness

Available For Sale

Water colours, 60 x 37 cms.

This piece is from the same time as Exigency, and I talk about what was happening to me at the time there.

It is of my girlfriend of that time, Marina. She was my very first girlfriend, when I was a desperately mad teenager, and we loved each other with that strange pure innocence of the very young and new to love. We got back together again a full 14 years or more later.

At that stage, I was in the midst of what proved to be the worst crash of my life (I mean depression, see the bipolar and Paul page.) OK wrote this a few years ago and it wasn't the worst crash. Sigh. Sigh sigh.

Marina was having troubles of her own, having broken up with her partner and looking after her young son (aged less than a year) by herself, with no family support. She won some massive award at univsersity in 2006 for consistently being in the top two percent of all the campuses (ECU uni, there are lots of them.) I feel pretty good about it. I made her go. Nagging is a poweful tool. Like a shovel. That's a powerful tool. When I was five I proved this by hitting someone over the head with one. Ah, the freedom of mad youth. I think that the despair comes through very clearly in the works from this time. There is a hesitation to my marks making that is not present in my works from other periods. Of course, being down, I didn't take care of things well either, and now this piece has charcoal all over it (fixed and clean as of February 2008.)

This is the shot without it being cropped or the levels being messed with or anything like that. It got red wine spilled on it, which is odd since I don't drink at all (as mentioned elsewhere, I am an alcoholic who hasn't had a drink since 1998 and so on dark and great and fucking horrible as the day I stopped was blah blah and certainly blah.)The red wine soaked into the left corner where the shadow is. The red was almost exactly the same colour as the shadow. Oh the symbolism! Oh break me into pieces and make each one of them a red skittle! Symbolism, natural irony, the glory of how life reflects art onto art!

The piece looks the same, it was not destroyed. It was not damaged. It remains.