studio afternoon May 7

Beyond the open window, a deliciously warm afternoon, the air filled with bird's cries. I am about to begin setting down  the final layer of graphite on this drawing when the sound of the telephone causes me to start. It is my mother, who is longing to see her family and is finding it difficult to understand why I cannot call upon her and relieve her loneliness. I try to insert a positive note into the conversation and promise to sit in the garden with her and read poetry to her when restrictions have been lifted and it is possible to travel once more. I have this image in my mind to hold on to; the both of us seated in the green garden chairs beneath the spreading boughs of the venerable Bramley apple tree, little birds filling the air with their song, myself, having wrapped a blanket about my mother's knees, reading Christina Rossetti aloud.

the shell

One of the nicest pieces of work that I ever made was a gift to a Professor of English Literature, whom I was dating at the time, many years ago, now. It was a limpet shell, pale, steep sided, scrubbed clean of the echoes of the sea, and of the remains of the flesh of the creature once dwelling within, inside which, in the form of a spiral, I inscribed, in pencil, the words of a love poem by Robert Herrick. The shell, an enchantingly simple, bony tent-like structure, was delicately tinted in shades of ochre, buff and cream, the smooth interior surface accepting the mobile graphite as if it had been designed for just that. I placed the shell, weighted with words of love, in a small box lined with white tissue paper, and could hardly contain my excitement at the prospect of bestowing it.

The relationship is long over; no correspondance has passed between us for at least a decade, but I remember the man, and the shell, and my longing both to give it, and to keep it. It was received, as I recall, in the very spirit in which I had fashioned it. One can ask for no more than that.

cloud verse

"Clouds, that surround us like a ring of white-
Gowned nuns, their vigil gentled by the wind,
Grow taller with each mile so as to hide
The blueness underneath their spreading arms.
Their habits greying with the ageing day."


 The second verse of a poem entitled 'July Journey',
from The Desecration of Trees, by Lotte Kramer.
Published by Hippopotamus Press, Frome, Somerset, 1994.