A funny thing came up this morning as I was writing about how, and when I first came to France to live. I went into i-calender and went back into time to look at September, 1972. I realised quickly that I must have arrived around the 12th or so of that month.
But looking at the i-calendar in it's monthly configuration, I noted that it had anchored within it the birthday dates of several friends whom I had only met many, many years later. They are in it from the future, as it were.
Nathalie, whom I met in 2010 was a girl of eleven years that year, and Alan, whom I met about three years later was twenty one, Anthony, from the UK, I met in 2008, turned twenty seven years old that year in 1972! And so it went, etc, etc. For each month of the year, the i-calendar had embedded within it a chrysalis of the friendships I would eventually share with so many different people.
It's totally silly and irrelevant to anything or anyone but myself, of course. But it also allowed me to see into the timeline of my own life through friends whom I would come to know, appreciate, and love alongside of it.
As I continued to peruse the calendar moving quickly up through the years I saw many of my other friends turning and churning through their own lives. W was fourteen in 1973 and I would find out that she had been raped at that age. X turned 20, beautiful; she ran through men like a country auctioneer at a cattle farm. Y was eight and lived in Pakistan in a diplomatic enclave, and dear Z was six years old in the South of England and now has three boys 17, 16 and 13.
And in the same spirit, here is a painting done in landlocked Dieulefit which I painted of the sea several years before I actually began working from the sea here in Australia.
oil on canvas, 150 X 150 cm
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