Everyone Has Gone Away. Except Me, I Am Still Here.

www.antoniarolls.co.uk for my website
www.jesusonthetube.co.uk for my other website
www.agracefuldeath.blogspot.com   for the A Graceful Death exhibition, paintings from the end of life

Nobody Here But Us Chickens.

Everyone, I tell you, has gone away.  Here is where they have gone to.

• Alan has gone to Germany.  He is visiting an old friend who's wife is recovering from serious illness.  She, in her own fashion, has gone away.  She has gone to Hospital.
• Alexia, Blonde and Fearsome Daughter, is not quite gone yet, but she is going to go to America.  This is serious, because America may need a few days to prepare.  Part of my concern that America may need to take it easy a bit before she goes is because she is taking with her
• My Mother.  She too is going to America.  Alexia and Mother are are very unforgettable on their own, but together they are lethal, and I expect the USA Customs and USA Officials In General are having a few extra Psychological Toughening Up lessons to prepare themselves. 
• My sweet and musical cousin from Detroit who is staying with us for a while, has gone to Brighton with a Boyfriend.  She will not be back until Further Notice.  Fair enough. 
• Arty Man Who Is A Singing Guitar Man Too and his Ginger Best Friend (his girlfriend) have gone to work or to somewhere else, it certainly isn't here.
• 13 Year Old Son has gone back to bed (he has had his lunch, high spot of the day over)
• The Muppet has gone away from this room half an hour ago because the conversation was not very interesting.  He has technically Gone Away, as he is no longer In This Room.

And Me?  I am still here.  I like it here.  I am on my sofa in my own sitting room which is Mine All Mine.  I have arranged and coloured it to be my room and there is no radio or telly in here so that we can do things like Talking, Playing the Piano, Reading and Playing Scrabble.  And then Alan got me a laptop for my birthday so I come in here and Laptop Around.  The colours in this room are a wonderful inspiring yet calming combination of salmon pink, coral pink, deep red, deep pink and warm browns.  There are two sofas with plenty of twinkly, brightly coloured cushions and blankets ready to wrap up in, and since my birthday, a wonderful spirally hanging feature of shiny, sparkling butterflies.  I have too, a magnificent old Grandfather clock that ticks and chimes and carries on in its clocky kind of way, and has done so since about 1750.  Magic.

So here I sit.  Wrapped up on the sofa in a pink and white spotty blanket, the rain banging on the windows outside and my tea tray beside me.  Here I can ponder on everyone Going Away and am tempted to say Don't Hurry Back On My Account.  A couple of days like this, and I will be grounded and sorted and full of passion again.  Everyone going away has helped me to start painting again.  I love to have a whole day, or more, to be empty of Housework, Kids, Appointments and Stuff, in the studio, to start early in the morning knowing that there is no limit at all on my time in there.  I have nearly finished a portrait of a wonderful old man who is going to join the A Graceful Death exhibition in Dublin in October, and I have started the large Final Steve Painting for A Graceful Death.  It is of me as a survivor.  Coming through the grief, and out the other side.  It is meant to be the graceful finish of the Steve story for the exhibition, which will then concentrate on other stories and people that wish to be included.  Hence the beautiful old man I am painting at the request of his granddaughter, he will be a welcome addition

The high spot of the day, you all say?  What was it, do tell....Well, I went into Bognor in the rain with my paint splattered flip flops and Studio Coat, and spent £80 on big new tubes of oil paint.  Big new squeezy tubes of bright orange, yellow, orangy-yellow, paynes grey and more.  I sit here all alone in my Special Sitting Room and know that once the mood takes me, I will shoot over to the studio and do a frenzied self portrait in Orange and Yellow.  And because everyone has Gone Away, no one will be there to put the brakes on, and I may end up rolling around in paint and doing strange Orange and Yellow Things and calling them Art.  I may just do that anyway.  Time to go a bit dippy, since no one is here to see.  Hooray.