Mojo

First proper day making at the studio.

I went to the fantastic art shop called Barna Art yesterday on my bike to get some canvases, obsessed with painting and how brilliant I will be at it! They have what I have wanted all along, a smooth surface so I can draw and paint at the same time, they will make up the canvases as you wait. Pablo was really helpful and sincere about surfaces as I apologized for my lack of language.

It's strange being in a city cut off from the crowd. A city that is more about the people than any other place I have been and I, like there is a smoke screen around me, can not intercept them. When I walk Molly people talk at me and I am silent, awkward and it exacerbates my insecurities and my confidence dwindles. In a way its quite, you can be with your own thoughts in a metro full of people, but at the same time you walk around the city full of life, alone.

This week it is finally sinking in that it is going to be sunny every day in Barcelona. And if I don't get something creative done I am going to start feeling like a bit of a looser. Well, it is as if I have to. To regain some of my identity, my mojo, before I sink down into self destructive pity of an aging lady with a double chin, who cant speak Spanish let alone Catalan.

We spent a bit of sunday on the beach, and yes the sky was deep blue and it was funny to be there, and I felt amazed and lucky. But the sky can be blue and the sand can be soft under your belly as you let the warm sun heat goose pricked skin from the cold still water of Mar Bella Beach, but it's meaningless without your mojo.

And the beautiful naked things around you only agitate a rising insecurity and lack of confidence that you could brush off surrounded by the pink bodies of Paignton, but here, with the beautiful people, insecurity disguised as self loathing creeps in like a bad smell so when I go to the studio tuesday I cant do anything.

I don't know what to paint nor have the courage to start, so in strange surroundings of a new studio I listen to a song that sings "I had it all" and I miss my studio, and I scrabble and wrangle and slightly panic and then I do what I know. As Graham said to me a long time ago when I was stuck 'why don't you do a standing figure?' knowing that as soon as the clay was in my hands and a form under way someone would come out, and she has.




mojo also means .... a Cuban sauce or marinade containing garlic, olive oil, and sour oranges.