Volcano

This is not a tranquil peach of Lagrasse dancing merrily with it's partner on a plate in a courtyard jostled by high white clouds racing through sunlight. These are not the peaches of the English taste in France. This is Catalan, it is cut, it is bleeding colour. 

This is a country girl living in Barcelona, this is trying to paint, this is an uncomfortable experience. This is not a holiday.

This is a blood red orange of a peach, sliced by a blunt knife, torn, flesh bleeding. This isn’t silent sunny days of village life punctuated by swallows. 

This is squelchy flesh dented through white cloudy bloom, deep purple, thin skin that hides volcanic colours. Like rotten fish when pressed, it’s flesh doesn’t spring back, it leaves a bruise. This peach is from one of the crevices of the cities of Catalonia.

This is punctures and stolen front wheels and growlers and not speaking the language and shit on the front door step. This is people sleeping where the insects can crawl in their hair and the shopping trolley recyclers and the blind staring man and the things I don’t understand. This is alzurian crimson.

This is not knowing what to do with myself, my life, or even just that day. This is a friends slow death. The junky shit. The pain of childlessness and the sometimes pain of being alive. This is not being in my own studio, not having my own space, This is taking too long to get to work, this is jostics, this is arguing neighbors, this is “The Killing”. This is blood life colour.

This is the sound of wet clay being pummelled, the longing for a weekend in the English countryside of lazy buzzing bees and pints of beer, of exchanging the hard piss streets for the smell of fresh green grass under feet, this is opera, this taking the hits, the bruises of life, this is the sound of the trains and the decision not to be a farmer. It is the fact that I am a better painter in my head than on paper, it is fighting a million distractions and having the balls to carry on and the eyes to see and the heart to feel.

This is today, and I only have this day with this peach, this peach is dying, drying before my eyes. 

And when I can say all that in a painting of a peach I will be a painter.