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The Vacant Lot

If someone interrupts you it’s the height of disrespect, even arrogance. These are a rare few seconds of  deeply personal intimacy.

There are other lulls too. Doing something you enjoy, or with people you like, when you  just withdraw into yourself and feel how right it all is, in this moment. Little time passes; this happens between one second and another, but is most delightful. This is what contentment is…being satisfied by it.

I have two paintings that, for me, depict lulls. One by my pseudo uncle, of their back garden, painted before I was born. It feels like a Sunday afternoon. Greenery, sun, shadows, old buildings, a slight heaviness, and nostalgia now that he and all his peers are gone. Every time I look at it it gives me a feeling of mental space and calm.

(As a total aside, it’s not the Sunday afternoons I remember when I was 6 or 7. Parents would give the two of us a glass of cider, which I presume they thought was non alcoholic, with our Sunday lunch. We then had to wash and wipe up. This became the hardest task of the week, followed by an afternoon of an incomprehensible dose of inertia.)

The other painting (below) is of an empty shirt and dress hanging on a cupboard, with the sun slanting through the window onto a chair, cup and table.  Sunday morning after the night before. No people, no pressure, no oncoming responsibilities, vacant.

The image at the top of the page is a pretty poor likeness of the painting I’m referring to, which is  called ‘This Place , This Day’ by Andrew McNeile Jones 2014