However honestly and accurately I try to tell you about my early years, my beginnings – it’s only my perspective, my recollections, my feelings about the flavour of those times.
The people who raised me were itinerant. They could not settle. No matter how hard they tried.
Whatever it was that was driving them on – I’ll never know now.
I never knew anyway. They weren’t given to explaining things to a kid.
That kind of parent/child relationship had yet to evolve.
I was just in the back of the car looking out the window while they bickered in the front.
I saw the natural world floating by – field and forest – the greens, golds, browns and earthy greys – the occasional town coming into focus, then fading from view. Scooting clouds overhead.
Sometimes I saw the sparkling coast, fizzing into the distance, but nothing in the way of detail.
If I saw faces they were fleeting.
Now I come to think of it, these visual impressions have been the bedrock of how I’ve been making pictures ever since. They had seeped into my subconscious and wormed their way out years later.
Now here they are in front of me – wobbly hand made things which exist in their own right.
Solid artifacts I can, hopefully, hang on the wall.
So, I can’t realistically represent what something looks like – copy it or whatever – but that doesn’t interest me anyway.
I have to get deeply engaged in what is almost an abstraction.
Half a thought.
From a half a lifetime ago.
And try to nail it down.
It’s a beautiful struggle. It never makes complete sense. It’s not factual. Yet when I get it right, it’s completely truthful in a way that me writing about my past could never be.
Because even I don’t know the whole story. Never did and thankfully, never will.