I know I haven't been around, I've been finishing up a project for the foundation year programme. We had to choose an artist whose work we can currently see in person. Then we had to prepare 10 objects to represent that artist, in some sort of container that relates to our project in some way. Some people made objects representing the artist's life, others used aspects of the artist's techniques and others focused on theme.

I was looking at Rothko and mainly looked at different aspects of his technique: colour, abstraction/subject matter, brush strokes and layering. I'll share some pictures later on.

[Silly me, wrote this a few days ago and accidentally set it to publish on the 29th of November!!!]

You do need to think outside the box. Love is a rollercoaster. Desire burns just like fire. Where there is life there is hope. And he did say he'd call.

Some things are universal. Many things will be experienced by most of us in the course of a lifetime. And of course, while we will each experience them in our own way, there will some aspects shared by many. Sometimes cliches offer us a touchstone for shared experience. They tell us quickly we have things in common, or flag up things that may lie ahead, from the words of someone who's been there.

All this comes from the experience I'm having in my art course. The tutors keeps wanting to warn and reassure us about the emotional extremes in the year ahead, but they don't want to say 'journey' and they don't want to say 'rollercoaster'. Sometimes they do, apologetically. And it is those clichéd words that keep us going, when one of us is feeling down and untalented and discouraged, we tell ourselves and each other "They did say it would be a rollercoaster" and "This is all part of the journey." And we feel better, because we know that this road has been travelled before, and that people will guide us through the parts that they know well.