Zen and the Art of Ladder Maintenance

I've not had as much time in my studio as I would like recently. Every time the sun shines (and its been a sunny autumn, despite Storm Ashley shaking the walls on Sunday evening) I have to go out the front of the house to be on Ladder Duty. Our very old stone cottage was extended upwards some time in the dim and distant past - no records remain - and two dormer windows were added. Since we bought the house these dormers have been rotting away with remarkable speed. DB spent our first winter watching Youtube videos in his comfies. I thought he was just hibernating, but it turns out he was educating himself with all the skills necessary to renovate the windows. He is doing a wonderful job, and they are gradually being restored to their former dormer glory.

My job is to hold the ladder. All the time. For HOURS. Just stand there, one foot on the bottom rung, two hands on the sides. They don't show you that bit on DIY SOS. Some days I have stood there for seven hours. Yes, yes, I'm perfectly aware that also means DB is heroically balancing at the top of the ladder doing all the hard work, but he gets all the admiration and sense of achievement. I just get cold and bored.

But it's also been a bit of a journey in mindfulness and observation. The first day I stood there I was crippled with tedium. I couldn't look at the sky with the skeins of geese passing, or the brown river ebbing and flowing through the meadow in front of the house, or the squawking jackdaws and rooks making victory flights around the beech trees. All I could look at was the wall in front of me. I shut my eyes and lulled myself into a semi conscious state, just aware enough to leap into action should I feel a wobble on the ladder.

But as the days have gone by I've noticed a shift in my outlook. Instead of just shutting my eyes, I started to look at the wall in front of me....I mean really look. The stones are mostly granite and I believe come from the quarry across the river. I've often used stones in my artwork so I'm used to looking at the details of their surfaces, but I've never looked for quite so long. Oliver Burkeman, in his excellent book 'Four Thousand Weeks', describes a challenge the art historian Jennifer Roberts likes to set for her students - chose a painting and stare at it for three hours. It's a lesson in really really looking, and taking the time to really really look. As an artist, I like to think I do look 'properly' at things. I am working with sea shells at the moment, and I look at them intently, observing the lines and colours, the idiocincracies of each shell, drawing them repeatedly. But my enforced hours of wall staring has reminded me not to get complacent. Look, then look again and again for you will always see something new. The light is always changing, and so the shapes, lines, tones and colours are always changing too. What we do with these observations is then up to us as artists. We may favour realism, or go on to use details in abstraction. We may draw on our emotional response to what we have seen - Picasso said, 'I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them'.

In the meantime, I'm praying for a bit of bad weather so I can get back into the studio and put all of this 'looking' time to good use.