Wild patience - some thoughts about fishwives

Now that crazy month is over I can get back to you with the 2nd fishwife painting as promised! It's called 'To Market'.

(not a great photo it's a bit glary.)

Here are some of the things I've been thinking about while I've been working on these paintings.

These days I suppose fishwife is used to describe a woman who is common, unsophisticated, with a loud raucous voice. If I've had a bad day of yelling at the kids I might note in my journal that I've been a bit of a fishwife!!

I grew up in the north of England, at school we learnt songs about fishermen battling the stormy seas - one that goes 'it was windy old weather...', and a hymn I think that goes 'the fishers watch when night comes down...' The women in these kind of songs - if mentionned at all - are passive, waiting. (I'm amazed I could track these songs down on the basis of one half remembered line!)

In reality they didn't sit around twiddling their thumbs, they would have helped mend the nets, take the fish to market, manage the money, make sure there was food on the table.

There's a great line in an Adrienne Rich poem - 'A wild patience has brought me this far' (Integrity)
I had always thought of this as a contradiction, wild and patience being opposites. Now I've started to think about how patience could be something fierce, full of determination. I think it says a lot about how women's lives have been.

While I was wandering around the web looking for images of fishwives and wondering what their market cries might be, I came across this blog by Kate Davies a crafter in Scotland who's doing lovely work inspired by fishwives!!

Here's the 3rd painting I managed to do for the Fish exhibition called the fishwife's cat.

If you're in Darwin, the fish exhibition is open at Tactile gallery (Territory Craft) until 20th October.
The minatures exhibition 'The goddesses of small things' is still on at DVAA until 13th October.

Best wishes to all, I hope to be around and about on the web a bit more this month!!

A Few Things Poetical...

On my wanderings around the internet I came across Big Tent Poetry, a poetry site that posts a prompt on Monday, then you can post your poem inspired by the prompt on Friday and over the weekend.
This week's prompt was a wordle (I'd never heard of this - it's a group of words) you could include one or as many of the words as you like in your poem - I think I managed to use about half:-

Skatepark

Not exactly fearless
but determined,
gripping the handle bars
poised at the lip of the ramp
alert to other riders
timing his launch
into the flow.

His scooter is
an aluminium blade
slicing the air, down the ramp
across the flat, left foot pumping hard
to make it up the slope
get air, rotate 180
maybe.

And repeat
until his shirt
is drenched with sweat
and the sky is darkening
storm clouds banking up
and we run
at the first drops.


For xmas I treated myself to a book of poetry by Adrienne Rich with essays and criticism. I think I'll be dipping into it all year, there's so much to get my teeth into! I was attracted to some of her poems I read in anthologies. I've been trying to work out what it is that hooked me, and I think it's the imagery, the way she describes things is striking and beautiful, also the feeling that there's a lot more going on in her poems, they're full of emotion which made me curious about the underlying themes or meanings - the essays are really helping with unravelling these. About being a woman, and a woman in relation to a man/men, and being a creative woman. I'll point you to - Storm Warnings, The Roof Walker, Diving Into the Wreck and Integrity, as a taster!! I think I'll be back to talk about these more another time!!...


The paintings in this post are the ones I did a week ago. Yesterday I did some monoprints which you can see on my flickr page, I also finished carving a wood-cut that's been on the go since September...hopefully I'll print that next week.

I hope you've had a productive week.
Best wishes xx