Jun 1 2011

Spring Fling, Dumfries and Galloway

I am jealous but have no reason to be. Again. Several years ago I did a joint degree in Creative writing and English. Some of my fellow students have now had novels published and I am bitter and jealous despite not having even attempted to write a novel.

And now I am looking around artist’s studios and inwardly screaming with bitter envy and resentment despite the fact I got a D in GCSE Art and my last attempt at drawing made my sleeping baby look like a mutant potato with a face like when people send photos to Take A Break magazine of a crisp which looks a bit like Cheryl Cole.

We are at the Spring Fling in Dumfries and Galloway – an annual event when artists open their studios and houses to showcase their work and people come to talk about the creative process with fellow artists, buy original art or stare balefully at boho kitchens with handmade tiles then remember to look at the actual art, decide they can actually do better or at least as good, then realise that drawing a tree is actually fucking hard.

I suspect that is not the purpose of the Spring Fling.

I suspect I am a shallow monster who true Art shuns.

I am already envious of people who live in Dumfries and Galloway-an understated Nirvana, which makes Devon resemble Hackney. It is so unspoilt and empty that all signposts point to each other due to the winding intermingling roads and small farms are highlighted on the atlas.  And it is absolutely beautiful. There are mountains, forests, lochs, sea and moor, standing stones, beaches, crofts and places where you can buy feta stuffed olives.

Anyway, the Spring Fling. An enchanted place becomes even more annoyingly enchanted because of the realisation that artists live there, millions of artists who all know each other and have a jolly bohemian time together without you unlike in Devon say where ‘artists’ reside in houses that cost half a million pounds and you know you could never afford to be their friend.

Then again these artists are not struggling. I want them to be, it’s so romantic but then I clock their Aga. Although to be fair some of the artists have studios in purpose built blocks so hopefully they live in desperate garrets where you only have a glimpse of the sea and their oven is a cheap white Beko.

The art itself is diverse veering between spectacular and ‘how the hell can they pretend that’s art?’ Looking at art and then seeing its cost makes you look at it in a purely financial sense-a painting you would admire in a gallery has you peeping at the label and then comparing it against another piece of art as you flit between picturesque studios as you fly down narrow winding roads following haphazard signage, as you chitchat politely and snaffle free cake and envy and admire and peep.

I saw amazing things. I saw Jacobs Ladder in mosaic, I saw vases featuring guns, I saw oil paintings of empty assembly halls, and I saw wicker mermaids and pearl necklaces. Self-portraits of moody tattooed men and watercolours of pretty churches, cows and fields. In a cottage in the middle of nowhere, a precocious child showed me her mother’s studio and made me a free badge. I saw luminescent self-portraits and bad abstracts, studies of the sea, pretty watercolours and angry splatters. Clay, pearls and wool. And I saw and I envied and I admired.

And as those who can’t do, teach, I wrote about it.