FEBRUARY

We have all arrived into the year of the Rooster and must now cluck, scratch and occasionally with gusto cock-a-doodle-do our way through 2017. After a very average beginning to the new year which involved our house being broken into and ransacked, a wild guinea pig invasion of our garden, a small earthquake, assorted stress from the excitable emotional roller coaster of the Latino world I often inhabit and watching via media the ever increasing fear, greed and stupidity hemorrhaging from the battered body of geopolitics. I am now ready for positive news.  What this year brings I have no idea but a Chinese horoscope told me that on 26th October 2017 I shall receive a windfall and I should place a green trinket near the eastern side of my home or was that a red vase on the western side?  I best sort that out as luck seems required on a number of levels. 

I do know that my artwork and travel plans for this year are as complex as ever and if everything I hope to do is actually achieved that will please me enormously. 
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One project confirmed for November and December will see me planted at the Nordisk Kunstnarsenter Dale (www.nkdale.no) A residency on the east coast of Norway. Rather remote but I seem to be happy and can easily operate from peripheral zones most of the time. I imagine the views obtained from such a faraway place will be wide, clean, cold, quiet and totally jam packed full of zero distractions. Sounds like an ideal studio.

As mentioned above the dangers of being in Argentina are numerous - including over-consumption of meat and red wine, wild Zonda winds, cactus spikes and other unmentionable, unfathomable, unusual phenomenon.  Therefore it is time to move. The route mapped out for the next few months includes Sydney, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Thailand and Melbourne.

Such a schedule makes me a little dizzy but if I stay still in one location for longer that a few months I feel another form of dizziness. More like a still-sickness where itchy feet and wanderlust begin to grate upon both my body and my mind. This ache for distant locations is the opposite of homesickness and the Germans have a precise word to cover this feeling – Fernweh.                                                                  

​I best pack my bags.  ​