I'm fond of this drum. It's mine, it's big, it's obliging, it's got a great resonant tone, it's a friend ........ and it's where it all began.
Almost exactly a year ago I went to a workshop run by my friends Dawn Russell, Lorraine Grayston, and Leo Rutherford. It was all about the Star Maiden's Circle, and promoted as a practice that would "release your stuck places". I didn't think I was stuck (famous last words), but I was curious. With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight I was just poised in a place of uncomfortable potential, ready and waiting for something to happen.
I'm not sure I entirely understand the Star Maiden's Circle. It's a bit like a cross between shamanism and psychotherapy, I suppose, but you take an issue into it for resolving whilst a practitioner takes you through various aspects of looking. Often, of course, the issue you start off with radically turns itself inside out into something else entirely ........ The one I brought to the process (although when push came to shove I felt I had as many as a pack of playing cards - pick an issue, any issue says she fanning them out in all their numerousness) was the idea that I let everybody down. I don't really want to go into that here, it was all a tag bag of misplaced childhood stuff and sexuality, and, as issues go, it didn't last long at all. Within about 5 minutes I suddenly heard myself say the fateful words:
"I'm not creative."
The practitioner looked at me. Hard and quizzically. Eventually she spoke.
"But you are one of the most creative people I've ever met."
I pondered. At length. Eventually the gleam of an idea winked in and out, a tiny spot of light in the darkness of incomprehension.
"Maybe I'm not being creative in the way I want to be."
On the way home from East Sussex I stopped off at Avebury, and sat amongst huge stones pinkly lit by a spectacular red ball sunset. I thought about homeopathic practice, of patients who seemed to want something for nothing, or needed too much. I thought about illustrations, and paintings, and came to the conclusion that putting colour and form onto a piece of flat oblong canvas wasn't for me. Not any more. At that point there seemed frustratingly to be more questions than answers, but the only thing that was crystal clear was the need not to do "this" any more.
Ideas came somewhere up the M4, in ones and twos as the miles flashed by. They seemed to have an integrity that literally hit me in the solar plexus. Did I dare to fulfil them and to birth the dream they represented?
Walking into the house, I explained to my hubby. Well, actually, explanation is probably too intellectual a word - I think what I really blurted out at about 2 in the morning went thus:
"I want to give up homeopathy and paint drums."
"OK," he said. Bless him. And, within a fortnight, it was all under way.
Here are some of Chris's other drums. Clicking on any of these small graphics will open a new window or tab to show the full beauty and artistry within these creations (warning: large files).
