SO MANY CHANGES.  It feels like March 2020 was another universe. The night before lockdown I shut down the relatively new studio space I'd worked so hard to get together.  Saying goodbye to the empty room, I turned off the light and stacked art supplies and work in progress in the boot.  

Within a few days at home it became clear that our lovely old cottage was not a feasible place for me to live and work. Nearly fell over myself finishing a painting of The Lonesome Pine, below, in the tiny 8 x 10 workshop…

'So come the storms of winter and then the birds in spring again.  I do not fear time.' 
Sandy Denny | Fairport Convention
 

I don't exactly fear time but I hate losing track of it when life happens so fast there's hardly a chance to breathe. Maybe I should heed Sandy Denny's words and stop counting time. Grab time instead, throttle it, make it stop for a while so I can reflect on extraordinary moments before they fly away. Unlike the birds of spring, some moments never come round again, not the same way. 

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The Bladnoch Altarpiece project just finished a few days ago, and I'm still recovering!  More about that later.  But while organizing files in the aftermath, I found an unposted blog written on the day everything went wrong - isn't that how the expression 'snafu' came into being during WW2 (Situation Normal All F##ked Up)?  Here's my memory of that day and maybe it'll encourage others who are in the thick of it, because we kept going and somehow it all ended well...

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For quite a few years I had my art studio in a building at the Bladnoch Industrial Estate in Bladnoch, near Wigtown in rural South West Scotland. The building was part of the old Bladnoch Creamery that closed in 1989 and was on its way to dereliction before I moved in. I loved it...the vast space, the peeling paint and rusty bits of leftover machinery, the atmosphere of calm disturbed only by occasional sounds of heavy metalwork and imagined echoes of the past. 

Today, the Creamery site is being…