The mobile artist

"A writers trinkets, totems, and tchotchkes are numens that possess a magical aura." Grant Faulkner


There's a way to travel lightly, I know there is because I've seen these rare people gliding through airports with their hand luggage and an air of insouciance on their way to Ibiza or wherever they go to be wildly creative that week, but these people are so not me.
They're not me because I like my things around me that say to me you're here, the things that impart that air of my own creativity to any space where I am.
I like my own tea, in my own tea cup, not the egg cups usually provided to drink teaspoons full of coffee from, I like warm jumpers for when it gets cold and my swimmers to swim in, I like my own painting brush, I like my own journals.
And then of course when I do get where I'm going I like all the things that are there too, funny keep cups from London that say Namaste,  books that are irresistible to buy in British bookshops, and the clothes that suit the climate where you are so much better than the clothes you bought from home.

I don't know why this should be but clothes have a home base. A place they suit and fit, like a glove, and no matter how well you try to plan your packing, your clothes from home will never quite do this as well as the clothes you see seductively blowing in the breeze of enticing new shops you've never been into before.

So when I schlep through airports on my way to somewhere else, (always via the Airport bar as I don't like turbulence in the air or anywhere really, I prefer the ground...) I'm always travelling heavy and I'm never insouciant.  I've got heavy bags of tea cups, paint boxes, warm jumpers and a determination to pare it all back the second I get back into my own sunny garden studio at home....