Still connected in the seven teens

Over the weekend I wanted to finish off a painting that was important for me. It’s one that was almost done in a way but I was fine tuning it to get the best out of it. Until it was done, I wasn’t going to rest. My man was happily involved with photo editing some photographs of his own sitting a couple of feet away from me with his laptop. We were companionable in our artistic endeavours, in the same room but in different artistic spheres. There wasn’t much we needed to say to each other, other than the odd comment regarding cups of tea or something to eat…

And for some reason, that I know was connected with the artwork I was working on, I wanted to hear some tunes from my teenage years. The stuff that I would have played a lot when I was fifteen, or sixteen, seventeen even. I knew it was going to help me to paint better, to hear it. Which is weird, because I am a better artist that I was then as I have far more technical knowledge and ability, its just that then I painted what made me happy that usually was off beat and quirky. Maybe I was channelling into that teenage self when I suggested listening to a particular album. Its odd, because I don’t often listen to whole albums much now, I will listen to the radio most days, and am up todate reasonably with contemporary music and like most genres of music. But on this occasion, I wanted the past, a big part of my past…

So, started with Bad Company “Run With The Pack” going on to the better known “Sharp Shooter” and after that wanted to hear Elton Johns “Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy” and “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” and yes, the specific music that defined the whole of the seventies it seemed… “Tubular Bells” that I hadn’t listened to for years and years and years, and wow, how familiar it WAS to hear it again!

So happy to hear all those albums, in the order that they would have been played as a vinyl record. None of this jumping around with odd tracks, but listened to as a proper album….

And what a difference it made to the painting. I just painted, lost in the music, and letting it flow over me until it was too dark to paint by natural light, which is the way I prefer to paint…

And as I put my paints away and washed my brushes, my man commented on how much he had also enjoyed listening to Tubular Bells again…! Yeh, that made two of us. Weird isn’t it, how we are hard wired to our seventeens and the music that was important to us then, leaving such a lasting impression.