Morocco - a year on.

I heard back from 'Not on the High Street' about my application to sell with them and their response was a big fat no. Charming. One good thing about the fact that I have been doing this for a long time now is that I care slightly less. I literally still get rejected all the time. Almost every time I enter anything in fact, but well, who cares. I have sold things, and I can't not do it, each piece is a piece of me and they can't come out any other way. There is nothing right or wrong about it, love it or hate it, it doesn't matter either way - this is me (cue singing).

I'm happy with that.

Speaking of me, I was finally brave enough to tackle a painting of my trip to Morocco from April last year. Morocco blew my brains away. I climbed Mount Toubkhal, in the snow, at breathless altitude, on borrowed shoes, with blood sugar lows, enormous 'I can see your achilles heel' blisters and filled my shoes with blood. We were hiking through the Atlas Mountains for 6 or 7 days. I got the blisters about 3 hours in. I had elephant sized feet when I got off the plane back onto UK soil and it took two weeks before I could walk without hobbling.

The Atlas Mountains were beautiful, dusty, windy, snowy, cold, hot, red, white, isolated, desolate, culturally different, peaceful, empty, on top of the world, scenic, cloudy, I can touch the moon, bread filled, every day painful, painkiller crazy.

Marrakesh was a dusty, smelly, hot, people filled, busy, patterned, colourful, look at those tiles, pestered, rainy, peppermint tea drenched, loud, traffic, haggling, bustling, sensory overload.

I couldn't get my head around mixing these things together, let alone getting my head around the experience of the trip, the pain of my feet or reducing all these things into a painting. Processing it all has literally taken a year, and here is the first result - a mix of it all. I think I will let the painting speak for itself because I wouldn't even know where to start...