Surfing at Sixty

A love story out of the mind

During the strange, suspended years of Covid, I began an experiment. I wanted to discover what my life might look like if nobody was watching.

More than that, I wanted to step out of my head and learn to listen to my body. What might happen if I simply allowed myself to be, and waited for something from within to move me?

After years of working as an installation artist, and coming from a background using pastels and oils, at this point in my life I found myself drawn towards the medium of watercolour. I could paint with precision, could reproduce the Mona Lisa on the pavement and captivate a crowd, but this new era of my life I felt my mind had become a prison. I wanted to break free. Watercolour was a choice made around relinquishing control. Like my life, in my art practice I wanted to stop imposing my ideas on the work and allow the medium to lead.

I kept a journal throughout this period, recording the experiences, discoveries and unexpected turns of a life lived in a completely new way. What began as a book called How I Learnt to Surf at 60 gradually became something more expansive. In a way it turned into a love story. Not one, like in my days of youth, where i fell in love with someone else, but this was a story where I finally fell in love with who I really was, deep inside. It is a story of exploration, of finding new ways of being and of discovering what becomes possible when we let go of the life we think we ought to be living.

The watercolour paintings from this period grew as I did and they are intricately laced into the way I was exploring my dreams. Together they form part of my exhibition Liminal, artistically I was exploring the meeting places between separate environments, the land, the ocean, and the sky, and the possibilities that emerge in the spaces between them, but they were informed by the emerging themes of my dreamwork.

The exhibition is on and adjacent page in this website, and six of these works are also available through my online shop.

I am now turning those journals into a book, and I'd like you to join me as I write it.

Rather than disappear for several years and emerge with a finished book, I've decided to open up the process itself. Through Substack, I'll be sharing excerpts from my original journals, revisiting the experiences and gradually shaping them into a story.

I'm inviting a small group of readers to join me as beta readers, following the journey as it develops. You'll have the opportunity to read the emerging chapters, share your responses and become part of the conversation as the book takes shape. In this way I hope to be able to share the intimacy of a new way of being unfolding alongside the vast open expanses of the Atlantic coast.

The original journey may have taken place in Cornwall, but the exploration is still unfolding.