It all starts with shoes

Nordstrums in San Francisco is a fabulous store. I particularly like the café on the top floor where they top up your coffee forever. The sales people are incredibly helpful, there seems to be no end to how hard they will try to find what you want.

That level of service tempts you to go for the impossible, which in Lois’s case is all about shoes. We tried to get a new pair of shoes. I think we ended up with three assistants and about fifty pair of shoes spread out on the floor. Maybe we were lucky to get there on a slow day, but I think that was when it dawned on me that it was all beyond us. If Nordstrums can’t find a shoe to fit Lois then there probably isn’t one anywhere.

There’s little point in trying to explain why her feet are weird, it might make sense to an orthopaedic surgeon - maybe. I should know, I once wrote a chapter in a book about the foot. Feet are quite complex and very three dimensional, almost four dimensional when you consider that they change shape when you stand on them. There are bones and muscles and ligaments all struggling to do their bit. Shoes, on the other hand don’t follow the same rules. Ideally you need a shoe that helps your foot; that holds your foot where it happens to be weak. Lois now has orthotics to go inside her shoes that support her feet and keep them in shape so long as the orthotic stays in the right place. That means the shoe has to work with the orthotic and of course shoes are not designed to do that. No matter how hard all those assistants tried, there just wasn’t a shoe that hat did the job.

We did eventually discover that riding boots work OK, they are reinforced underneath to cope with the stirrups. Back when Lois was younger she just had constant problems with her feet and couldn’t wear fashionable shoes. That meant she didn’t wear fashionable clothes, or make-up or jewellery, and that in turn leaves you out of a lot of conversations as a teenage girl.

Lois ended up being the outsider looking in, observing others but not part of the scene. She became a psychologist. Now she’s an artist, both roles seem to involve a lot of observation and wry comment. That’s what bad feet can do for you.

Well that’s the short version; I think the whole story could be a book.

Living with an artist

It has finally dawned on me that I am living with an artist. I always knew that Lois could paint and draw, but facility is not necessarily art. I think it was Pissarro who warned his son against facility, though it might have been someone else. The point is that if you are good at something then you don't have to work at it. If you don't work at it then you may not really get what it is about.

Compared to me, and to many others I guess, Lois has facility in painting and drawing, but she also finds it hard to work at it. In the last two years she has discovered machine embroidery, what I call fabricollage. Collage with fabrics in other words. Embroidery as we usually know it is all detailed little stitches, careful hand sewing and nimble fingers. Machine embroidery on the other hand is a much more wild adventure.

For a start changing the foot on the sewing machine, or taking it off altogether, modifies the sewing machine. That means you can stitch anything to anything, within reason anyway. If you thing a piece of plastic or a sweet wrapper would look just right for the effect you want, then stitch it on, or glue works, or Bondaweb that you iron on will do. PVA adhesive turns out to be an embroidery material.

This freedom forces experiment. If anything goes, then everything goes, anarchy rules, and it is the final look of the work that determines what is best.

Trying things means that the house is covered with experiments and there is something exciting about living in the middle of art in creation. A writer experiments of course, my computer is full of them, but my experiments are not physical. I don’t trip over them.

It is hard to say exactly what art is, hence the multiplicity of definitions if you look for them. Inspiration is part of it, and seeing things differently and something that Nicholas Serota said about lifting the spirit. The cool thing is that Lois has an idea, sees something differently, and my spirit is lifted. It is an inspiration.