This is your creativity; This is your creativity in cyberspace...

 (Wiki commons)

This is your brain. Note how neat it is, and how each area and its function are identified. This is a nice brain.

 

(Wiki commons) 

This is your brain after five days of doing computer things. Building websites for your work. Endlessly inputting meta tags and other garbage. Indeed, this IS garbage. No, your brain. No, garbage.....

 

This is all by way of explanation for my absence from the blogosphere recently. But today, finally, I finished a sales page that will go live on Monday. Which means that I can get back to painting. Which means that I can get back to writing about painting...or even writing about writing.

ANYTHING EXCEPT ENTERING THE SAME INFORMATION OVER AND OVER AGAIN TO SATISFY THE REQUIREMENTS OF CAFEPRESS. It is deadly; it is the perfect task for George W. Bush. He might have been up to that; he certainly wasn't up to governing the United States. And if he went on endless vacations, as he did, who would care? One would need only to get another smirking chimp to do the input tasks.

But I digress. I never really saw the need for artists' and writers' retreats before. I do now. After a week of cybercrapola, I need to retreat, into a world where meaningful things exist. Birds. Clouds. Movement. Sounds of nature. Sounds of human life. Interaction. At least two brain cells that are working well enough to communicate with each other and possibly create something...a thought, a picture, an object, even a swell dinner from scratch.

I'm cleaning out the garbage tonight. I'm having a change of scene, and I'm not going to waste the rebirth of my creative juices by cooking. We are going to our favorite Devon restaurant, Steps of Tavistock, a place that's so homey*, it could be home. The fact that the woman owner, Suzanne Oldfield, is a former American and her husband, Adrian Oldfield (the chef) is British--thereby offering precisely the same combination as my husband and I do--has nothing to do with it.

What has something to do with it is that it the atmosphere will be both restful and friendly, and the food excellent and well-prepared. The background music is either classical or post-big-band jazz, either of which let one's mind wander in gentle ways. 

Steps restaurant is familiar, indeed, it is almost genetic. Simon's late father, Ronald, went there once or twice a week for a good meal and some company after Simon's mother had died and Ronald had moved into town, diagonally across the street, in fact, from the restaurant. We lived in that flat for a year before we bought a house; great location, great flat. It retained the vibes of Ronald, a gentle man who actually wrote letters to his wife from their cat--in Cockney--when she was in the hospital giving birth to Simon. They used to keep mother and baby for a week back then, even when all was well as it was in her case.

I know what I'm having tonight: Adrian's fantastic green salad, perfectly dressed. The shallow fried crab cakes or maybe the sea bass, with sauteed potatoes. Adrian Oldfield is an artist with those potatoes. They are so perfect, so delicious that I could be perfectly happy with those alone. A bottle of Belle Muraille, a red wine, not expensive, but a favorite of Suzanne Oldfield, and us. And very probably the creme brulee.

See, I told you it was homey. In the perfection of its homey-ness, it is high art. In the perfection and consistency of Adrian's traditional Cordon Bleu British cuisine, there is high art. In Suzanne's running of the front of the house, there is high art. But it is comfortable art, precisely the kind that will salve the misuse of a creative brain so that it can begin again to find some new and interesting things about its own creative world, in my case, painting and writing.

* I must persist in the American usage. The British usage would be homeliness, but in the US that means ugly...and I can't gt past it. Mea culpa.