Are Your Bells Jingling?

Are your bells jingling? Nah, mine certainly aren't this year. After a couple of Christmases that would make '' A Lion in Winter '' look like a comedy, my tinselly Christmas fairy tiara is tarnished and I'm joining the Scrooge Faction this year, let's here it for ''bah, humbug!''. I also read this week that listening to Christmas music is psychologically damaging, at least I now have an explanation for the fact that I'm bonkers, I obviously listened to George Michael's  ''Last Christmas'' once too often. Sooo, now to some art, 

This is the finished version of my Bremen sketch with the fascinating architecture of the Schnoor Viertel. 

Last week in an online forum the question was raised about personal symbolism and how it made art for buyers more interesting, it also poses the question of how much you want people to know about you and whether talking about your personal symbolism may ruin a painting for someone; their interpretation being something completely different. My love of architecture definitely has more to it than fascination with detail. Houses and historic buildings have a tale to tell, they have seen (and survived) wars, famines, floods and personal dramas, they are testimony to the people who went before. I see the word ''house'' in a Tudor sense, the building and all who lived in it. As someone who has personally been ''uprooted'' often, old buildings are a symbol of roots and perpetuity. A visual tribute to the hands that designed the buildings, built them, loved them, lived in them. One very telling moment for me was while sketching a half-timbered house, I looked up and saw on one of the beams on an upper floor a portrait in profile of two heads, initials and the date 1541, I was gobsmacked. Whether those two people ever  paused to think that nearly 500 years later they would still be there? I would love to talk to the architects of these buildings, did they contemplate about how long their work would survive, how the world around the building would change and move on? 

Questions, questions, wouldn't a time machine be a great thing, indeed this week it was suggested that travelling in time is possible, but only backwards. Fine by me, maybe that old chinwag with Anne Boleyn is not such an impossibility, and how would Henry VIII react to the fact that none of the palaces he built had survived, no perpetuity there. Henry’s legacy was another ........ but let's save that for another day.