Thursday 25 February 2010

Wonderful First Night

www.antoniarolls.blogspot.com for an account of being an Artist and Mother in Bognor Regis
www.antoniarolls.co.uk for my website
antonia.rolls1@btinternte.com to email me

A Wonderful First Night. Very Moving and Different This Time

Yesterday the Exhibition opened. It was a good team effort at Clarissa's huge Wiimbledon House to get the exhibition space prepared, and then the paintings hung. For a more lightheated account of the day and evening go to www.antoniarolls.blogspot.com .

This exhibition really talks to people. I am so sure that most of us carry around really profound experiences, that the death of someone close to us is something we all know about. And we just carry on, eventually, and the experience takes its place with all the other life experiences, and get on with things. But it changes us. There is a Before and an After. So many people who come to the exhibition come with stories that make me so respectful of the human spirit. I have lost Steve. OK. I painted him I wrote about him but I lost one person. I met a lady yesterday who had lost her husband and two of her four children. How does one live then? This lady was asking me about my story with such grace and wisdom that I wonder at her calm.

I am more than ever convinced that there is a need for this kind of exhibition. I don't know where it will go after Birmingham, I don't know who will host it next, but I know someone will. It is a very necessary experience, to open the way for us to talk about death, dying and how we will die. The exhibition is not depressing. Feedback is that it is not miserable, it is difficult and moving and weighty. But hopeful. It is hopeful. It deals with dying, death, loss, illness and hope, life, creativity and love.

The exhibition is open now till Sunday. Come and see it, it really is an experience.

A GRACEFUL DEATH
127 WORPLE ROAD SW20
WED 24 FEB - SUN 28 FEB FROM 10am - 5pm DAILY
CLOSING EVENING CELEBRATION
SUN 28 FEB 6 -9
You are warmly invited to the closing evening celebration too.

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