A Street Three Times
The room of the house that I’ve been working from has two windows, one facing northeast, the other facing northwest. For this reason, it is also the coldest room in the house, a fact which became additionally clear during the intermittently very cold weather we’ve had here in Scotland during the past two months. It is a room of one’s own, but it is also a room of one having very cold hands.
In the five and a half weeks that I’ve lived here the room has witnessed only new two paintings, likely a sign that I’ve perhaps spent too much time scraping ancient paint layers off walls as opposed to putting new paint down on to paper.
The northwest window of the cold room though, it looks out onto excellent things, such as the neighbour’s cats watching birds from behind glass, and trees taller than the houses, and the early cloud sitting down in the valley on most days, and people walking various up and down the pavements with their groceries, or dogs, or children, or deep thoughts.
I already know that I’ll look at the views from these windows thousands and thousands of times, and it felt like an essential piece of early domestic documentation to paint one of those views during February—just in case a tree gets taken down, just in case something slips, just in case.
