Andrew Wood's studio

Andrew invited me for lunch today, and I was a few minutes late, which turned out to be a good thing, as he was too! His excuse was much better than mine however, being wholly the fault of others. We spent quote a while in conversation, catching up on each other's lives, even though we did meet briefly last week. Today we had time to elaborate. He prepared a delightful lunch of cheeses, tomatoes, olives and some hot vegetable soup accompanied by fresh bread drizzled with absolutely divine olive oil produced at his former home in Tuscany.

While the soup was heating I watched a rough edit of a short film he has been making about a sculpture he was commissioned to make of Ganesh, which I happened to blip some months ago. Sadly, when it was fired the statue exploded in a thousand bits. So Andrew tried again when he was back in Tuscany this summer visiting his family. A friend recorded him finishing the second attempt while Andrew spoke about his love of India, its religions, his guru Sai Baba, and his experience of living with Parkinson's disease. I was impressed and moved by the film, and hope he can manage to prepare the film with his Italian editor to enable it to be shown on television. That may be very hard in this era of simplistic tv, and it is not an easy 'watch'.

I then took a couple of pictures of the studio space where he is working at painting this huge sculpture, at least four feet high, which is a couple of years old now. The Ganesh sculpture was made again and fired successfully, before being painted in this room, on the same stand, and then delivered to the clients, a very good Indian restaurant in Peckham.

Andrew and I were at school together from the age of fourteen, but have stayed in contact off and on ever since. He only recently returned to Stroud after living in Italy for some years although his heart is still there with his daughter, Violet. I am glad we had time to share together, and I was able to give him a bit of help with his Apple laptop. I expect he will be my blip subject again in due course and not just some of his recent work which is hanging around the studio.