Educations of the Heart

I've always written and only recently allowed myself the luxury of being supported in that over time. I'm in the entry level of an online writing course. Deadline for Week 3 was 8.00pm this evening. One of the warm-up exercises to writing on the topic of 'People and Emotion' produced the description below. The pic is of one of Fanny's fabulous creations, the description is of her raw materials. She takes occasional commissions.

'I first saw the jars in a cellar, gleaming in the cold and dark. Now they line the walls of the room where I slept in adolescence; the same room where my father eked out his last days. Jars of every shape and size, jostle for space with art books, tapestry threads, canvases, mugs full of pens, brushes, hand-tools, photographs, packages of cement and putty, tubes of paint, tubs of dye, postcards, frames, off-cuts of wood, a few roof slates. And mosaics large and small, square, round, half-moons some finished, some not; some brightly coloured and figurative, sunflowers for example, others more abstract and mirrored. My favourite titled ?Educations of the Heart.?

The jars themselves are like jewels scattered in a treasure chest. Every one has a tale to tell. The silver and gold leaf found in a tiny shop full of cats and baskets in an alley in Venice; a tall jar full of sea-glass faded turquoise and white dulled by the sea, interpersed with brilliant shards of azure, slivers of old medicine bottles, whose colour seems only to have deepened with age; the jig-saw shapes of china washed up on the beach - here a flower sprig brown and green, there a hint of blue or pink, the edges worn soft by the tide. All these gems collected by different people at different times, friends and strangers drawn by the romance of found objects, once a teacup or dinner plate, who knows where or when. Commemorated now, made into patterns that somehow invoke and honour the history of each fragment.'