I used to do a lot of life drawing, and liked to do quick sketches- I have a good line and an ability to capture, quickly, the essence of the model. When I was faced with a three-hour pose which needed analysis rather than instinctive treatment I tended to get lost, bogged down in unnecessary detail. I was lucky enough to be taught by the artist Mario Dubski at the Royal College of Art. He said, when criticizing my drawings, that there were some good elements, but it was not sustained. His words have echoed in my memory and I have applied them to many other things in my life, which has contained an enormous amount of experience gathered in many disparate fields. I readily admit being a dilettante.
In the mysterious meanderings which make up our life we seem to arrive where we belong eventually, although it never seems so during the journey.
Here at the hotel I meet people for two days mostly- some leave after a day and I never have any personal knowledge of them, apart from a brief ‘good morning, I hope you slept well’ (although that is actually a very loaded question for a hotelier which I tend to avoid, just in case they didn’t sleep well, and it had something to do with the hotel).
People pass by and often I spend some very pleasurable time with them, getting to know people very briefly, but not necessarily only superficially. I sometimes see one deep slice of them, but only one aspect, what can be gleaned from a few intense conversations. They seem to me like my life drawing encounters. My relationship with them is fleeting and not sustained. And it seems that this is what I have instinctively chosen, although I never knew it when I chose to become a hotelier…

Above to the right is Joel, an Israeli physicist who is on holiday in Mali with his wife Anat, a linguist. To the left of Anat you see the Swiss photographer Ralph. We had two lovely days together full of interesting discussions about EVERYTHING intermixed with a great deal of laughter. Joel told me that colours are light waves, and we perceive them as different colours because of the frequency of the waves- some are closer waves and some are longer. The sky for instance is blue because of this, (although I can’t quite remember whether the waves are long or short-) but of course you know all of this already. I asked if my new bogolan pattern could be used as an illustration of this light and colour phenomenon. He said it was perfect.