Who am I? What am I doing?

As I begin to leave behind and emerge from my battle with my leukaemia I start to enquire into the state I find myself in and how my journey will unfold. I feel that a 'new normal' is starting up, and as far as my art is concerned I have already posted one possible path. I know I have already sensed other changes, e.g. How I think........What I think......How I see myself (although others may detect little or no physical difference)......How I relate to other people......Things I value.......etc,.......etc. These are all internal, self-analytical, and at the moment have uncertainty and little clarity about them. They are as seeds about to germinate. Some will grow. However, I seem to have lost confidence in myself, something I have only just become aware of, but being aware of it I can work on regaining it, and I feel I am beginning to win this latest battle.

There will be connections with aspects of myself which have gone before. There is an inevitability that particular periods, philosophies, events and people will automatically power through into the future, but which if any of the recent Bob Fowles will survive. Here are a few images of how I have been seen by others and how I have seen myself which I anticipate will not recur. Some portraits, some self-portraits, and not in chronological order:

My journey into a new and unchartered future has been supported by my meeting with fellow cancer patients who have been through extremely challenging and painful experiences but who now express a joy for life and so have become role models for me. I recalled the significance of this in a recent posting. Also through Leukaemia Care and MacMillan web sites I have read numerous case studies, written by the patients themselves, expressing such an optimism for their future and how such a transformation has taken place. 

And now for an extraordinary coincidence ........................ After having written the opening text for this posting and having located and copied and pasted the portrait and self-portrait images, I took a break and went into Pinterest, and up popped an image or two of Tracy Emin's work together with an interview she did for the Financial Times. I never regarded her unmade bed as art (just as that controversial pile of bricks at The Tate Gallery known as The Bricks is not art, but then Duchamp's Urinal became an acclaimed work of art) but that aside she has shown amazing bravery, resilience and determination to live, and is therefor a most significant role model for me, particularly as her cancer and associated surgery appear far more severe than anything I have experienced. But there are parallels.

In July 2023 when diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukaemia I was given nine months, told it was a surprise I was still alive and disbelief I was actually managing to do things. I am now 'up and running' as talked about in my last two postings. Here is the extract from Tracy Emin's interview: 

 In spring 2020 Emin was diagnosed with squamous cell bladder cancer, a particularly aggressive strand of the disease that led to surgery in which she had her bladder, her urethra, her lymph nodes, her womb and half her vagina removed. At the time, interviews she gave suggested she would struggle to get past Christmas. So – how is she? “I wrote a list of things earlier,” she confides in her sing-song voice, her Kent vowels still strong despite first leaving her native Margate more than 40 years ago; she’s calling from her home there now. “My list of really positive things was: ‘I am here. I am alive.’” Emin has been given the all-clear. “I just had my big check-up last week with my surgeon, and it’s amazing – I don’t have to go back now for six months. So I’m moving fast away from cancer, I’m shifting.” But she is still prone to huge waves of fatigue. “It’s almost like I’ve had a sabbatical,” she says of her period of illness. “Time to sit back and think: what is it all about? Why am I an artist? What am I doing? What’s it for? And… I’ve suddenly worked out what it’s for! I know what I’m doing. I want my art to make people’s lives better.” “I had the confidence to change my life. Because you just accept the status quo – you just go, ‘This is my life, I’ve got to get on with it.’ Well, actually, if you’re in a position to change it, you should. Because there’s a hell of a lot of people out there that can’t!”