The Happy Place

According to the Urban Dictionary, a “Happy Place” is defined as “The mental state achieved when one wants to avoid the unpleasant or uncomfortable. Everyone's happy place is different, and usually consists of the things that make them joyous.”

The last seven days have been really awful.

In order of occurrence:

1. My middle son broke his finger on his left hand. His right arm is also in plaster from breaking it three weeks ago, so now the poor chap can’t use either limb, although he is soldiering on bravely.

2. Rich is working frightening hours on the day-job, as the next software patch is long overdue, and the customers are getting pissed. They also won’t part with hard cash until the bugs are fixed, causing no small about of worry for me, the trusty company finance director.

3. Rich’s photography was rejected from an agent as not being distinctive enough, and because it is too much like much of the material they have already. He thinks this is a valid criticism, and he also doesn’t know which direction he is going in the future. He has felt the need to change photographic direction for a while now - he’s always said he wouldn’t shoot the fine art nude genre forever. So he’s musing on this, and I am being suitably musey (which is fun!), and no doubt varying experiments and results will appear in due course.

So the week is not so bad so far, huh?

Well, number four came earlier this week.

On Tuesday morning I was approached by my first real local professional model agency, asking me to join them. I was so excited!
And then the twist of fate.

On Tuesday afternoon, my annual MRI results came back. They were not good. My tumour is growing slowly but steadily, wrapping itself insidiously around my brain. It is inoperable, and radiation resistant. When surgeons start to use words like “incurable”, “wait and see”, “containment” and “quality of life” you get a horrible feeling in the pit of your stomach that just won’t go away. The good news is that it can probably be contained long term - they are going to nuke the tissue around the little critter next year some time (long waiting list for gamma knife machine), which should in theory prevent it from expanding further.

Number four has resulted in me being a bit of a basket case for a couple of days, not least because the treatment will herald the end of my modelling, not to mention I will now be forever unemployable. This it has been, shall we say, “a bit of a blow”. However I do feel more positive about this now. After all, I do get to live! Hurrah!

Now you’ll all be pleased to hear that I have no intention of whinging on about cancer endlessly - in fact I didn’t intend to mention it at all, but I thought it might help explain why I have been so, um… “moody” recently (I’m really sorry about that Captain James D).

So, most importantly, how does this affect the photography? Well, Rich wanted to give it up. He was concerned that I would get upset about him photographing gorgeous naked chix when I am “unphotogenic” in the future (no he doesn’t think I’ll be unphotogenic - but I know I’m going to be, for treatment reasons I’m not discussing here, but Melvin knows what I mean).

Well I’m definitely not letting Rich quit his photography. Oh no siree. Quitting is not an option.

Photography is our happy place. It makes us feel better inside, gives us the warm fuzzies.

Art is in our blood now. We can’t go back.


"What separates artists from ex-artists is that those who challenge their fears continue; those who don’t, quit.”

Art and Fear, page 14.




This is model and artist Clayre McKinnen from last week’s shoot