Watlington Artweeks, 2021

​Congratulations to Watlington Artweeks for a fabulous 2021 event. How lucky the town is to have such a festival of art. The sheer amount of effort and organisation is remarkable. The skill and craft levels of the art are exceptional; there was imagination and decorative ideas wherever you looked. A starry, starry portrait in the High Street was perhaps a high point for me. The event took place throughout the town. St Leonard’s parish church was one focus. Was there anything missing? Well, we live in eventful times. I did miss a sense of enquiry and comment. I look at local children being shown round, many of whom will be priced out of living here when they grow up. I thought of various concerns: the town’s thundering lorry traffic, that rattles everyone’s back teeth. The destruction of the green belt. The 1% pay raise for nurses. The potholes, down which several artists are still missing. The rural over-development. 3000 new homes on the Oxford plain. The ‘concrete councillors’ getting their way. The pandemic. Ye olde brexit, that is now so ‘done’ it no longer warrants a capital letter. The vaccine delivery triumph. Is this - are these - not the stuff of art, as well as vases of petunias? Where is the unease for our current plight? Adjacent to the church, on the nearby green, the ride-on mower scythes through the buttercups, skin-heading the grass to within an inch of its life. If gentle wildflowers can’t flourish by a churchyard, what does that say about us?  For the Artweeks Team then, a spectacular success. For 2022, more of the same, please. And, from the artists, even more effort with perhaps with some added muscularity.