Hi and welcome to Art Juice. This is honest, generous and humorous conversations to feed your

creative soul and get you thinking with me, Louise Fletcher. And me, Alice Sheridan. I just was about

to say with me, Alice Sheridan. I know, but I thought it. That's so weird because I thought it. And then you said

Louise Fletcher and I thought, no, that's wrong. Oh, hang on. That's right. Maybe so we're like mind

melding. We've been doing this so long. It's the Spock mind melt. So this week, we thought we'd have a chat about, well, basically the world going to hell in a handbasket.

Because wherever you live in the world, it does feel like that.

Post-COVID, it almost feels like nothing ever got back to normal anywhere.

And we've got wars and we've got politicians telling us how hard life's

going to be. That's if you live in the UK. And we've got price rises and we've got all sorts. And

in America, we've got some people who are very happy about what's happening, some people who are

devastated. And the whole thing is just crazy. And we've both had in our groups a lot of people are

a lot of conversation or comments about what it means to be creative in this well alice is shaking

ahead so i'll say i've had lots of conversations in my groups about people asking, what does it

mean to be an artist when everything's happening like this? What, and wherever you are in the

world, you know, when things feel crazy, if I'm unhappy with what's happening, if I'm struggling

financially, if other people are struggling financially,

if I worry about people in war zones and I can't do anything about it, how can I then be in my

studio painting? Or I just can't focus. I'm too worried. Lots of people get really worried about

other people or they're reading the news a lot and they get really worried. So it's kind of a general sense of this approach to what's happening when things get, what, how we handle when things get bad that we thought might be interesting to talk about. Yeah.

I mean, personally, quite a few years ago, I decided to stop watching the news.

Hang on, before, before we go into this, I think we should preface this,

we're saying that this is not going to be a political conversation. Mm-hmm.

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