Kate Bush shares Christmas message to fans: “A Monet Christmas to all!”

nme.com:

Kate Bush has wished her fans a merry Christmas in a new message, in which she touches on war, developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and what she learned from seeing Monet’s paintings.In the lengthy message, she thanks fans for the support for her new short film, Little Shrew, a black-and-white animation she wrote and directed in aid of War Child. “Little Shrew will be getting a bowl of especially delicious earthworms this Christmas morning,” she said.Bush also mused upon the current fraught political situation across the world but noted that she wanted her Christmas message to be one of positivity.“It’s been another year of exceptionally dark news.

It just keeps getting worse, doesn’t it?” she wrote.“The wars keep raging. We helplessly stand and watch as those poor people are caught up in the horrors of it all and of course there are the children…“It’s hard not to focus on the worry we all feel about these conflicts and the massive changes that are happening around us, but I’d like to try to find something positive to say for this Christmas message:”Bush said that Christmas Eve was one of her favourite days of the year. “When I was a child, it used to have a special feeling,” she explained. “It even had a sort of Christmas Eve smell… a mixture of smoking coal fires and damp leaves, all bundled up in a drizzly English frozen fog.

If I really work on it, I can still summon it up on the day. I’m working on it now…”She recalled seeing a new exhibition on Monet’s paintings and relating the French artist’s perception of industrialisation to modern anxieties around AI.“Is that us?

Standing in awe at the dawn of AI, the symbol of modernity, as smog was for Monet at that time in the newly industrial London?