Colour and Clay
Discover more from Into the Deep Woods
Friends,
Here is the latest instalment of my occasional (but tending ever so slightly towards frequent) newsletter. If it gets any more frequent I may give it a name. What follows are some musings on attention and the artist, a couple of film and book recommendations, new illustrations, and a poem. Hope you like them. If you do, it would be wonderful if you could share. If you don’t then the unsubscribe button is at the foot of this email and I promise you it works.
I hope you’re thriving in this strange, hot, cold, dry, wet summer.
J
Here on the Welsh Borders summer arrived in spring then decided not to hang around. My time on Masquearade has mostly been spent moored up, hiding from the constant rain. It’s been cold. I’ve seen trails of smoke rising from other people’s boats. Never mind, there have been linnets, owlets, ducklings shaperoned up the canal at speed by their panicked mothers, a huge pike lurking in the marina pool, even snakes (I never knew grass snakes could swim!).
I’ve spent most of the past two months experimenting with paint, and particularly with bold colours. I’ve painted cerulean woods, turquoise orchards, tangerine skies. Back in May, when I did a reading at Dartington Arts, I discovered the work of Emily Powell, who had a residency at their gallery. She paints huge, joyful canvasses in Magic Roundabout colours - summer all year round, some of them so huge you could fall into them and never find your way out, and you wouldn’t mind. So I came home thinking about my own work, which has been monotone for a while. On the wall of my study is a big picture I painted 10 years ago, of a mountainous coast with diving seabirds. I painted it on board and used teals and blues in layers, sanded and scraped back. It feels like an old, favourite piece of furniture. The colours are luminous and the picture has become for me one of the few things which I’m not willing to give away. That picture became my starting point for this period of work. I bought lots of boards, cut them up and spent weeks building on the technique. At the end of those weeks I think I’ve managed to move from black and white to indigo and fire orange, a development. The subject matter is the same: wild things, wild places, transformations and negative space. I’ll be showing the new work soon.
I’ve also been spending more time hill walking, particularly on Hergest Ridge, my new big play space. When we moved house a year and a half ago I felt placeless at first, the hills I’d been walking in Wales seemed very far away, replaced by deep woods and little fields, spaces without horizons. I’ve grown to love the woods, but I still need the big skies and the silence of a high hill. So I follow the Offa’s Dyke footpath along Hergest Ridge, looking across the border into Wales, at the Begwns and Black Mountains, the places which wrote Two Lights (places can write books, writers like me are just conduits for them).
Walking can be a form of meditation, if you’re able to shift your attention from jabbering thoughts to the swing of your arms and legs, your feet landing on the ground, the stroke of the wind on your face, the languages of ravens and skylarks. I’m getting better at it. Sitting meditation seems impossible. It’s beyond me to be still for long periods to do anything at all. But I’ve found other ways to be present. Painting is one of them, writing poems another - the kind that begin without intention, where you wait for the sounds and images to come by themselves. I get lost in both.
Shaping clay is a new discovery and, for the moment, the practice I’m finding the best of all for finding that peak of attention, when the mind chatter is quietest. I started to learn to make pots at the beginning of this year and I’m now producing objects I almost like, bowls mostly, the simplicity and antiquity of their forms, the infinite possibilities of their limits. I put a lump of wedged clay onto the wheel and then I’m instantly lost in the making. A four hour session in the studio passes in what seems like minutes. I don’t hear people talking to me. I’m oblivious to the attention-seeking mutterings of smart phones. My heart is literally in my hands.
And then there’s the firing process, the endless variety of textures, tones and colours in glazes. My favourite of the moment is a glaze called Tea Dust which graduates from burnt umber, through cerulean blue, to sun yellow. Mix it with a thin coat of Titanium White and you end up with a finish like the deep space photographs taken from the Hubble telescope. Pottery feels to me now like a practice for life, a way to heal, to pushing the chaos away. I recommend it to everybody.
I’m going to start adding a few recommendations and a section for news to these posts in the future, in the hope that they’re of use to people. If there’s anything you recommend or would like me to cover, do get in touch, your messages are very welcome.
Recommendations
On the theme of mindful practice I watched a wonderful film on YouTube this week: “Moving From Emptiness - The Life and Art of a Zen Dude”, about the US-based calligrapher Alok Hsu Kwang-han. His life and decades-long painting practice are movingly portrayed in the film. Perhaps, like me, embedded in a materialist, production-for-profit obsessed culture, other artists and writers occasionally struggle with the sense that their work is of little use to the community. I feel it strongly sometimes. From now on, when I’m overcome with these thoughts I shall return to this film and remember the healing power of art which comes over hugely and irrevocably. Alok is a true elder, artist, fool and sage.
I’m (re) re-reading The Summer Book by Tove Jansson. I enjoy it more every time I enter her strange and beautiful world. Her prose is light as air and deep as the sea. The characters of Sophia and Grandmother seem to be incarnations of the same person existing in overlapping time - emotional, wise, irascible, tricksterish. The evocation of place in the book is crystalline. I’ve also been watching video footage of the island of Klovharu, where Jansson and her partner spent 30 summers. The tiny cabin perched on the rocks seems to be only just above the waterline and the whole island is like a stone circle in the sea. It is a nesting site for terns and the footage shows them wheeling and diving above the house continually. I can’t think of any place more inspiring.
Writing News
Readings, interviews and events for Two Lights are now complete for the summer, but I have another event coming up in autumn. I’m going to be talking about curlews and some themes in the book at Hay Castle on 27th October (7pm). Mary Colwell will also be speaking.
And finally . . . a new poem.
ENTANGLED
We went looking
for that perfect cobalt sky
veined with quartz
the undulation of hills
like lovers reclined
and found instead the deepened twilight
beneath shifting leaves
slow air at the pace of tides
the low call of a bird
we could not see or name
dawn and dusk entwined across the earth
a blue line graduated
like a fold of cloth painted by Vermeer
and we held hands for a while
not needing to voice this
ripples through the skin
the close weave of thoughts
the loosening
the blur
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