Woods, rivers, moors

Glade, Isabella Plantation, Richmond Park. 2021

Here’s 21 paintings roughly stretching from early autumn to the current winter, including four haunted ancient yews from Druid’s Grove in the Mole Valley near Leatherhead, the heavily wooded enchantments of the North Teign River on the edge of Dartmoor, views from Dorset’s Spreadeagle Hill and Melbury Abbas, the South Downs from the slopes above the easy-to-misspell Fulking near Devil’s Dyke, plus colour meditations in Richmond Park’s Isabella Plantation, and the Pen Ponds, a Highlands vista and a couple of wild and windy Dartmoorland images. A number of these have already sold, but if a painting piques your interest, please drop us a line….

Rivers and Hollows

A gallery record of the paintings done between last winter and this autumn in and around the Thames at Richmond, Ham and Kingston; the hollows of Ham Wood – beautiful small winter woodland pools for the local protected population of toads and other brilliant life forms, though thy tend to dry out through spring and summer – and the Pen Ponds and Isabella Plantations of Richmond Park.

Ham Woods are one of this country’s oldest parcels of common land; it was common land in the Domesday book, and it’s common land now, crossed with a maze of footpaths, and the kind of woodland where you find an oak climbing out of a yew, twin trunks raised up like antlers or arms, and the finest ornamentation of ivy growth on thick bark. There’s a suntrap of a glade too, and hideaways and tree houses made from the woodland store of fallen timber.

The Thames, flowing wide and slow through south west London, is at its finest, turning from salt water to sweet at the Teddington lock, and with the view over Petersham from Richmond Hill protected by Parliament. As is the view from King Henry’s mound, a Bronze-Age barrow near Petersham Lodge, to the City and St Paul’s Cathedral.

Winter, woods and water

Through the winter lockdown, I’ve taken to local walks by the River Thames, and into the local woods at Ham, common land that is some of the oldest surviving in England. Ham Woods is one of the loveliest and quietest nature reserves you can imagine within greater London. Quieter than neighbouring Richmond Park, there’s something of an eldrich feel, and that extends to the expressionist winter trees, especially the willows, drooping over the banks of the Thames.

To view more paintings, you can sign up to my Instagram feed, which is regularly updated with new art.

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Garden Art

A visual diary through lockdown and beyond of the 2020 pandemic

I never felt as fortunate as I did in this year, the year of the plague, to have beyond my back door a small enclosed garden space in which to roam. No one else could enter. These are the paintings I made from the year of restricted movement. Let down your hair, and climb over into the light of Rapunzel’s garden

Some have already sold into private collections. Many are available, from between £50 and £100, and most of them are acrylic on A3 board or paper.

Well Loved Tales

Some events in life remix your colours in ways you can’t imagine. Mind and matter mix like pigments and it’s the strong colours that bleed through. Your gravity shifts, you hear a new bass line, and your moves change. Being adopted, exchanging one name for another, is like being mugged of your identity. There’s a violent wrench a long way beneath the surface and all this wreckage to deal with after the storm, except you can’t classify it as wreckage because you’re dealing with the basic material that makes up your life. And the most basic of all is that identity switch, the first dislocation, the unexplainable disappearance of the mother who bore you. It’s the plot of a fairy tale. Sublimate it and bury it as deep as you like in anger or acquiescence but it’s not going anywhere. It surrounds you, it’s your wagon train. It’s your story. How are you going to tell it?

The first story I ever read was Rapunzel, a Ladybird edition with watercolours on one side, 14-point text on the other. Whoever did the Ladybird watercolours were professionals of their craft. The tale is full of nasty forks and twists and I felt them all. The couple who can’t have children, the wife who conceives a child and pines for the old woman’s greens, the sustenance she lacks. The timorous husband who climbs the walled garden, way beyond his years, and picks the vivid salad greens from their beds of saturated colour, a colour so strong it has a life and movement of its own. His capture, their agreement. The birth of the child and its adoption by the old woman – with fairy tales, it’s amazing how many foundlings and orphans and adoptees blaze in their furnace.

The old couple disappear after that. Whatever they did was irrevocable, and it was done. They cross the line then fall into a vacuum of not here, never was. The woman will pine for the witch’s green rapunzel till the universe spins itself out to a series of dots and dashes. Rapunzel, Rapunzel… Let down your hair… The young beauty in the tower, the young wandering prince who climbs her tresses and makes her fat with sex and progeny. The old witch puts a measure to the girl’s waist. She is the hated Second Law of Thermodynamics. “Something from nothing? You dirty little bitch!”

The pictures in my mind of the witch’s garden, and the tower through the trees of the forest that the young prince sees, I’d feel them twang and vibrate and shimmer. They’d begin to move, and I’d see the old man creep through the darkness, enormous dark green leaves hanging in still air. Not a sound, not a breath of wind – and then the witch’s finger.

You!

I twitched, looked up from the first story I could read, climbing the fine hair pinned by a nail and ending in dead fingers, speaking in tongues. What was the girl virgin to the old witch? And when she was swollen with child and cast out into the thorny wilderness, I saw the skulls of Golgotha in dad’s painting above his bed, done some time between art school and the war. Christ on his knees at the mouth of a cave at night, black and grey but for his crimson djellaba. Dad’s voice from an underworld studio.

“Rose madder.” Madder from Friesland, a plant for the colour of panic and life and blood, the prince’s eyes bloodied by thorns, the thorns and petals of a red briar rose. I can remember learning to read the thorny black marks into words, the prince stepping through the parting wood and looking straight at me.

And then the witch vanishes, and so does the tower, and the rapunzel. Never here, never was. Just years in the wilderness, until he hears her sing and her tears heal his sight. Remote vision: I remember the ache and terror built in to that little paragraph: “And he wandered alone for many years.” So light on the tongue and the fingers, and so unendurable. I stared into the mouth of the story and never blinked. It was like staring into the mouth of a dark cave, one that had once been inhabited, and you could very faintly scent the habitation. The thorns, the prince and the old witch and the girl in the tower and the fearful husband and the greedy wife – they moved and flickered like figures on a cave wall under the light of a fat lamp. Fairy tales are the cave art of the ears and tongue. I think they are just as old, stirring in the minds of the young.

Every terror in life, and the terror of death, has been felt out first for us in fairy tales. A great scientist once acquainted them with stories for people afraid of the dark. One of his anti-religion raps. He didn’t know his subject. They are instructional, not escapist. They’re there to make us fear the dark, not protect us from it. Riddles wrapped inside an enigma dropped in to a well, and you hear a faint echo.

Like you’re on the way to Thebes, and there’s this floppy bitch with claws resting under her dugs, waiting to tear your head off and feed it to a ravenous, disc-shaped sawmill of a mouth. The name’s Oedipus, and you’re the original tragedy. The foundling marked by the claws of an eagle. All adoption stories pull in their thread from the labyrinth and they all end at the foot of Oedipus, the baby tossed in to the wilderness because of a promise and a curse.

“Motherfucker killed his father, sired his own brother.” Kept on punching holes in his social network. He married his mother and killed his father and solved the riddle. How would my fate slot in to that mythic template?

Because they are questions loaded with weapons, riddles feature large in myths and tales and songs, like holes in a Swiss cheese. The current academic fashion is to date nothing in folklore further back than its first documentation. It’s an odd twister of a position to take on an oral lineage of descent from the collective tales Carl Jung wrote about, the prince and the witch and the girl in the tower, forbidden fruits and blinding thorns. They live in a steady state, way older than written matter. It’s worth noting that one of the Grimm’s sources for the tales they collected was a neighbour woman who came to clean their house. Once, after telling them a tale, she returned, concerned that she had placed a word incorrectly, and in the tales she told and had heard and learnt, every word had a place as firmly fixed as the stars.

Songs, we know, are more protean; they’re carried to be spilled, and one song often pours through another. The devil riddles a young boy on the road; a gentleman lover puts life-changing riddles to the beautiful young sister who will take him to her bed; The Bells of Paradise is all riddle, drenched in the musk of grail imagery. “One half runs water, the other runs blood.” John Barleycorn, dealt with as if he was one of the bog people garrotted over the peat workings of ancestral neolithics. Barleycorn finds an antecedent in the Exeter Book of Riddles, pages of which were used, some time in the 10th century, as beer mats.

Cheers, and may the road rise to meet you.

Wisteria Time

Continuing garden art in lockdown, where the borders of the known world edge into the unknown, set amid a cascading jewellery of bird song, bee buzz, the evening exhalation of scent and the changing face of the light through the day, and what it does, and so here’s a gallery of this spring’s manifestation of wisteria from first bud and first leaf to flower-fall and the big wind that will take the last of the drying blooms over the hills and far away.

 

Dartmoor dozen

In mid August, I stayed with a friend in Chagford, and on my last day on Dartmoor, headed back to Powdermills Farm, where I had spent many Easters and Summers in the 1960s and 1970s, when it was still a working farm, with Mr George Stephens at the Farm House. It was a typically Dartmoor summer’s day – ferocious rain followed by splashes and sprays of warm sun, when the green of the grasses alongside the Cherry Brook was an almost supernatural, Robin Hood, Greenwood green of ergot hallucination and hypnogogic inner voyages. I made a lot of fast field drawings on the farm, then worked on seven larger acrylics on board, and here’s a selection of them, alongside an account of life on Powdermills Farm almost half a century ago. 

Long summers and fragile Easters largely made up our family’s moorland calendar. The moor I remembered was scored with ancient mine workings, fearsome muses, stone circles, standing stones, kists and dolmens as well as the naturally, spectacularly weathered granites atop the famous tors – the ragged profile of Old Crockern and his ilk. Through the Fifties and the Sixties – the rock n roll years – as each of us arrived from the children’s home, the growing family would bivouac on a patch of emerald green grass, perhaps the only patch on the north moors – beside a little russet brook, the Cherry Brook, on a farm called Powdermills in the middle of the moor, north of the B-road between Mortonhampstead and Princeton, with its prison.

Powdermills had been chosen in the 1840s as a site suitably remote enough for the making of gunpowder, the ripe charge of saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal. The land was littered with ruined granite outhouses, workers’ cottages, two giant chimneys, and leats, channels and clitter-filled drops that once housed water wheels powered by the Cherry Brook to filter out impurities from the finished product. The gunpowder was delivered to local magazines by horse or steam and from there to the quarries and mines that blew their way into the earth for metal and stone. Some of the tin workings in these parts are very ancient indeed. Without them, there wouldn’t have been any Bronze Age.

The farmhouse had been the foreman’s house, the farm buildings workers’ cottages. There is a story of one worker, by the name of Silus Sleep, who chose to eat all his day’s meals in the morning – so that in the event of an explosion, he would meet his maker on a full stomach to soften the blow. Two testing mortar were set either side of the track from the road. Three thousands US troops were station at Powdermills in the months before D-Day and a group of them took the cannon with them. They were retrieved at Plymouth Hoe and returned to the moor, and to Powdermills, where we’d clamber over them to play.

Storms lash Dartmoor even in the height of summer, and there were floods, collapses and other camping calamities until Dad gave up bivouacking for one of the farm cottages, The Blue Cottage, hired from the Duchy for seventy pounds a year, and one of a row of two between milking parlour and barn that looked directly over towards Bellever forest. The forest was thick but young – post war pine and Forestry Commission pathways. It rose up dark and solid towards the summit of Bellever, like a troubling dream, the approach to the peak ringed by wild blueberry bushes yielding handfuls of tiny bittersweet fruit to assiduous foragers and thirsty mouths. I remember following a stream through the forest, as if it were the compelling plotline of a fairy story, taking you deeper into the wood but forever holding the light of the sky below the crowns of the tall dark handsome pines.

The Blue Cottage had a tiny front garden, and a rock strewn paddock ran the full length of farm buildings behind us. In shearing and lambing season, the farmer George Stevens would round up flocks from the moor – whistling and calling his dogs up the slow slopes of Longaford and Higher White. Sleeping through the sound of several hundred sheep in the paddock at night, as if the sound itself took on the properties of wool and pillowy warmth, a quiet Celtic kid like me would feel the whole of the universe expressing its sheepness.

The cottage at Powdermills had no electricity or running water. We drew water from a well using a long iron hand pump, and lit the rooms with oil lamps and candles and the light of a rayburn. In later years, the landowner Mr Russell had a generator installed, but our cottage was not connected to the 20^th century in any direct manner, and I relished the time travel. It was haunted, too. The voice in the ear in our parent’s bedroom. The spirit that troubled my brother in bed by the stair wall. All drowned out by the generator sat shaking and growling in the old barn where dad and Mr Stephens had once tended a dying bull ‘whose blood had turned to water’, like the Mass in reverse, and a bull, too, that creature of the cave wall.

Mr Steven’s farmhouse was a large, square grey shale-covered building of weather-worn Georgian proportions at the end of the row, and through the gate by the farmhouse the path took you to Cherry Brook, and the old gunpowder works, the gorsey slopes that led to Longaford and over the other side, a line of Bronze Age stones leaning towards the westerly sun and the great north moors, the green desert of Britain. The silver flashing Devonport leat wound through the bottom of a valley running east through Wistman’s wood, an acreage of primeval forestry, its gnarled and stunted oaks strewn with boulders, nests of adders and cushions of moss.

These trees, these few little acres of land, were the last remnants of Dartmoor’s original forest, the lay of the land before Bronze Age settlers built and raized and passed. Wistman’s was full of legends, boggy with them – the name from the Celtic for wise man, the Wood of the Wise, and from Wisht, for pixie-led, for haunted, eerie, uncanny. It’s not a place that many care to enter. The Wisht hounds are reputed to thunder through on their wild hunt for the souls of the sinner and the unbaptised. Dartmoor tales wrapped round each other and the landscape like those gnarled, twisted, stunted oaks and made objective truth impenetrable. Dad made studies of the wood, using an impasto of his own making, monochrome miniatures that captured the eerie density of the contorted, wizened oaks that grew as if one creature, wrapped up in itself and admitting few strangers.

I was too far from Powdermills to fold it into my route map, but I was back on the moor, drawing down the family myths and west country tales, and taking a lunch of shepherd’s pie at The Tors Inn after a walk through a farm gate by a grassy knoll onto the moor, and the widescreen desolation that embedded itself into your expectation of it, so that you had the faint, curious sensation of reliving an older time. There’s little husbandry on the moors today. You’ll find a few heads of sheep, cattle, the wild ponies and adventure sports enthusiasts. The Duchy had turned against digging channels to drain the bog for pasture, preferring the concept of a more natural abandonment.

On Powdermills, what used to be George Stephens’ vegetable garden is waterlogged mire, packed with clumps of pixie grass. A few fresians loll and amble on higher ground, near the road, turning slowly like weather vanes in the wind.

 

The Tolmen Stone, Upper Teign River

ERRATUM TO KNUCKLE: A NEW COLLECTION FROM PITT STREET POETRY

Catastrophically, I posted the wrong date for the launch (Thursday 9 July)
It is, of course, Thursday 11 July. Thursday. Thank you.
A picture, and a poem from the new book, in recompense.

 

Radio Carbon

Cosmic rays stroke the atmosphere,
smoky signals burnished by our passing, wave
after wave spinning the dial of radio carbon
against the background hiss of all creation,
measuring out our time to the core, dancers
at the back of the cave guttering torches
in the mind’s eye. Signals run out beyond here.
From this point on the choir becomes
a murmur then vanishes, water running
silent beneath ice. We bury our dead
in the ground and listen, the gauze curtain
of cosmic forces that calibrate a human hair
rippling like a field of wheat through air,
sackcloth through the ether – another
medium we don’t believe in anymore.

Well Loved Tales

Well Loved Tales

Here’s the link to the new poems and prose at Live Encounters, edited by Mark Ulysses in Bali – and as a teaser here is the text of Well-Loved Tales, about the power of fairytale, the first story I could properly read, as a remedial pupil, at around the age of eight. Rapunzel. The title refers to the classic 1960s Ladybird editions of the tales. The story of the girl child given away will never, ever lose its power.

Some events in life remix your colours in ways you can’t imagine. Mind and matter mix like pigments and it’s the strong colours that bleed through. Your gravity shifts, you hear a new bass line, and your moves change. Being adopted, exchanging one name for another, is like being mugged of your identity. There’s a violent wrench a long way beneath the surface and all this wreckage to deal with after the storm, except you can’t classify it as wreckage because you’re dealing with the basic material that makes up your life. And the most basic of all is that identity switch, the first dislocation, the unexplainable disappearance of the mother who bore you. It’s the plot of a fairy tale. Sublimate it and bury it as deep as you like in anger or acquiescence but it’s not going anywhere. It surrounds you, it’s your wagon train. It’s your story. How are you going to tell it?

The first story I ever read was Rapunzel, a Ladybird edition with watercolours on one side, 14-point text on the other. Whoever did the Ladybird watercolours were professionals of their craft. The tale is full of nasty forks and twists and I felt them all. The couple who can’t have children, the wife who conceives a child and pines for the old woman’s greens, the sustenance she lacks. The timorous husband who climbs the walled garden, way beyond his years, and picks the vivid salad greens from their beds of saturated colour, a colour so strong it has a life and movement of its own. His capture, their agreement. The birth of the child and its adoption by the old woman – with fairy tales, it’s amazing how many foundlings and orphans and adoptees blaze in their furnace.

The old couple disappear after that. Whatever they did was irrevocable, and it was done. They cross the line then fall into a vacuum of not here, never was. The woman will pine for the witch’s green rapunzel till the universe spins itself out to a series of dots and dashes. Rapunzel, Rapunzel… Let down your hair… The young beauty in the tower, the young wandering prince who climbs her tresses and makes her fat with sex and progeny. The old witch puts a measure to the girl’s waist. She is the hated Second Law of Thermodynamics. “Something from nothing? You dirty little bitch!”

The pictures in my mind of the witch’s garden, and the tower through the trees of the forest that the young prince sees, I’d feel them twang and vibrate and shimmer. They’d begin to move, and I’d see the old man creep through the darkness, enormous dark green leaves hanging in still air. Not a sound, not a breath of wind – and then the witch’s finger.

You!

I twitched, looked up from the first story I could read, climbing the fine hair pinned by a nail and ending in dead fingers, speaking in tongues. What was the girl virgin to the old witch? And when she was swollen with child and cast out into the thorny wilderness, I saw the skulls of Golgotha in dad’s painting above his bed, done some time between art school and the war. Christ on his knees at the mouth of a cave at night, black and grey but for his crimson djellaba. Dad’s voice from an underworld studio.

“Rose madder.” Madder from Friesland, a plant for the colour of panic and life and blood, the prince’s eyes bloodied by thorns, the thorns and petals of a red briar rose. I can remember learning to read the thorny black marks into words, the prince stepping through the parting wood and looking straight at me.

And then the witch vanishes, and so does the tower, and the rapunzel. Never here, never was. Just years in the wilderness, until he hears her sing and her tears heal his sight. Remote vision: I remember the ache and terror built in to that little paragraph: “And he wandered alone for many years.” So light on the tongue and the fingers, and so unendurable. I stared into the mouth of the story and never blinked. It was like staring into the mouth of a dark cave, one that had once been inhabited, and you could very faintly scent the habitation. The thorns, the prince and the old witch and the girl in the tower and the fearful husband and the greedy wife – they moved and flickered like figures on a cave wall under the light of a fat lamp. Fairy tales are the cave art of the ears and tongue. I think they are just as old, stirring in the minds of the young.

Every terror in life, and the terror of death, has been felt out first for us in fairy tales. A great scientist once acquainted them with stories for people afraid of the dark. One of his anti-religion raps. He didn’t know his subject. They are instructional, not escapist. They’re there to make us fear the dark, not protect us from it. Riddles wrapped inside an enigma dropped in to a well, and you hear a faint echo.

Like you’re on the way to Thebes, and there’s this floppy bitch with claws resting under her dugs, waiting to tear your head off and feed it to a ravenous, disc-shaped sawmill of a mouth. The name’s Oedipus, and you’re the original tragedy. The foundling marked by the claws of an eagle. All adoption stories pull in their thread from the labyrinth and they all end at the foot of Oedipus, the baby tossed in to the wilderness because of a promise and a curse.

“Motherfucker killed his father, sired his own brother.” Kept on punching holes in his social network. He married his mother and killed his father and solved the riddle. How would my fate slot in to that mythic template?

Because they are questions loaded with weapons, riddles feature large in myths and tales and songs, like holes in a Swiss cheese. The current academic fashion is to date nothing in folklore further back than its first documentation. It’s an odd twister of a position to take on an oral lineage of descent from the collective tales Carl Jung wrote about, the prince and the witch and the girl in the tower, forbidden fruits and blinding thorns. They live in a steady state, way older than written matter. It’s worth noting that one of the Grimm’s sources for the tales they collected was a neighbour woman who came to clean their house. Once, after telling them a tale, she returned, concerned that she had placed a word incorrectly, and in the tales she told and had heard and learnt, every word had a place as firmly fixed as the stars.

Songs, we know, are more protean; they’re carried to be spilled, and one song often pours through another. The devil riddles a young boy on the road; a gentleman lover puts life-changing riddles to the beautiful young sister who will take him to her bed; The Bells of Paradise is all riddle, drenched in the musk of grail imagery. “One half runs water, the other runs blood.” John Barleycorn, dealt with as if he was one of the bog people garrotted over the peat workings of ancestral neolithics. Barleycorn finds an antecedent in the Exeter Book of Riddles, pages of which were used, some time in the 10th century, as beer mats.

So, riddle me this: did I have to kill my father and marry my mother?

“If I saw her again, I’d kill her.”

I once made good friends with Nabila, a young British Pakistani woman. She was the accountant, I was the copy writer. We were often alone in the overspill office together. There was a spark, and the same with anyone I liked, she soon learnt about my children’s home origins. “If that happened to me,” she said one day, apropos nothing in particular – she was settling some petty cash accounts for the book reps – “I would find them and kill them both.” Then she gave me a dazzling smile. Not long after that, a young accountant working on the end-of-year books nodded towards me and Nabila and murmured to his younger male colleague: “He is her comrade.” Their eyes were still and pointed. I was being watched, like the witch watched Rapunzel. A few months after that, her marriage was arranged to a dull fellow with a scratchy beard, and here comes the groom-to-be’s brother to work in the warehouse, to keep eyes on the valuable bride.

The Twilight of Spring

They call her Anna Perenna, Brigid, Flora, Freya, Hebe, Ostara, Lada, Libera, Maia, Olwen, Persephone …. It is the death of Spring, the last wisteria flowers in evening shades, the season’s nocturne.

This was painted around the time I was reading Tales from Ovid, the small creatures of the spring air seemed weighted with myth and immortal body, sparrows teaching their young to fly and now they are flown and spring it is all but over.

Gnawa Festival at 20

The marvellous Gnawa Festival in Essaouria celebrated its 20th birthday this year, and I celebrated my 11th visit to the festival, armed with drawing books, brush pens and black pens, friends including writers Andy Morgan and Jane Cornwell, and musician, DJ and all-round magician of London-Moroccan culture, Moulay Youssef Knight. Here’s some of that image hoard.