The Hermitage

Rise & Root

2012-01-01T15:06:00.002Z

I HAD A DREAM a few weeks ago in which several symbols appeared before me. They had no context, just were there. One of them remained with me upon waking, and I became determined to discover its meaning. It was a rune-like sign, made of straight sections, and looked like this:

I’ve been paying more attention to my dreams recently, and this sign seemed to need deciphering. I went first to the runes for a meaning, but though my symbol was very like a rune, I found none like mine. Then I searched amongst the Ogham alphabet. At first I thought it must be the Ogham cipher for birch which is made up of a vertical straight line, a shorter horizontal heading out to the right from the centre and at the base (as begins or ends all Ogham letters when written alone) an inverted V, making two legs. This was the symbol most like mine I could find, though it wasn’t quite satisfactory - my symbol had three legs and a diagonal stroke to the right.

For a while I sat with birch trees and wondered, until one day I found the answer in my sketchbook. I was drawing ideas for an image I’ve had sitting on my shoulder for a while; as the imagery came out of my pencil in rough scribbles of ideas, I spotted the symbol hiding in amongst the sketching, and it gave me impetus to carry the idea through to a finished design.

For some time I have wanted to make an image with which to start a quiet revolution on the backs of service station toilet doors, on the billboards behind carparks, over the screens of insidious train-journey advertising. In deep hatred for the feeling I get when I am forced to enter motorway service station cafes, shopping malls or toilets, I wanted to rail against all that is bland and homogeneous and commercial and life-suckingly chrome-and-concrete and spreading un-refuted like a disease across our land. I imagined planting little seeds of hope and solidarity in the form of a beautiful and rousing image which I would stick between the scrawlings of desperation and ugliness in the perfumed, disinfected cubicles made for us to shit in whilst we are not at home. The backs of public toilet doors are a fascinating melting pot of honest expression, dissent and advertising; it feels like there’s a communication between strangers played out there in this, the most private of rooms, and this is the way I wanted to communicate: liminally.

I suppose I wanted to plant my revolution-seed in the dirt in the cracks of the pavements, in the dirt between the formica and polyester, in the dirt pushed to the edges of millions of touchscreens, in the dirt underneath escalator rails and hygienic hand-dryers. Like the gargoyles and marginal grotesques of the middle ages, I wanted to coax beauty in once more like a stranger to the citadels of public ugliness we all have become so used to. I wanted to surprise and unnerve and delight and disedge all the lovely human beings who have grown so unseeing in the unbeautiful subway of their daily rush through these places. I wanted ivy to grow over all the chrome and adverts, its clinging rootlets ruining the L'Oréal shine with their ancient, living patination, and its roots grinding escalators to a twisted halt. I wanted green silence to toll through the noisy claustrophobia of shopping malls and for the shoppers to break their ankles on huge ancient roots, which had crept in past the security guards (notwithstanding hoodies and ASBOs) to smash up the shops. I wanted to grab them by the hand, and run with them (limping) to the dark woods and remind them that they are powerful.

And so I made this drawing for you - Rise & Root - a symbol perhaps, a waymarker for the Zapatistas of suburbia. As I drew the rooted tree-people raising their fists, I realised that they were the embodiment and representation of my dream-rune: raised fists to the fight, and roots in the earth. I give you this image to do with what you wish: download it, reblog it, print it, photocopy it, make it into stickers and take them with you in your bag to stick on the backs of public toilet doors, on supermarket conveyor belts or over underground advertising screens; make it into a poster, a projection, print it on bags and T-shirts, paint it large on the sides of petrol stations, pavements, parliaments.

Or take the rune as a symbol we’ll all recognise when it’s chalked on our doorsteps, and tattooed on our foreheads.

I want this image not to be for sale - take it freely and use it, let’s make it spread unrelenting from the edges, appearing everywhere, but not obviously authored. I will not make a website about it. It is rough, and black-and-white as a badly photocopied pamphlet. It is yours. A gift to our revolution for Two Thousand And Twelve. Take it and run.

Unsnow

2011-12-24T21:33:00.000Z

THOUGH THERE ARE PRIMROSES growing outside our house, and coat-wearing is a matter of choice, they tell us this is December, and midwinter passed without our breaths becoming visible in the air. Nevertheless we have hung lights and evergreenery in our houses, and lit fires against the cold that hasn't yet come. And nature, in puzzlement, has bedecked herself in winter costume - white-green lichen for snow, and unfallen apples for baubles. Her branches are as beautiful as frost-furry antlers, but warm still and waiting, waiting for the snow...

My days have been a clockwork of hectic, but now we settle in for spiced and flickering nights with each other and the dark fathoms-deep Dartmoor sky. I want to wish you all the most wonderful Yuletide and a year of good true adventures to follow. Thank you most earnestly for all your kind kind words and for your support and purchases and donations this year, and for continuing to read and to look at what I scatter here with such delight, it really does mean a great deal to me. Thank you to all those who snapped up the winter cards, I was unprepared for the enthusiastic uptake! There'll be more available in the new year when my shop reopens. Before too long, I'll gather all the loose strings of things still to tell, but for now, on this Night Before Christmas, I wish for something unexpected and wonderful in each of your stockings hanging now by your fires, and I leave you with words from one of my most cherished writers - someone I would have dearly loved to meet, someone who for me in the winter, becomes a kind of godmother through her wise and quiet words - Tove Jansson, who brings us snow...

Snow

by Tove Jansson

from: A Winter Book - selected stories by Tove Jansson, published by Sort Of Books.

________________________

When we got to the strange house it began to snow in quite a different way. A mass of tired old clouds opened and flung snow at us, all of a sudden and just anyhow. They weren't ordinary snowflakes – they fell straight down in large sticky lumps, they clung to each other and sank quickly and they weren't white, but grey. The whole world was as heavy as lead.

Mummy carried in the suitcases and stamped her feet on the doormat and talked the whole time because she thought the whole thing was such fun and that everything was different.

But I said nothing because I didn’t like this strange house. I stood in the window and watched the snow falling, and it was all wrong. It wasn't the same as in town. There it blows black and white over the roof or falls gently as if from heaven, and forms beautiful arches over the sitting-room window. The landscape looked dangerous too. It was bare and open and swallowed up the snow, and the trees stood in black rows that ended in nothing. At the edge of the world there was a narrow fringe of forest. Everything was wrong. It should be winter in town and summer in the country. Everything was topsy-turvy.

The house was big and empty, and there were too many rooms. Everything was very clean and you could never hear your own steps as you walked because the carpets were so big and they were as soft as fur.

If you stood in the furthest room, you could see through all the other rooms and it made you feel sad; it was like a train ready to leave with its lights shining over the platform. The last room was dark like the inside of a tunnel except for a faint glow in the gold frames and the mirror which was hung too high on the wall. All the lamps were soft and misty and made a very tiny circle of light. And when you ran you made no noise.

It was just the same outside. Soft and vague, and the snow went on falling and falling.

I asked why we were living in this strange house but got no proper answer. The person who cooked the food was hardly ever to be seen and didn't talk. She padded in without one noticing her and then out again. The door swung to without a sound and rocked backwards and forwards for a long time before it was still. I showed that I didn't like this house by keeping quiet. I didn't say a word.

In the afternoon the snow was even greyer and fell in flocks and stuck to the window-panes and then slid down and new flocks appeared out of the twilight and replaced them. They were like grey hands with a hundred fingers. I tried to watch one all the way as it fell, it spread out and fell, faster and faster. I stared at the next one and the next one and in the end my eyes began to hurt and I got scared.

It was hot everywhere and there was enough room for crowds of people but there were only two of us. I said nothing.

Mummy was happy and rushed all over the place saying: “What peace and quiet! Isn't it lovely and warm!” And so she sat down at a big shiny table and began to draw. She took the lace tablecloth off and spread out all her illustrations and opened the bottle of Indian ink.

Then I went upstairs. The stairs creaked and groaned and made lots of noises that stairs make when a family has gone up and down them for ages. That’s good. Stairs should do that sort of thing. One knows exactly which step squeaks and which one doesn't and where one has to tread if one doesn't want to make oneself heard. It was just that this staircase wasn't our staircase. Quite a different family had used it. Therefore I thought this staircase was creepy.

Upstairs all the soft lamps were on in the same way and all the rooms were warm and tidy and all the doors were standing open. Only one door was closed. Inside, it was cold and dark. It was the box room. The other family’s belongings were lying there in packing-cases and trunks and there were mothproof bags hanging in long rows with a little snow on top of them.

Now I could hear the snow. It was falling all the time, whispering and rustling to itself and in one corner it had crept onto the floor.

The other family was everywhere in there, so I shut the door and went down again and said I wanted to go to bed. Actually I didn't want to go to bed at all, but I thought it would be best. Then I wouldn't have to say anything. The bed was as wide and desolate as the landscape outside. The eiderdown was like a hand, too. You sank and sank right to the bottom of the earth under a big soft hand. Nothing was like it was at home, or like anywhere else.

In the morning it was still snowing in just the same way. Mummy had already got started with her work and was very cheerful. She didn't have to light fires or get meals ready and didn't have to be worried about anybody. I said nothing.

I went to the furthest room and watched the snow. I had a great responsibility and had to see what the snow was doing. It had risen since yesterday. A thousand tons of wet snow had slithered down the window-panes, and I had to climb onto a chair to see the long grey landscape. The snow had risen out there, too. The trees were thinner and more timid and the horizon had moved further away. I looked at everything until I knew that soon we would be done for. This snow had decided to go on falling until everything was a single, vast wet snowdrift, and nobody would remember what had been underneath it. All the trees would sink into the earth and all the houses. No roads and no tracks – just snow falling and falling and falling.

I went up to the boxroom and listened to it falling, I heard how it stuck fast and grew. I couldn't think of anything but the snow.

Mummy went on drawing.

I was building with the cushions on the sofa and sometimes I looked at her through a peephole between them. She felt me looking and asked: “Are you alright?” while she went on drawing. And I answered: “of course”. Then I crept on hands and knees into the end room and climbed onto a chair and saw how the snow was sinking down over me. Now the whole horizon had crept below the edge of the world. The fringe of forest couldn't be seen any longer; it had slid over. The world had capsized, it was turning over quietly, a little bit every day.

The very thought of it made me feel giddy. Slowly, slowly, the world was turning, heavy with snow. The trees and houses were no longer upright. They were slanting. Soon it would be difficult to walk straight. All the people on earth would have to creep. If they had forgotten to fasten their windows, they would burst open. The doors would burst open. The water barrels would fall over and begin to roll over the endless field and out over the edge of the world. The whole world was full of things rolling, slithering and falling. Big things rumbled, you could hear them from far off, and you had to work out where they would come, and get away from them. Here they were, rumbling past, leaping in the snow when the angle was too great, and finally falling into space. Small houses without cellars broke loose and whirled away. The snow stopped falling downwards, it flew horizontally. It fell upwards and disappeared. Everything that couldn't hold on tight rolled out into space, and slowly the sky went dark and turned black. We crept under the furniture between the windows, taking care not to tread on the glass. But from time to time a picture or a lamp bracket fell and smashed the window-pane. The house groaned and the plaster came loose. And outside, large heavy objects rumbled past, rolling right through the whole of Finland all the way down from the Arctic Circle, and they were even heavier because they had collected so much snow as they rolled and sometimes people fell past screaming all the time.

The snow on the ground began to slither away. It slid in an enormous avalanche which grew and grew over the edge of the world … oh no! oh no!

I rolled backwards and forwards on the carpet to make the horror of it seem greater, and in the end I saw the wall heave over me and the pictures hung straight out on their wires.

“What are you doing?” Mummy asked.

Then I lay still and said nothing.

“Shall we have a story?” she asked, and went on drawing.

But I didn’t want any other story than this one of my own. But one doesn't say that sort of thing. So I said: “Come up and look at the attic.”

Mummy dried her Indian ink pen and came with me. We stood in the attic and froze for a while and Mummy said “It’s lonely here,” so we went back into the warmth again and she forgot to tell me a story. Then I went to bed.

Next morning the daylight was green, underwater lighting throughout the room. Mummy was asleep. I got up and opened the door and saw that the lamps were on in all the rooms although it was morning and the green light came through the snow which covered the windows all the way up. Now it had happened. The house was a single enormous snowdrift, and the surface of the ground was somewhere high up above the roof. Soon the trees would creep down into the snow until only their tops stuck out, and then the tops would disappear too and everything would level itself off and be flat. I could see it, I knew. Not even praying would stop it.

I became very solemn and quite calm and sat down on the carpet in front of the blazing fire.

Mummy woke up and came in and said, “Look how funny it is with snow covering the windows,” because she didn't understand how serious it all was. When I told her what had really happened, she became very thoughtful.

“In fact,” she said after a while, “we have gone into hibernation. nobody can get in any longer and no one can get out!”

I looked carefully at her and understood that we were saved. At last we were absolutely safe and protected. This menacing snow had hidden us inside in the warmth for ever and we didn't have to worry a bit about what went on there outside. I was filled with enormous relief, and I shouted, “I love you, I LOVE YOU,” and took all the cushions and threw them at her and laughed and shouted and Mummy threw them all back, and in the end we were lying on the floor just laughing.

Then we began our underground life. We walked around in our nighties and did nothing. Mummy didn't draw. We were bears with pine needles in our stomachs and anyone who dared come near our winter lair was torn to pieces. We were lavish with the wood, and threw log after log onto the fire until it roared.

Sometimes we growled. We let the dangerous world outside look after itself; it had died, it had fallen out into space. Only Mummy and I were left.

It began in the room at the end. At first it was the nasty scraping sound made by shovels. Then the snow fell down over the windows and grey light came in everywhere. Somebody tramped past outside and came to the next window and let in more light. It was awful.

The scraping sound went along the whole row of windows until the lamps were burning as if at a funeral. Outside snow was falling. The trees were standing in rows and were as black as they had been before and they let the snow fall on them and the fringe of forest on the horizon was still there.

We went and got dressed. Mummy sat down to draw.

A dark man went on shovelling outside the door and all of a sudden I started to cry and I screamed: “I’ll bite him! I’ll go outside and bite him!”

“I shouldn’t do that,” Mummy said. “He wouldn't understand.” She screwed the top onto the bottle of Indian ink and said: “what about going home?”

“Yes,” I said.

So we went home.

Wayfarers' Nativity

2011-12-04T13:11:00.001Z

THE NIGHT COMES EARLY these days, leaning up against our old rattly windowpanes, which ooze condensation and owlsong from four o'clock on. The long evenings afford us time to do Things Indoors by the fire, or at our dark desks. In the picture above, you might just be able to make out the image emerging on the paper below the lamp - but only in the reflection in the window.

It's a new winter painting - a ritual I've kept for some years now - to make a new snowy painting at this dark end of the year. No other time of year seems to call me to paint it so regularly, and these winter paintings always end up on my Christmas cards when I send them.

This year I decided (at long last) to make Winter Cards to sell, which meant completing this snowy painting early so that the cards could be designed and ordered in time for fairs and for you to buy to send...

Which meant that I couldn't labour over a detailed creation for weeks on end, and since I've been trying to force a freer looseness in my work of late to combat my finickity temperament, I made this a watercolour of quick light sketchy strokes, and tried to draw with the paintbrush in splodges rather than with hair-thin lines. I deliberately used a paintbrush slightly too big and determined to finish this in two days.

So here follows the progress of this work in pictures....

The image - a kind of gathering of nomadic folk, stopping to set up camp and collect firewood amongst the trees in the snow - I drew quickly, without worrying it too much, and without "finishing" the figures at the pencil stage which I am prone to doing:

Then I splurged on some sky, and put colour on clothing, not worrying if the paint ran over the edges, or colours mixed in unintended spots...

My accuracy with the too-big paintbrush was a little haphazard around the trees and I intentionally left watermarks where wet and dry paint met. I put on loose washes over the faces and left a space for the firesmoke too...

Gradually, each little figure was put in, suggested rather than drawn...

All of the painting came straight from my imagination, drawn and painted without reference to anything, except my inner snowy, firelit world.

Some of the scenes were very small...

And then I began to add other details around the figures - small blueish brown splodges for snow-footprints all around the encampment, and twigs in hands and on backs...

Finally, when all the paint was painted and dry, I coaxed the important bits out with a pencil, sending back the darks and tucking in the edges...

Though I decided in the end to leave the trees and their edges with the sky alone - just rough seagreen watercolour, not heeding its proper boundaries...

But I drew in the faces softly where I could...

And then, almost to my own surprise, it was done.

And here it is, Wayfarers' Nativity available to buy as a print in my shop now.

The tribe, whoever they are, gather wood for the fire in the midst of cold white winter to warm the stew in the pot, and to warm the babe in arms, just visible inside the bender. I didn't know this was going to be a nativity painting to begin with, but it has become somehow an alternative to the story we all know, yet really the same: where we all bring gifts to the child of light in the dark days of winter. The gift in this case is the gift of firewood, which in a life on the move, mostly lived under the sky, is the most important gift of all: warmth.

And so to Winter Cards....

I've been busy selling at Advent Fairs and setting up my little December exhibition in the bustling Courtyard Wholefood Shop and Cafe in Chagford, where my cards are for sale next to the cakes. I'll write about this soon, but meanwhile... here are the cards, a selection of eight of my wintry paintings from the past few years, packaged all together, or as single cards and packs of four.

They are printed on lovely heavy white card stock, with a very subtle matt sheen and come with recycled brown envelopes. The eight designs included are:

Baba Yaga
Balalaika
Telling Stories to the Trees
Father Christmas
Picking Up Sticks
Winter Crow
Wintersong
Wayfarers' Nativity

The cards are all wrapped up and sitting in the shop waiting to be posted out to you. I hope you like them. If you live overseas and would like to send these on before Christmas, you might be wise to order them soon before the postal services get too hectic.

Days are getting chillier here on the edge of the moor, and the first noticeable frost crept into the fields around our house on the first day of December. Macha has taken the warmest spot on the rug by the fire, and we busy on, readying ourselves for dark lamplit evenings, mulled-wine-stitched musical gatherings, and gathering plenty of firewood to warm the Winter Child.

***POSTSCRIPT***

Also, I have a giclée print of Baba Yaga up in an auction which is running til December 18th in aid of our dear Terri Windling who has struggled financially lately due to a combination of health and legal difficulties. Her worldwide circle of friends and fans have gathered an enormous amount of creativity and support and this auction is full to bursting - a veritable Goblin Marketful of delights. Please go and support it in any way you can - either by bidding or offering or word-spreading. Terri has inspired and helped so many of us, she deserves this support.

Here's the link to the main auction page where you can browse the wonders on offer.
Tom has one of his most beautiful blood red and ember yellow harlequin masks in the auction too - here.
My Baba Yaga giclée print's auction page is here.
There are many other jewels on offer, not least artwork by Brian Froud, Alan Lee, David Wyatt, Danielle Barlow, Virginia Lee, naming rights for a forthcoming book by Catherynne M Valente, handwritten postcards from Ellen Kushner to you, and a fairytale by Jane Yolen in which you star, and many many more...

Autumn Aflame

2011-11-17T12:30:00.001Z

YELLOW FIRE licks the clear blue skies of these short November days in a last farewell. At the year's retirement, branches give up their last sparks to light the winter fire that will burn for us and in us throughout the cold coming months, and warm us with red ember-spice and cinnabar-stories from deep within the hearth of winter.

Hedges crackle with golden fire and bracken burns its last in the low sunlight.

Eventually the flames fall, and there is fire under our feet.

We kick and leap in the auburn embers of the trees' last celebration.

And we lay on this soft red carpet thinking toward the day when it will turn hard and white.

Our Autumn has been firelit from September onward...

For my birthday, Tom took me to the circus for the first time in my life.

We drove in our little red van to Cirencester for the last night of the season of the extraordinary Giffords Circus, who had circled their wagons in a field on the edge of town, ready to perform for the last time their astonishing production of Tolstoy's War & Peace.

All the vehicles were painted traditional burgundy and cream, and the wagons around the big tops served home made pizzas and programmes and Wurlitzer wonders.

Giffords are a traditional progressive circus, meaning their setup incorporates all the beauty of a traditional circus without the animal cruelty. The animals in the show were their own horses and birds, trained and loved and happy.

I was as wide-mouthed as the children in the front row throughout the show. Gasping at the feats and grinning at the magnificent Russian-flavoured music.

There was a man who tap-danced on his hands, a knifethrower and a dove-tamer, a Hungarian who galloped around the ring standing astride two horses at once, and a woman who played the violin upside-down in mid air, dangling from a rope; there was a goose who followed a horse, a hawk and a brilliant clown, who wove the whole rambling story of War & Peace incredibly, madly together.

I was most wowed by an incredibly athletic troupe of Russian acrobats who flung each other into the air with breathtaking dare. Seconds after I took the photo below, this tiny woman - one of that troupe - tossed the flaming hoop high into the air, then she herself was flung up high by the two fellows supporting the narrow bendy board on which she stood, and she somersaulted mid-air through the flaming hoop only to land upright and un-singed on the narrow board again!

Outside the big top in the dark, the circus-glow made us grin...

... and we returned to our van to sleep, bellies full of Giffords' own hand-reared hog roast and vodka.

These pumpkins were grown for our community by Chagfood - an amazing local food initiative here, where fruit, vegetables and flowers are grown for this area's residents and we sign up for a share of the harvest, year round, receiving an abundant box every week. The wonderful organic veg are grown by lovely people (and a horse) in a field just down the road a bit. When they reach our plates, the vegetables have not been out of the ground for longer than a few hours. The vegetables we receive are seasonal and so amounts fluctuate according to yields throughout the year. It is one of the most inspiring and nourishing (in all senses of the word) projects I've come across, and I'm proud to support it and have it as part of our community. The blooming veg boxes we receive every week really do make our hearts smile. I'll write again at some point about Chagfood in more detail, because it's important to me, but meanwhile you can see some wonderful photos of the land, the people, the project and the food at this lovely Chagfood blog.

To celebrate this year's harvest, Chagfood held an October gathering at their field, with fire and pumpkin soup and local cider sold from their hand-built vardo. As the sun set, we lit candles for a story and folks gathered on straw bales around the fire to be taken into Baba Yaga's forest.

As ever, the evidence that we told a story is hazy at best. But you should be able to just make out our shapes by the wagon - me illustrating Tom's wonderful story with my accordion. It was a different tale this time, though our favourite Russian witch featured again of course. This time we had a chase (with suitable Russian um-pah chase-music) through the forest, and even squeezebox-witch-snoring.

Thanks to Miriam Boy for taking these photos of us. I particularly like the candle-lit face of the child to the right of the photo above.

As the evening drew on, we sat in happy circle with the people of this place with whom we share vegetables, and looked into the fire.

The magnificent Kes Tor String Band played bluegrass into the night.

And the fire burned higher.

On the fifth of November, we attended another local spectacle - the Sticklepath Fireshow - a yearly performance of puppet-ghouls and papier-mâché skellingtons in front of an audience of thousands.

The fireworks that followed the death-parade stitched the black sky with fire-stars, dancing their extravagant crackles about the white moon, who stood still up there and watched.

And after it all, the enormous wooden hotel-façade that they'd built for the performance, was burnt to the ground. What a strange and powerful thing it was to stand in a crowd of thousands watching a house burn. Watching the way the rafters and stairs burnt through, the burning rocking chair which had contained Guy Fawkes, and the hot hot dancing changes in the glowing wood, disintegrating in the fire, we wondered at how odd it was that this old fire tradition had got so knotted up with a character in a seventeenth century Catholic plot to assassinate the Protestant king.

If you thought about it too hard, you realised it was quite a horrific scene - all these people standing calmly watching a house burn to the ground. But it had power too - at the Inbetween place straddling the old and new years, the ghostly place, where the dead and the Others are much closer than usual, we gave our unwanted things to the burning house of the old year, and were warmed by the flames into the new.

That new year's day, November the first, we climbed the hill we climbed last Samhain, and saw the sun up with fried eggs and toast on a fire.

This new sun painted our edges with gold...

... as we stood together looking over the auburning of our land in the sun of the year to come.

Now, at home, as the fogs roll in, we see the flame burn on in the pith of the pumpkins and in the shadows on a leaf.

I am preparing for upcoming winter fairs where I'll be selling prints and originals and Christmas cards too! Over the next two weekends I'll have stalls at two Steiner School fairs in Devon: Exeter Steiner School on the 26th November and this coming Saturday, 19th November, at the South Devon Steiner School in Totnes, who are holding what looks to be an extravagant advent fair, with marquees and tents of local crafts and chai and music and mulled punch and more! Here's the poster to the left, above that for another event we'll be selling our wares at: Dartmoor Frost & Fire - A Yuletide celebration on December 11th, hosted by Nigel Shaw and Carolyn Hillyer, mythic musicians of Seventh Wave Music. There'll be medieval music from the wonderful Daughters of Elvin, transporting bardic harping from Elizabeth-Jane Baldry and many more warming wintry wonders.

For the whole of December, I'll have my work exhibited again at Chagford's wonderful Wholefood cafe - The Courtyard, where on December 13th, we'll have a mini fair over a couple of hours in the evening for the community's late night opening hours where aromas of hog roast and carol singing waft across the square and both wine and gift giving are mulled. Please come along to any of these events if you are nearby. If you are not, keep an eye out on my virtual stall for wintry creations in the weeks to come.

If you look in through the damp window of our studio these days, you can see that the flames of autumn have leapt into my latest painting.

May the flame keep burning, gold and copper and red, in your core as the nights close in.

Atching Tan

2011-11-03T19:42:00.000Z

A RED SUN-WHEEL burns bright in the blue sky above a green land that could be this land. The sixteen-spoked wheel represents the Romani Gypsy flag, where a red chakra (wheel) spins over a half blue (for sky), half green (for earth) background. I chose to make this sky-wheel into the fiery sun of inspiration and creation in this Once Upon O'Clock made some months ago for Sarah Bayliss who works with the Romany Theatre Company. In searching for her own Gypsy ancestral roots, Sarah asked me to paint her a clock that represented the traditional Gypsy travelling life.

So I drew a scene amongst the trees with a vardo (traditional travelling wagon) stopped at the laneside and its travelling folk collecting firewood and stoking the fire under a kettle for tea. Their horse grazes and the road winds on toward the horizon. This is the Atching Tan - the Stopping Place, the wonderful camp amongst trees - a place to relax and cook and wash, to find water and let the horses rest and the children play, to make repairs to wagons and to make contact with the locals for work and exchange of goods and services.

The clock was painted on a lovely piece of Yew, and where there was a natural crack in the wood, I extended it with paint to become the road.

And just by the road-crack sits a wagtail, the romano chiriclo (Romany bird). James Hayward in his excellent dictionary of the Romany Language Gypsy Jib, finds no obvious reason for this bird to be named for the Gypsy people, but points out that the connection is strong - the Gypsy Lore Society adopted the wagtail as its emblem with the motto Oke romano chiriklo, dikasa e Kalen - which is Welsh Romany for "Behold a Wagtail and you shall see Gypsies". Indeed all piebald animals are thought to be lucky in Gypsy tradition because they hold both dark and light in them simultaneously.

The colourful painted wagons that we associate with Gypsies were only in fact in widespread use for a matter of decades at the end of the nineteenth century. Before vardos, the Gypsies travelled with horses and carts and put up benders (temporary canvas shelters made from flexible branches of hazel or similar) when they stopped. The use of painted wagons was adopted from the Fairground folk who had begun using them earlier on in that century. The ever more elaborate and brightly painted wagons largely stopped being built with the onset of the First World War, and so this short period of time when the Gypsies lived and travelled in these wonderful decorative vardos has left us with the definitive "romantic" image of Gypsy life.

Because wagons and benders were small, most of life was spent outdoors - a rugged all-weather life, where the fire was the focal point of the Gypsies' days and nights. Indeed the Romany expression for stopping place - Atching Tan - comes from the root verb hatch - to burn, to light a fire. Thus the original meaning of the expression for stopping place was "the place where the fire is lit".

Unlike with my other clocks, I decided to scan this one before I painted the numbers on it, so that you'd be able to buy the painting as a print. Mostly I feel that my clocks don't really work as non-clock prints, but this one seemed a complete scene to me which I hope some of you might enjoy. So here is Atching Tan as a print in my etsy shop now.

Atching Tan - by Rima Staines 2011 - oils on wood - prints available here.

And when that was done, I painted on the numbers and attached brass clock hands to turn around the fiery wagon-wheel sun in the sky.

The clock now hangs happily on Sarah's wall, where I imagine the woodsmoke from the campfire drifting out of the clock to evoke another time...

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

A Gypsy family and their wagon, Epsom Downs, 1938
© Simon Evans - Stopping Places - A Gypsy history of South London and Kent

... Which I leave behind sadly now to write a little about the life of Gypsies in our time, this time now.

I have felt prompted by the recent violent evictions at Dale Farm, the surrounding coverage in the media and by the often shocking reactions to it amongst the population to express something that I've long noticed about people's attitudes to Gypsies, especially during the time I was travelling myself.

Gallician Gypsies being moved from Wandsworth common, 1911
© Simon Evans - Stopping Places - A Gypsy history of South London and Kent

Any article about the site evictions or another Gypsy-related matter prompts screeds of venomous and ignorant comments, the unbelievable flavour of which can also be seen if you follow the #dalefarm discussions on twitter. For some reason, there remains today an extreme fear of and hatred towards travelling people. This is not just the domain of right-wing governments in Italy and Eastern Europe, this is a widespread attitude of many many people in this country now.

A family of basket sellers at Halstead near Sevenoaks in the early 20th century.
© Simon Evans - Stopping Places - A Gypsy history of South London and Kent

And I have been so saddened and shocked by what appears to be an explosion of some common inner repressed shadow, that I wanted to think on this a little.

Almost without fail when you hear people talking about this or that Traveller site, or Gypsy-related report in the media, they will say something like "Oh yes, but they're not real Gypsies, they're just dole-scrounging 'pikies'". Many people seem to have this division in their minds about two distinct kinds of "Gypsies": The romantic wagon-dwelling, music-round-the-campfire-playing, peg-and-lavender-selling, fortune-telling Gypsies Of Yore versus the static-caravan-dwelling, scrap-metal-dealing, child-stealing law-dodgers on the grotty council sites of these days. They believe that the first kind have real "Gypsy blood" and that the others are not the "genuine article" and therefore deserve all the venom directed towards them. This is an interesting and frightening phenomenon which calls to mind other historical questionings of purebloodedness. As Simon Evans says in his brilliant book Stopping Places - A Gypsy History of South London and Kent, this false analysis is a ploy which is frequently used to deny that today's Travellers have a culture and history of their own. Once robbed of their identity, they can be dismissed as 'mere' vagrants, itinerants and scoundrels. In reality of course, Travellers are Travellers, there are no "real" and "fake" versions. It feels like once people have identified the "negative variety" of Travellers, they then give themselves permission to pour all the really venomous hatred, fear, envy and dissatisfaction with their own life onto this group of people.

A bender tent, St Mary Cray, 1870
© Simon Evans - Stopping Places - A Gypsy history of South London and Kent

The common story as to the history of this nomadic people is that they left Rajasthan (based upon the fact that the Romani language is strongly linked to Sanskrit) around a thousand years ago and have been travelling west since. They got called "Gypsies" through a mistaken belief that they'd come from Egypt. The first record of Gypsies in the British Isles comes from 1505 when a witness at a court hearing in Scotland was described as an "Egypcyan woman" who had considerable skill at reading palms. They've been shunned as outsiders wherever they've travelled whilst at the same time taking up and laying down traditions and musics in all the places and cultures they've travelled through.

Inside a bender tent
© James Hayward - Gypsy Jib

With the gradual privatization of common land in the UK, which has become rife during the last part of the 20th century, the Gypsies have found increasingly fewer stopping places on their travels. They used to do a great deal of work as farm labourers, hop picking and suchlike, and farmers would welcome itinerant workers to stay on their land whilst their work was needed, knowing that they'd travel on after the work was done. But the spreading commercialization of farming and the burgeoning of "agribusiness" where traditional farming ways have been swallowed by the soulless money-hungry machine, has meant little more need for travelling farm workers and so the Gypsies had to find other ways of earning their living.

The Hilding family on a hop farm
© Simon Evans - Stopping Places - A Gypsy history of South London and Kent

Their journey, in my opinion, has been hampered further in this country by two laws in particular. The first - the 1960 Caravan Sites Act - which sought to regulate the setting up and running of caravan sites, also placed stipulations on farmers who were using itinerant farm workers on their land, requiring the travellers to leave immediately after harvesting had finished. The act also gave councils new powers to evict Travellers from common land which had previously the land on which they stopped between farm jobs, so they were left without any legal place to park their homes. In 1968 another Caravan Sites Act was passed which attempted to place duties on local authorities to make some provision for travelling people, but it did not specify any time frame in which to do this and so most authorities never fulfilled their obligation before the second of the detrimental acts came along and negated it: The 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, put in place by the Tory government of the time, repealed the duty of local authorities to provide places for Travellers to stop, as well as pretty much outlawing the travelling way of life altogether:

Section 77 - Power of local authority to direct unauthorised campers to leave land

(1) If it appears to a local authority that persons are for the time being residing in a vehicle or vehicles within that authority's area—

(a) on any land forming part of a highway;
(b) on any other unoccupied land; or
(c) on any occupied land without the consent of the occupier

the authority may give a direction that those persons and any others with them are to leave the land and remove the vehicle or vehicles and any other property they have with them on the land.

(Part of section 77 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994)

This section goes on to state that anyone who fails to comply with this is committing an offence and will be convicted and/or fined accordingly.

Wrotham Heath at the foot of the North Downs in Kent, apple picking time in the late 1940s.
This was a popular stopping place which allowed the horses to have an overnight rest before tackling Wrotham Hill.
© Simon Evans - Stopping Places - A Gypsy history of South London and Kent

These acts, combined with the unruly spread of towns and suburbs and frantic road building programmes at the latter end of the 20th century meant that the travelling people who had once walked alongside their horses as they pulled their wagons and stopped on common pieces of ground between jobs, were now squeezed and shunned simultaneously by the roaring traffic of modernity and continuously evicted even from the pieces of land they did find to stop on.

Minty Smith with children, 1960s
© Simon Evans - Stopping Places - A Gypsy history of South London and Kent

Thus many Gypsies ended up stopping on the council run sites which, every time they were proposed in an area, were objected to left right and centre by local residents who feared mess and violence in their neighbourhoods and couldn't see any reason for them anyway since the Gypsies 'are a nomadic people'. These sites were concrete and soulless places and the council's rules did not allow the Gypsies to continue there any of their life's loves: keeping horses and dogs and sitting around fires under the sky, nor livelihoods such as storing scrap metal for buying and selling (which had become a main source of income for many since seasonal farm work had all but disappeared). These places were effectively ghettos at the grimmest ends of towns: under bypasses or beside municipal dumps. And the sites are fenced round with high walls and barbed wire. You can see in this photograph below of the Murston site near Sittingbourne in Kent, that the 8 foot high concrete fence posts are crooked inwards inferring that the inhabitants are to be kept in - the barbed wire is clearly not there to prevent intruders.

Traveller site in Murston near Sittingbourne, near completion, 1990.
Note the crooks at the tops of the concrete fence posts facing inwards.
© Simon Evans - Stopping Places - A Gypsy history of South London and Kent

"They cut your friends off, they cut your way of life off and you're basically tied down to one place and really and truly I wonder who did win the war. Was it Hitler? Because we're on a concentration camp now, we got barbed wire around us, we've got fences around us and we're put miles from anywhere, We've got a big river down the bottom of the road there, three lakes if we want to go and do away with ourselves, because this is the ideal place to be depressed - here."

- Albert Scamp (on Murston site)

The Murston site with its 8 foot high barbed wire topped fence. The fact that the posts are facing inwards infers that they are to keep the new residents in.
© Simon Evans - Stopping Places - A Gypsy history of South London and Kent

A new Traveller site under construction at Ruxley in 1990. It is lined by an 8 foot high concrete wall and is a few feet away from a busy dual carriageway.
© Simon Evans - Stopping Places - A Gypsy history of South London and Kent

The glaring gulf between these concrete ghettos and the life on the road the Travellers had known seems to me to be a huge and tragic putting down of a people. There exists a smug and patronizing notion amongst council spokespeople and others that all the Travellers need is to "settle down" and move into houses, which is offensive in the utmost to people whose deep Way Of Life is just not the same as that of settled folk. The travelling is the thing - the life of taking your chattels with you, and stopping beside hedgerows which provide sustenance and stories. Though it may sound romantic, I know from my experience living on wheels that it is damn hard and raw as well. It is all of this - the romance and the rawness, the realness - that Travellers yearn for, and the gradual erosion of the very intrinsic way of their life has been devastating to the soul of them as a people I think.

Traveller girls
© James Hayward - Gypsy Jib

"When I was younger we used to have television and used to watch cartoons, but I would much rather have gone out and listened to my grandad because he used to go on about the really old times - stories that you would never hear about, and we would sit down there for hours and hours just listening to him. We didn't care about all the technology, televisions and toys and playing with them, we just wanted to listen to him all the time, you know, I really miss that. I really miss the old things that he used to go on about and the old remedies. You get all like the aromatherapy stuff that's come out now, all that Travellers used to do back in the olden days, they used to go and find that up hedgerows...

Now that my grandad's dead, I miss him telling me all the stories and all the things he used to go on about because they were so interesting. It was real life, it was about real life."

- Sarah Hilden

Sandwich bar, Biggin Hill, 2001
(NB - the irony of both bad and goodwill displayed on this shop door!)
© Simon Evans - Stopping Places - A Gypsy history of South London and Kent

And the prejudice and hatred haven't stopped either. So the Travellers are forced into ways of life that are not what once were theirs yet still must endure hatred for being who they are. Some of you may have watched last week's BBC Panorama about the evictions at Dale Farm, where you'll have glimpsed the horrifically nasty flavour of the opinions of the uninformed and fearful opponents of the site. The programme was thankfully quite balanced in its observation of the people and the evictions, but it was almost unbearable to watch. Though the number of supporters who travelled to the site from all over the UK to chain themselves to railings and battle the riot police (who were sent in in place of bailiffs) was heartening, and the genuine warmth and gratitude expressed by the Travellers towards them was wonderful to witness.

The eviction of Court Road, Orpington in 1934.

The police would gather a gang of men from the nearest town or village to manhandle the wagons off, often late at night, still containing sleeping children, or when the families were not present. A man or woman might return home to find the stopping place empty.

The eviction of Court Road, Orpington in 1934.
© Simon Evans - Stopping Places - A Gypsy history of South London and Kent

The horrors of evictions have not changed over the years, except to become more violent. Here in this collage of eviction footage over the years, Simon Evans has overlayed the testimonies of Travellers powerfully showing the same old tragic story of being forced to move on.

I wonder what the people who dismiss the Dale Farm residents as "just pikies" think has happened to the "real old Gypsies". For it is the granddaughters and grandsons of the folk in these wonderful old photographs who are the residents of the Traveller sites of today. Many people use the argument that Irish Travellers "don't count" somehow, and apparently possess great inside knowledge when they state authoritatively that the "genuine Gypsies" can't stand the Irish Travellers either. All of this is nonsensical, divisive fear-mongering. I think there's a part of these Traveller-haters which deep down is perhaps angry at their own life choices and the comparative freedom of Travelling people who seemingly don't suffer under the same rules and restrictions placed upon "law abiding house-dwellers". They are unable to accept that different people choose to live in different ways, and that those ways might be deeply intrinsic to their culture and way of experiencing the world. I've observed a simultaneous slight envy of the free roaming life coupled with extreme anger at the fact that they can live this life.

A Sussex layby, 1989
© Simon Evans - Stopping Places - A Gypsy history of South London and Kent

And because Travellers are living outside the norm and on the margins of society, they of course stir up all the shadowy fears in people. This place of fear is where the stories of stealing (both property and children) come from.

I have heard many stories that people will happily tell you (especially if you yourself are living in a vehicle) about Travellers and how they stole this or that. But almost always it is a second or third-hand tale. Most people cannot actually tell you a first-hand experience of Gypsy theft. Now, of course I'm not saying that Travellers don't steal things - it would be a blinkered statement that could not be corroborated anyway, but this applies no differently to house-dwellers: there are house dwellers who steal things and commit all manner of terrible crimes, but it doesn't do to assume that the structure you live in has anything to do with whether or not you commit crimes. I'm just interested in the way that stories which bolster the "us-and-them" mindset get passed on and on, and added to a sort of collective storage bank of Reasons To Hate Gypsies, from which anyone can borrow.

Corke's Meadow, St Mary Cray, 1950s.
© Simon Evans - Stopping Places - A Gypsy history of South London and Kent

Long-time readers of this blog might remember an incident I recounted of coming face to face with this fear of Travellers when my truck-house was parked in an orchard in Kent. A woman whose house overlooked the orchard one day hurled abusive language and fearful assumptions like "well you might have dogs, you just don't know do you", "I just don't like having to look at you" and fears that many more vehicle-dwellers might turn up the following summer! I was amazed at the reluctance of people to just come and talk, to see what kinds of people were over there, to ask them questions, to give fellow human beings the benefit of the doubt... but the fear was stronger, and the next day a council official with a clipboard heralded the subsequent leave-taking.

Making primrose baskets in Dartford Woods, 1959.
© Simon Evans - Stopping Places - A Gypsy history of South London and Kent

Through living a travelling life, I learned that if your house is small and mobile, then when you stop, a lot of your belongings (bikes, buckets, spare firewood, washing, tin baths etc) will have to be put outside, under the vehicle or in the field - which is why a Traveller site can look so wonderfully ramshackle. I got to see from the other side both the warm kindness and the deep-seated fears and misconceptions in people. Since that time, other people have assumed that I lived that life out of necessity rather than choice - that I was forced to live in a vehicle because a house was not available to me. This is fascinating too - this lack of understanding of the plain love of the travelling life, and is related to that patronizing welfare-assumption that you hear/read in news reports about "Gypsy problems" - where they congratulate themselves on working to get the Travellers "into houses".

"Look at Corke's Pit, the way that that disappeared. I was born in Corke's Pit in an old wagon. One of my aunts born me, there wasn't no nurses come there, no doctors. Travellers lived there for years, didn't they? All that was done away with, they built bungalows there, the old prefabs were there. That's where the Travellers made a mistake: from Corke's Pit, they moved into the prefabs, that was the first of Travellers settling down. When they got into them, they didn't like them. We lived in a prefab for about three years and we bought a wagon and moved back out again."

- Joe and Minnie Ripley

Traveller children on Cobham site, 1960s
© Simon Evans - Stopping Places - A Gypsy history of South London and Kent

What I really wish for is that people would consult their own true, informed and fair judgement every time they come across Travellers, and base their opinions upon that. Not someone else's third-hand story or opinion, but their own judgement rooted in their own fearless and kind interaction with fellow human beings. I wish that people would expect the best of people and speak and act accordingly. I wish they would quietly keep their own counsel, and always approach another person directly and truly to find out their story.

"If I started talking in the Travellers' language, the biggest half of the words [the youngsters] don't know what I'm on about, they don't understand. The main reason is why, is because all the Travellers is not based together, not like it was years ago... but where the Gypsy kids have been parted up, the language is just dying out."

- Bill Smith

During my time travelling I met a Gypsy woman called Kathleen, who danced her handmade gypsy jig-doll on her knee to the guitar-playing of her husband Charlie around a fire one evening in Devon. Saying goodbye to her the next day, she gave me this card - with a print of a watercolour painting showing an old Gypsy stopping place (unfortunately I don't know the artist's name), and inside, a poem she'd written herself and wanted to pass on to me. I think it paints quite succinctly the life of a Traveller and it's a gift I treasure.

Many of the images and quotations in this post are taken from Simon Evans' excellent book Stopping Places - A Gypsy History of South London and Kent, which I bought in Faversham in Kent whilst I was travelling through, in a small museum of local history. It has proved the most well written, balanced and insightful account of the Travellers' story I've read yet, and it resonates with me particularly because I grew up in the South London / Kent area and so many of these places in the pictures are familiar to me - roads I went down to get to school, and so on. I had friends who would go hop picking as kids with the Gypsies in Kent, and I knew of houses in the area where travellers now lived. If you want a clear and fascinating account of the Gypsy life in the UK, I urge you to buy a copy of this book - it's full of many more wonderful pictures and moving verbatim accounts, not least the wonderful one at the end of this post by Brian Belton, with which Simon Evans also ends his book.

A Reading type Gypsy caravan, 1887 - old well-worn postcard of mine from the Museum of East Anglian Life, Suffolk.

In truth, I think settled and travelling folk share a great deal these days in terms of the kind of society and world we live in. I feel like the story of the Gypsies in the UK over the last century has been everyone's story: Since industrialisation, we've all had the green freedom taken away from us; we've all been hemmed in, both physically and spiritually by tarmac and city sprawl; we've all had our hats whipped off our heads by the sheer speed of modern life roaring past. The globalization of our minds and daily lives, of our food and our stories, has stopped each individual place mattering. Each individual hedge plant's voice is drowned out by the roar of sameness. Our common places have been sold - owned not by all of us any more. And we've all been herded into concrete ghettos, not free any more to go where we want and live however we want, unwatched, undocumented, wild and real. They've taken away our Atching Tan.

Sarah
© Simon Evans - Stopping Places - A Gypsy history of South London and Kent

"You cannot travel in this society. This society says, 'You cannot live an itinerant way of life.' Now, I think that as a Traveller I can identify other ways of travelling. I can identify other itinerancies. Where are the Travellers going? Well, they're going anywhere and everywhere, but without change you're not going nowhere, you're actually staying exactly where you are. That's the anathema to a Traveller way of life, to stay exactly where you are, you can travel in your mind, you can be a little more transient. I hope that what transient ways of thinking can bring to society, if that's not too grand a word, is the idea that everything moves. If it stays still then it stagnates. You see, Gypsies can't stay where they are. If they stay where they are then they're not a Gypsy. You can start to say, not 'where I've been or where I am', and moan about that, but 'where I want to go', and why I want to go there and the romance and the beauty and the joy of what's around the next corner. That's what really, at the end of the day, created Travellers, it wasn't something in your blood - we'll find a Traveller gene and we'll zap it so we won't have to travel any more. No, it's not that, it's a curiosity, a burning curiosity to know what's over there. I know what's behind me, I have a very good idea of where I actually am, but what I'm really, really interested in is what's over there. That's what I would want to stay dear to, not my caravan, but caravans in the mystical sense of the word, the caravans of the mind."

- Brian Belton

I leave you with my favourite clip from Tony Gatlif's wonderful film about the Gypsies' thousand year journey - Latcho Drom (meaning good road or journey). I wish that all of us could be like the little boy, and cross over the railway line fearlessly drawn by the warmth and music and wonder of the folk on the other side...

The Bagpipe Society

2011-10-13T18:09:00.002+01:00

"Pan is the son of Mercury; His head and body form the sign of mercury of the Philosophers,
at once solar and lunar. The star on the right is the hieroglyph for harmoniac salt,
the third component of the Art (which is often called the Art of Music).
Anon., 14th century, Biblioteca Mediceo-Laurenziana, Florence. Ms Ashburn 1166, f.18."
~ from Alchemy - The Secret Art - Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, Thames & Hudson 1973.

IN THIS ALCHEMICAL DRAWING from an anonymous 14th century manuscript in Florence, Pan, god of the wilds and of rustic music, plays a set of bagpipes.
A strange and earthy, wild and raucous instrument, the bagpipes evoke such old yearnings in us. In the words of bagpiper Andy Letcher:

"The bagpipe is an extraordinary instrument - half plant, half animal, a swine to play
but will sing like a bird - and it's this old, nearly forgotten, rumpled magic
of the thing that I want to share with the world."

Andy (my friend of Telling the Bees fame) works as part of The Bagpipe Society to rekindle in people a hearty love for this wonderful instrument. As part of this process, The Bagpipe Society has had a lick of paint here and there, and I was responsible for the decorations.
The initial request was for me to design a logo for the society which showed someone playing the bagpipes and the words The Bagpipe Society. So that's what I did...

They were pleased with it apart from a small request to make him a little more cheerful! So here's the final logo complete with (very slightly) turned up corners of the mouth:

And here's the whole page of my very rough sketch-workings:

I found inspiration from books of old illustrations and engravings...

All above illustrations from The Encyclopaedia of Illustration - Studio Editions 1990

There were also a few pennies left in the pot for me to create something extra for the website, and so with inspiration spewing from the mouth of a marginal foliate head...

Title page designed by Daniel Hopfer, Augsburg 1515
~ from Alphabets & Ornaments by Ernst Lehner, Dover 1968

... I created this:

A quite unexpected and penetrating-gazed Green Man Bagpiper, now piping his green song from the pages of the website. You can buy him and the Bagpipe Society logo printed onto various Items Of Usefulness from their merchandise page, or as prints from my shop.

Next year, March the 10th is set to be International Bagpipe Day, where everyone is encouraged to get involved and organise local grassroots bagpiping events. The Bagpipe Society also publish a quarterly journal called Chanter, which you get if you become a member. Do have a good peruse of the site, there's videos of all sorts of different pipes being played, and information of the yearly bagpipe festival Blowout.

I leave you with a video of Andy playing his English Border Pipes with Cliff Stapleton on hurdy-gurdy. The tune is one of Andy's and is called Asclepius (the Greek god of healing and an obscure hermetic text....)

The Wedding Dance by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1566 - source: Bagpipe iconography

Flowers in the Hair of Summer, Songs in the River of Green

2011-09-17T00:52:00.000+01:00

THESE GREEN EYES have looked out over my summer and seen the fire in the river, the wind in the song, the sky in the feet of our days. Our summer has worn flowers in her hair and uncoiled her jubilant tendrils through our thoughts. Mother to the scrapings-of-crickets and leaping-naked-into-streams, this World Woman has been leaving us small gifts in the grass and humming us songs of late evening under the wild open sky.

She stepped out of the summer and appeared under my paintbrush one afternoon whilst I was making the largest ever Once Upon O'Clock yet. The long and beautiful piece of Yew I painted it on was given to me by the commissioner - tipi-maker Ian Hamilton - who had asked for this clock as an anniversary gift for his wife, Merle. He told me many lovely things about his family, and the flavour of their lives, not least the fact that he and Merle were expecting a child, welcome but unexpected in their later parenthood. And then, in the shape of the piece of wood, I saw the pregnant belly of some sort of Mother Earth figure who gradually took shape as I drew...

Her left arm reached to the sun, where a hummingbird drank from a flower in her hand. Her legs curled into night time, and stars shone on her knees. Trees grew from her earth-flesh at all angles, pushing their roots into her armpits and between her toes. If you looked down on her round belly, you could see Ian and Merle's family dancing around a tipi-clock and all the while, flowers grew in her hair.

For me there's something lovely in her face, something kind and sad and powerful. Painting faces is my favourite of all things, but it is at the same time a strange phenomenon: an enormous strength of feeling is born in the process of creating a character, an empathic understanding with this just-met person. And all the while you shape them, darken their eye-sockets, choose the sparkle in their eye, they look back and consider you in turn.

You might remember that this clock had already been paid for in part with an enormous ex-army Arctic bell tent, and we took this very tent out again along the lanes of this land to Hampshire and the Uncivilisation Festival where we met Ian and Merle and handed over the clock. I'm happy to say they were delighted indeed, and I hope its ticking brings them abundance in their happiness, stars at their knees and flowers in their hair.

Our wonderful tent, a-smoking in the sunshine. Photo by Andy Broomfield, used with kind permission.

As ever, I seem to have been too knotted up in festival-overwhelm to take many decent pictures of Uncivilisation. Here above is my only photograph of our display, before we displayed any wares! (That easel held the original Dark Mountain painting.) And here below - a view from inside our tent - is the only one of my photos showing any evidence that there were other people at the festival!

We pitched our temporary home right in the middle of the action, which meant we had to retreat at intervals for a breather and tea and toast on the wonderful folding Frontier Stove.

This festival was one of the most interesting, conversation-provoking, soul-affecting gatherings I've been to yet. Whilst sharing a lot of perspectives with people at Uncivilisation, I had worried that I might find it too cerebral and discursive, that I'd feel an imbalance in favour of analysis against grubbiness... Indeed there was a heavy emphasis on talking about things to be done, but there was also scything and storytelling and foraging and a feral choir! The place was beautiful and wooded, and home to wonderful woodland structures like this, built by Ben Law...

Some of the land at Hampshire's Sustainability Centre is used as a natural burial ground, which saw us wandering on the Friday afternoon in nervous anticipation for that evening's storytelling performance unable to find a people-less corner for our last rehearsal. We walked further and further until we slowly began to realise that there were body-shaped mounds amongst the trees. Our search for a perch away from the graves was fruitless, and so I sat with my accordion at the far end of the land on a bench that looked like it had not been sat on in some time whilst Tom [do click - he has a fantastic new blog!] tied on his bear-mask and we told the story one last time without a live audience to the ears of the dead.

By the time the stars were out and the music had finished, people were gathering around our fire to be transported to that place somewhere in between Story and Old Russia under the dark dark sky.

I had made a very rudimentary projection device from a shoebox painted black, a torch and an old magic lantern lens; inside it I had taped an upside-down silhouette painting on perspex. And so behind our expectant firelit story-circle, a warm and undulating circle of light shone Baba Yaga's chicken-legged hut in the trees onto a white cob wall...

And then as I played the first few strains of a Slavic folk tune into the night, Tom emerged from the forest blackness in his magnificent bone-toothed bear mask ringing a bell...

What followed was a journey through worlds, meetings with bears and giants, otherworldly birds and Baba Yaga herself; not to mention a beautiful maiden, strips of flesh and a very deep hole...

The audience was entranced, Tom's telling was artful sorcery of the highest degree, brave youngsters announced themselves not at all scared, and my fingers only made one mistake. Our story, Ivashko Medvedko - Little Ivan, Bear Child, though apparently amongst many people's highlights of the weekend, seems to have become like a mythical beast, glimpsed only in grainy photographs in books about The Unexplained. Though over a hundred people watched, there's not a skerrick of video evidence, and just a couple of dark photographs of people's firelit faces listening. A million thanks to Helen Harrop who took this below and also snatched a recording of the end of the story as she walked towards the fire. It's quiet but there... Even the photograph of my projection is one I took during experiments at home!

Firelit faces, lost in a story. Photo by Helen Harrop, used with kind permission

I'm sure you'll know that duplications of these experiences can never be an adequate or fair substitute, and I think that what you imagine of this event is in fact truer than a video ever could be.

Sadly, we were busy with our stall for much of the weekend, and so missed things we'd have loved to have seen. We did, however, experience the wondrous Liminal - Dougie Strang's performance-experience in the woods at night, where we were led a merry dance through candlelit forest paths past strange-familiar glowing images in the trees and in the earth, otherworldly grunts, people on the wayside offering, asking, laying with the bones, and all the while we followed the sound of a flute...

The other powerful experience for me was on the last day - hearing Jay Griffiths speak eloquently and beautifully about the Songlines of West Papua, alongside Benny Wenda, an exiled West Papuan living in the UK, who spoke very movingly about his people's fight for freedom against Indonesia's brutal occupation, which is happening right now - still - in support of American gold mining companies who alongside sickeningly offensive Christian missionaries are raping the land and silencing the songs of its people.

We were also shown a film about the West Papuan struggle: Forgotten Bird of Paradise, made by Dominic Brown.

The whole film can be seen here.

This is a struggle we should not ignore - a genocide likened to that of the Aboriginal Australians whose land sings just 150 miles south of West Papua.

Many people who were at Uncivilisation have written artfully about their experience of it, notably Catherine Lupton, Amelia Gregory (+ here) and Charlotte du Cann who also wrote about the festival for the Independent and mentioned a certain Russian Storytelling. Paul Kingsnorth has collected reflections of the festival here and here and these all will give you a much better idea of the whole event than I can offer.

But I will say that no other festival has remained with me as a feeling long after the event as this one did. We made good friends there and talked a great deal about the ways and ideas of it all after returning home. I was left with a fondness for the honesty and unusualness of this thing, whatever it is.. for these people who are climbing the Dark Mountain.

The loudest song of our summer, however, has been the song of the moor. Dartmoor becomes more and more beloved the more time we spend out there.

When the days were longer than now, we took quite a lot of heavy belongings up into this wild wide place for three days to sleep under the sky.

We carried our chattels in short bursts past grazing Dartmoor ponies in the evening sun, and headed down into a river valley through bracken and granite.

We found an island in the middle of the river, all granite-bouldered and hidden in the willows.

There we lost time and found Dartmoor.

Cold cold water crashed past us on either side, and eddied and rushed and trickled and gushed... Granite river rocks made triangles of white water foaming over moss and lichen. Every stone changed the river's direction. It swerved and pushed, as quick as it could, under and over and round and through. Some rocks had stood in the river for so long that the river had run through them, leaving behind legends of fertility and disease-cure for those who passed through after it.

I loved the water. Cold on hot skin. Rocks slippery with moss and river. Hours crouched in the rushing, catching small waterfalls over granite in my hands.

By day and night we cooked over a fire in our cast iron dutch oven hanging from a tripod.

We washed potatoes in the river and tied hammocks to the low trees.

Buzzards called to us from the sky as we cooked dinner, and we glowed in our woodsmoked Skins Of Outside. All the small things mattered. Feet bare on warm stone, or sunken in boggy grass. Small pieces of bracken made strange shadow-symbols on the canvas. And the days and nights stretched long past each other.

Untented as we were, midges came to eat us in the mornings and we drove them away with a dawn fire and a cup of tea too early.

Then we'd sleep again and our dreams were strange. Not-roofed dreams. Dreams of this wide place that held us.

And all the while she looked on...

Finally, a great going-sadness on us, we packed up, leaving promises to return and charcoal-written thanks on the rocks.

When we walked out of that time, strong and full, we came to the edge of Dartmoor, which ended abruptly as the fields began.

And we returned home to our thatch-fringed sunlit morning window which now brings us a different air. That changing sunlight which looks the same but smells different... Autumn approaches.

A new batch of beautiful high quality giclée prints is for sale now at the gate of my shop. I've chosen my favourite few paintings and had them printed in archival inks on 310gsm Hahnemuhle German Etching paper and framed with an ivory coloured mount. Each print is signed and hand embellished, and I'm tremendously pleased with them. The limited edition for sale at The Imagine Gallery is beginning to sell at prices of £400 and up, so if you'd like a good quality giclée print of any of these six paintings at a lower price, now is your chance! These are slightly smaller and unframed, and an open edition, but the quality's just as good!

In a couple of days I turn thirty two. I'm happy. This year I've heard all the songs of the seasons' changing clearer than ever, I've felt known and loved by the one I love, and more deeply in love with the land.

The sun has made beautiful shadows through the branches and grasses of this year... I step boldly into the auburn months with my face to the wind, arm in arm with my beloved, under the high green cathedral of trees.

Photograph by Tom's talented artist sister Hita Hirons

Dark Mountain

2011-07-17T18:47:00.007+01:00

THERE'S A SOUND that comes from the hedgerows in July: a green sound, a great cacophony of young birds with new wings, shouting their proud freedoms over the million wonderful brown rustlings underneath; it's a warm song of summer beginning in earnest, and it sings to our hearts of adventure under the long-eveninged skies. Hedgerows and waysides have always sung to me like this, in their beautiful chords of the season. As a tiny child I keenly peered into the holes made by Who-Knows-Whats and thrilled at the knotwork sorcery of roots. On the verges grew a wild library for me: weeds and truant grasses thrived unnoticed and yet held in their pages stories I was sure were important and ancient and wise. I have never stopped loving those roadsides that flash by beyond car windows, those mighty green kingdoms of undergrowth bordering our highways and byways. And I have always suspected that the feeling conjured in me by an old old hedgerow, gripping the centuries-old earth banks as I walk alongside it, is somehow a key: a heart-sign, deep beneath words in me, calling me to follow.

The congregations of the waysides have always drawn me too: those outcasts and travellers, peddlers, hobbledehoys, lunatics and vagabonds who make their art in the ditches and say their truths to all who pass by. I've long felt this edge-territory home: I make camp behind the road signs, draw faces in the dust where the sparrows bathe, and I watch. And I wonder about them all travelling so fast past... Where are they going? Who are they travelling with? What would we talk about if they stopped for a pee?
Have you ever had your head turned by the wonderful incongruous sight of a Gypsy wagon parked up on a roundabout as you drove by, a horse grazing on verge grass, and a man lighting a fire in the middle of this green island-in-the-tarmac as the unceasing slick of traffic roars on? That's the feeling I'm talking about - the leap in your chest, the feeling of being eye-witness to a still-possible dream, the joy of knowing it.

These are strange times: many many people have stopped really believing in dreams, or at best have packaged them up in a sickly little dollshouse called whimsy. We have been told a fairly grim tale: a grey snake of a tale that eats its own tail to form the 9-to-5 hamster wheel of progress. There's always a but just after a wild thought, a rote-learned reason for not being able to live the life you really wanted, and civilisation put it there.
Yet still there's a truth within us that yearns and hammers at the insides of our chests when we spy something from that other place, that other time and it recognises us in turn. And the ones who paint the poems which cause our inner truths to hammer like this are the artists, the wild ones, the glorious nutters - we all recognise them. Fondest of all perhaps, we recognise Earth's own green poem ringing in tune with our heart-harp-strings.

And these, these are the tunes I hear coming from the pipe of that colourful-coated traveller there in my painting. The tune he plays is in the key of hedgerow and yearning, it is the colour of love and oak leaves, and its words are older and more familiar than the cries we ourselves made as babies.

I'm not a joiner of groups or a follower of isms. I don't like ideologies or the fences they put up. But I was utterly taken recently by a manifesto written by the excellent steersmen of something called the Dark Mountain Project. And not long after I found myself nodding in utter agreement with their words, they asked me to paint the front cover of their second book!

I've struggled somewhat to describe succinctly what exactly the Dark Mountain Project is when people have asked, but I hope that what I've written above conjures something of the spark in me that it feels akin to.
Their flag flies for something they call Uncivilisation (what better thing to fly your flag for?!) - a kind of steep brambly path towards some sort of wild and old truth which we are invited to head for as the citadels of civilisation crumble around us. The thing is, they say, in removing ourselves from nature (as if we were not part of it), we have forgotten the importance of stories, though they are being woven around us second by second in the advertisement-saturated fast-paced life of now. We are all constantly telling ourselves stories about How Things Are; these stories are tweaked and upheld and strive to keep us feeling safe. But their threads are coming loose and we're beginning to see the face of the Storyteller beyond the woodsmoke. He's reminding us of the old stories, the ones that thrummed in us and in the earth, the ones that were true, and not just sleeping pills to keep the economy "growing".

The Dark Mountain fellows cheer the outsiders too, of course - they call for them in fact - to come and climb this mountain, and to bring their stories, their paintings, their poetry to the fireside - so that we can find the old paths again. What I really like about Dark Mountain is that it's not a Way to be prescribed, it's perhaps something more like a language: mutable with time and tongue, adaptable to the speaker. And I like too that they uphold beauty as something important. Their books are an attempt to gather writing that speaks to this realness in us, the truth that recognises that things these days are not quite as we are being told, the truth that offers something different and beautiful.
Their books contain poetry, thought, essays, interviews, recipes, art, stories, histories, futures, all beautifully written. I was honoured to be asked to paint the skin of this endeavour. It's an important and resonant thing, and I urge you to buy a copy for yourself. It also coincides with and celebrates the 200th anniversary of the Luddite rebellion. Throughout the book, there's a focus on an honest acceptance of death, and a hopeful forward-looking, there's earthiness and lyricism. And who could not cheer on a project that promises to write with dirt under its fingernails?

Dark Mountain pages...

And so to my painting... here on a piece of scrap wood found in a skip I have painted a kind of Pied Piper - a figure and a story which have long lured me - but which also felt apt, as he too, boundary walker and soul-stirrer-music-maker, was heading for the mountains.... He plays an aulos - or diaulos - a double-piped flute from ancient Greece, often depicted being played by the god Pan, or other satyrs. It is a reeded instrument said to sound similar to the bagpipes (as one of the pipes would have played the drone, the other the tune). I gave my traveller a split pipe to hint at the dual nature of things, the alpha/omega, yin/yang wheel, without being too specific. He pipes up a tune for a gathering crowd of misfits who appear to be preparing for a journey. As always in my paintings, these folk are the odd ones. Amongst them are old and young, happy and weary, there's a cockerel, a handcart, conjoined twins of different races, and a certain hound. And the keen eyed will spot the one who was left behind in the original Pied Piper tale, who for me stands for something important too, here he's a misfit amongst misfits...

Their gold coloured road takes them past trees and wooden huts to unknown mountains under a skyful of three pale green wild birds. I was inspired partly in the design of this by Russian lacquer work painting, where warm-coloured figures and scenes are scattered on a black background.
There's debate as to where the children went after they disappeared into the mountain, but for me the Pied Piper is not such a malevolent character as he's painted. His multi-coloured outfit hints at his membership of the motley band of trickster-fools who have danced across boundaries throughout the ages poking at entropy and stagnation with their wit and word-sticks. Perhaps the children and the rats got to see beyond the next bend in the road, and to learn by heart the map-song that the Piper played to them.

If you'd like to come and hear a little of the Dark Mountain tune, they are holding an Uncivilisation Festival in August at the Sustainability Centre in Hampshire. There'll be talks by many of the Dark Mountain writers - Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine (the co-founders of the project) as well as wonderful poets/thinkers/writers/doers from the five corners of the map. I'm particularly looking forward to hearing Jay Griffiths (author of the incredible Wild, who has an extract from her forthcoming novel of Frida Kahlo's life in this Dark Mountain book.) Also... my Tom will be doing a most wonderful telling of an Old Russian Folk Tale on the Friday night of the festival - Ivashko Medvedko - Little Ivan, Bear-Child, (he's written a beautiful introduction to this here) and apparently I'm going to be there too, in a mask, illuminating his words with my accordion.... I'm proud and excited and a bit nervous.
We'll be selling our wares for the weekend from our canvas emporium and I'll bring this painting to show; I don't think it's for sale at the moment, though soon there'll be proper nice prints of it available.

But I shall leave you now under the green leaf of your day with this parting gift - a piece of genius poem-music that is for me the most eloquent description of the kind of feeling I find in the hedgerows of this land. It is my Piper's melody and, I think, something like the Dark Mountaineers' battle-cry; in it hums the echo of that oldest tune of all that stirs the bold...

It is an epic poem by bard musician Robin Williamson - Five Denials on Merlin's Grave - set to music in an intoxicating fourteen minute paean to this island of ours, to the magic and story woven through it and under it and by it, and it thrills my heart in a powerful and unique way. I found a second hand copy of the annotated printed poem published in the year I was born. Please, please sit for a while, and listen to this on headphones, or good speakers - it will send tears of remembering down your cheeks, and loose an impossible beauty in your heart.

Dark Mountain Book 2

The Dark Mountain Project

The Dark Mountain Manifesto

Uncivilisation Festival

* italicized words in the last two paragraphs are Robin Williamson's.

A Brush in the Blue Paintwater Jar of June

2011-06-22T23:41:00.016+01:00

WE ARE FROGS crouching disgruntled at the water's edge of a doubtful Summer. So far, this June feels like Mr Jeremy Fisher's slippy-sloppy larder; the air hangs damp and grey; we nip out between downpours to do late things in the garden, and nip in again to light the woodburner in a most unsummerly fashion, and to work at our desks in the warm. There were predictions of parched earth and hosepipe bans here in the South West, but standing under huge wet trees, their barks black with rain, we listen to the the drip-drip from the points of the green glistening leaves, and shake out our webbed feet, and disbelieve the weather forecast.

Here are a few painterly-printerly goings-on, some new, some past, some blue...

This old man in a wooden boat on a green garden sea is the Ancient Mariner, painted for an exhibition at the Imagine Gallery based around Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem. I chose to paint the old man himself rather than any scenes of ghostly stormy torment. And for canvas I found a piece of Sequoia redwood amongst the offcuts from the chainsaw carving at the wood fair, which had the heart of a branch-knot like a spear running through it. How perfect, I thought, to make this into the arrow with which the Mariner shoots the Albatross; and the slice of wood was boat-shaped too. So I fitted him into the shape of it, the albatross hung around his neck, so that the redwood arrow ran through both the bird and the Mariner's own heart.

The original painting, in oils, is for sale through the gallery now should anyone like to own it. The Mariner's right hand holds an anchor rope which winds around his boots... echoing a sad and true story in my ancestry: My great grandmother Elsie had a sweetheart when she was young whom she called "Blue" ... but she lost him away at sea - he was drowned when his foot got caught in the anchor rope, and she never really forgot him. I still have a tiny elephant made of ivory which belonged to her, into its flank she scratched his name.

And talking of the Imagine Gallery, I'm mighty pleased to announce that there's a limited edition (of 33!) of fine quality giclée prints of a few of my works available for sale there now too... they're hanging handsomely framed on the gallery walls, and the paper and print quality is so good, even I could hardly tell they weren't originals!

At the moment prints have been made of Baba Yaga, Snowflight Under the Seasky, Anja in the Horse Chestnut, A Girl Mad As Birds, Father Christmas and The Goods & Chattels Man, and they've all been hand embellished (i.e. signed, titled and numbered) by me. This edition of fine prints is all roughly at the size the originals were painted, which in the case of Anja in the Horse Chestnut means almost A1.

I also intend to start selling smaller giclée prints through my etsy shop soon for folks who would like a posher and more knobbly paper quality. Any recommendations of companies who offer this print service with good results would be most welcome - I've been sending off for sample packs from various places, and can't decide.

There've been quite a number of interesting jobs over the past months... some of which I've waited for apter times to tell you about. This is one of them. Tess Giles Marshall, (a hearty cheerer for my work who has commissioned a clock from me before) asked me to paint a banner for her superb new site Pilgrim's Moon - a celebration of cronehood and all that that enfolds. It is a "countercultural path for women, ageing on their own terms" and it's gathering crones and crones-in-waiting left right and centre: Women who rage against the madness of trying to look younger as they age, women who are interested in the wisdom-knots and fascinations that greater numbers of years bring them, and best of all, women who have chosen to take back demeaning old-women words - crone, hag, harridan, witch - and reclaim them for the power-words they are.

These are pictures of the painting in progress - from pencil beginnings to watercolour end. A small band of motley pilgrims make their way from one village to the next under the blue of a wide wild white moon and the strains of a fiddle tune along the way. Do go and sit round the fire that Tess is building...

And the last painting in today's gallery was another commemoration of a loss... this one was commissioned by Janey to celebrate the life and mourn the loss of a cat she loved for many years.

As with all commissions involving people, it isn't a portrait of either Janey or her cat, but rather a painting of her sadness and of a girl and a cat that might be Janey or someone else. I rather liked it in its blue circular simplicity. The original hangs on her wall in Australia now, but you can buy prints from my shop here.

Koshka in a Blue Dress

And whilst I painted a tiny ragged moth came to rest on my thumb, and then flew off again.

I don't know whether the sun will come back again, I hope it does - we are planting vegetables, and thinking of warm evenings of summer adventure and bare feet and songs under the stars and golden picnics in August.
Even frogs like to bask from time to time don't they?

The Wide Skies

2011-06-06T00:31:00.005+01:00

GOODNESS! It's June! Somehow we have leapt over Spring and a wet May, and stand barefoot and blinking on the other side in the tall dry grass. The green is no longer just emerging: it is wild and abundant! The hedgerows quiver and the leaves are warm. I'm sitting writing this looking out on trees and plants alive with industrious bees and sparrows, and scuffled-under by our three resident chickens. Since last I wrote, we've moved to our wonderful new house on the hill and spent time nesting in under the thatch. House moves are rather momentous and exhausting apparently, and it's taken me some time to gather my wits from amongst the fluff and old twopences at the bottoms of all the cardboard boxes as we've unpacked. We're hallooing at the wonder of our happily-found home and I shall tell you tales of this new and idyllic residence in due course, but there's rather a lot of other news to report too, not least an adventure to the other side of England (during which we visited both our families, Tom sat a Chinese Medicine exam and I completed two oil paintings!!) to tout our wares at my favourite fair: Weird and Wonderful Wood. So for today, I'll show you the wonders of that wonder, and hope over the next weeks to bring you a few more regular updates on things painterly, homely, masked and summerly...

This year's Weird and Wonderful Wood fair welcomed us in its own friendly arboreal way on the Friday evening to set up camp in good time for the weekend's impending festivities. This year I'd chosen to be outdoors again: I like it better on grass, and under the sky, and I am coming to a conclusion that the outdoors is my favourite gallery too.

We came equipped with the most excellent tent: A ten man ex-army Arctic bell tent, which came in part-exchange for a painting still in progress for tipi-makers Ian and Merle of Hummingbird Tipis. It's brilliant to be able to stand up in your tent, we have space to wander about inside... in fact if you'd wanted to swing a cat you could've. And to add to the luxury-under-canvas, we had our new portable woodburner to keep us warm in the evenings and on which to cook all our meals and brew all our teas. This fold-up wonder, The Frontier Stove, originally designed for use in disaster situations, just works so well. The stove pipe comes apart and stows away inside the burner, the legs fold up and you can carry it away in one hand; it burns hot on just a handful of gathered wood, and can be closed down with the damper to burn quietly for hours. It even has enough space on top for a frying pan of bacon and eggs, a pot of coffee, a pan of milk and two small breakfast breads. And so we ate and lived like Wayside Royalty and sat out under the wide East Anglian skies with mugs in hand and thoughts of summer.

In front of our tent (which sagged a bit round the edges due to the fact that the guy ropes are measured for horizonless Arctic wastes, not snug festival pitches – this will need to be further mulled upon for a solution, though it was fine inside) we constructed a canvas emporium with an ochre roof, alder supports and garden trellis for walls. Ropes tied to trees and ground pegs held it all up and the interior was a patchwork of assorted fabrics and old carpets. Pictures were hung inside, and bunting triangles (cut out gallantly by Tom's mum from her vintage fabric collection) were attached to guy ropes to prevent midnight accidents. The Mad Hatter grinned from a tree, and a witch perched atop an easel on which rested a brand new painting (about which more soon).

But the crowning glories of this year's display were Tom's Magnificent Masks! We hung them between tent and tree and all down the tent-mast where they watched passers by with mischievous interest. These beautiful Smickelgrim Masks are exquisitely handmade from oak-tanned leather, hand painted with leather dyes and polished with Tom's own-recipe beeswax polish made with the help of local Dartmoor bees. I'm dearly and immensely proud to see our creations displayed together like this, don't they match perfectly?

But this brilliant project of Tom's is only just beginning, and awaiting a website and all (which the multi-talented maskmaker will create once he's finished his end of year Acupuncture exams!), so I'll not tell you the whole masquerade here, I'll just whet your appetite with a few pictures and with a whispered hint that there are some masks appearing for sale in Tom's etsy shop now for early birds (or indeed discerning vagabonds, incognito Romantics and stylish revolutionaries) in need of a disguise. This is just a trial price too, so be quick to be the first canny owners of these harlequinned works of art!

The fair passed in a whirl of faces and fascinations, and I'm sorry to say my photo-documenting was a little thin on the ground. I got none of the cosy interior of our tent, so you'll have to wait until its next outing for those. But our shop was busy with old friends and new friends and everyone in between. I was delighted to meet the flesh-and-bone versions of a few folks from this online world, particularly Francois Latreille, who was travelling the UK for some months before heading home to Canada and the beginning of his studies, and whose path steered him through Suffolk for this fair and to give me a poem, and Julie Howe who gave us candles :)

Friends and families came too: here I am with young Taliesin, dear son of friends Poppy and Curt (and Macha who is looking more like some sort of heraldic weasel). And we were happily pitched by Ash and Sarah whose wagon was the scene of last year's idyllic firelit evening.

This year they were selling vintage books and their own glass-etched brilliant signs. Their daughter Tilly was proffering wares too...

In between us Candy Sheridan had her resplendent Roma caravan and old-time Gypsy-painted wares. On our other side were Jon and Amalia, makers of the artfully blacksmithed Windy Smithy woodburners.

And the rest of the fair? Well I hardly left my perch, but in brief dashes to buy lemonade or nip behind a bush, I spied many inspiring and industrious folks conducting a thrilling range of workshops for children and adults alike... all with wood in one form or another.

There was puppet making, paper making, withy weaving, spoon carving, and a myriad other distractions. That's our friend Jason Parr teaching folks to carve spoons – he gave us one each too; aren't they lovely?

There was impromptu music and wandering stilted tree-people, there were pole-lathers and artisans, timber framers and axe carvers, chainsaw carving using a fallen trunk of sequoia from which I squirrelled offcuts for future paintings, and drawers of old tools through which to rummage: we brought home a mallet of wood and a mallet of copper, and a handsome machete which now chops our kindling.

These fairs are always an exhilarating melee of inspiring and enjoyable and exhausting talk, earth and wooden tent pegs and woodsmoke and damp socks, money changing hands, faces familiar and new and half-remembered, children and animals and ice-creams, dirt under your fingernails, wandering performers and minstrels-in-the-distance, wonderful handmade artefacts and battered old bric-a-brac, ale and bunting, and the glowing tiredness of sun-browned cheekbones.

At the end of it all, wares and wherewithal packed small, we took Macha and a bottle with a mouthful of cider left in it and a small tray of halva for a walk in the wide green Suffolk fields under the wide blue Suffolk sky and we sat amongst the stems, jangling-eared and happy, and Macha swam like an otter through the barley.

A Wayfarer's Cabinet of Curiosities

2011-04-18T19:16:00.022+01:00

THESE ARE THE BLOSSOMS of the Wayfaring Tree, a shrub common along the lanes of Southern England, which could be confused with Elder, except that it flowers earlier and bears a scent not nearly as sweet. Its leaves can be used to make a black hair dye, and its name was told to us on a recent happy wayfaring to visit our dear friends Andy (writer, professor, bagpiper, musician extraordinaire) and Nomi (rope-swinging aerialist, MA student in Gender Studies, artist extraordinaire) in Oxford.

Goodness! What a cornucopia of enchantments they offered to us on these balmiest early April days. Artfully they whisked us through a plethora of wonders - musical and museological and memorable. On the Thursday evening we were treated to the open-mic delight of song and story that is Oxford's legendary Catweazle Club, where anybody can come and perform their art to a warm and friendly room of folk. Sitting on the floor listening to extremely good and unknown musicians playing just there is a tremendous thing. There was storytelling and poetry too, most notably by Alan Buckley. Catweazle is also the place where Andy's wonderful darkly crafted folk band Telling the Bees met some years back.

Friday saw us tripping through the old and sunny city.We walked along towpaths where narrowboats hung in the quiet greenblue world-just-outside-the-city that is the canal, festooned with new spring leaves and joyous birdsong.

(above photograph by Nomi)

There were even boats within boats.

We were taken through eminent doors,

down interesting lanes,

past ancient tomes,

under green men;

we walked in quadrangles

(above photograph by Nomi)

and stepped into museums...
And oh! The cabinets of curiosities that awaited!
The Oxford Museum of the History of Science houses scientific instruments of golden and intricate beauty, painstaking craftsmanship and alchemical intrigue...

Medieval Islamic astrolabes and orrerys and compasses and Chinese incense clocks and planetary spheres

(please click to look in detail)

and tables for communicating with angels

and satirical snuffboxes

and paintings of old alchemists

and Chinese Feng Shui compasses

And then, to stir our curiosity-cauldrons even deeper we stepped into the dimly lit Aladdin's cave of the Pitt Rivers Museum. I really cannot believe that I've never been to this wondrous place before, but I shall most definitely have to return, with a bagful of time and sketch books.

Its crowded display cases of objects apparently pillaged from all four corners of the world at the end of the 19th Century are themselves crowded in the main museum court, forming a mazelike network of passages between them, where at every turn you are stopped in your tracks by wildly astounding and often horrific anthropological artefacts.

The arrangement of the objects within the cases appealed to my cave-hoarder nature: things were crammed together in cabinets of curiosities arranged by theme rather than by any cultural identity; but I liked this, and spent ages peering through the glass and reading the hand written labels which were sometimes obscured by another treasure placed on top. There were drawers too beneath the cases which could be opened and explored.
I took many many photographs, though mostly they were taken without flash in the museum half-light, so I've ended up with yellowed and blurred images which suggest some sort of dark magic hallucinatory reverie, though actually this conjures the experience very well.
To avoid long strings of photos, I've bundled them together by theme, just like the Pitt Rivers' display cases themselves. They'll be too small to see detail unless you click to enlarge them, which I heartily and gruesomely encourage you to do!...

There were cases and cases of amulets and charms, magics from North, South, East & West, beads and bones and divinations...

There were masks to frighten and delight, beautifully and powerfully made.

These below are wooden carved and painted Japanese Noh masks.

And from masks to actual heads, we came abruptly to the cabinet rushed to by children visitors on arrival at the museum: The Shrunken Heads! These shrunken heads or tsantsas form part of the "treatment of dead enemies" display and come from tribes of the Upper Amazon region of South America. A shrunken head was made by removing the skull and brain and boiling the skin and then shaping the features with hot pebbles, sewing up the mouth and eyes with thread and blackening the skin with vegetable dyes before stringing the head on a cord to wear around the neck. The making of tsantsas was part of a ritual which pacified one of the dead enemy's three souls which resided in the head. This was believed to form a post mortem kinship between the enemy and the killer's tribe.
The dead enemies cabinet housed some gruesome and disturbing exhibits, the shrunken heads are in the top right and bottom left of the image below.

There were cabinets full of gods,

beautiful Buddhas crouching between cases

and plump Syrian bronze birds.

But the cabinet which drew me to linger longest was the collection of folk magic artefacts. Such strange and wonderful curses and cures: hag stones, mandrake roots carved into men, moles' feet (to ease toothache), a bottle said to contain a witch, curious cloth hearts, stuck with pins (for witchcraft purposes) and an object said to be a toad, stuck with thorns (for witchcraft purposes)... oh I was captured!

(please do click to enlarge and read the wonderful labels)

The dark materials we found in these museums put us strongly in mind of Philip Pullman's Alethiometers and trepanned heads, and I am sure he found inspiration there too. Indeed, we've been inspired since to revisit his marvellous Oxford again by way of the unabridged author-read audiobook whilst we work.

~~~

And then, as if that was not illumination enough, evening took us down past Port Meadow, a tranquil water meadow which lies just minutes from Andy and Nomi's home. By day it was green and blue and calm, edged by grazing horses and blossomed branches and dipped in by herons.

By night, it had turned amber under the setting sun as the last duck floated home.

And on that orange and mauve evening we walked by the water to find the cluster of trees beyond where we would gather with friends that night. And there Nomi hung lanterns and bunting whilst firewood was collected and people crept in.

Sometimes occasions just collect goodness to them, and the minutes settle themselves into the fire like sticks, tessellating into the perfection of the night, and you recognise that clear familiar joy under the stars of being outside by a fire with the edge-folk you love so.
It was a beautiful gathering, and we were blessed with the most exquisite music you could wish for. Sharing the fire with such accomplished musicians makes for quite a stirring experience, and I am happy to share a little of that magic here for you:

The firelit musicians' faces are those of three quarters of Telling the Bees, and all three members of Brythonic folk-dance band Wod - you can hear English bagpipes, fiddle, guitar, flute, and Anglo concertina. While they played the sparks wrote fiery hieroglyphs on the windless night, we held hands over the curled dog between us, and we smiled.

~~~

Our journey home was broken by an lovely pause at Cadbury Iron age hill fort in Somerset, which is reached by an ancient track carved by centuries of feet into the hillside. On top we sat with a thermos and snack looking out over the green Somerset levels until dusk and the rest of the road to Dartmoor urged us on.

Dartmoor welcomed us back with blackthorn blossoms of delicate and exquisite beauty.

And Macha treads once again on her carpets of Celandine and Bluebell-to-bloom, looking for things that smell delicious under the trees.

We are in the eye of a happy Spring whirlwind at the moment though. There are fairs, which you are all cordially invited to, whether you are near by or far off. First, on Friday 22nd April, there's a Spring Artisan Fayre in Chagford (<- flyer over there to the left) at which I'll be selling prints and my Tom will be selling his incredible handmade leather masks which I've seen emerging over these past weeks. They'll be available online soon too, but this is a small local unveiling of sorts, and I secretly think he'll sell out!

In May we're off to the always brilliant Weird & Wonderful Wood fair in Suffolk on May 14th & 15th, and there'll be more as the year rolls on. Do come along and say hello if you're about. If you're not, please come by my online stall and come buy! There are a few originals for sale in the shop just now too, some of them professionally framed. All this roll-upping is an attempt to boost the coffers because of an exciting hillock on our happy road... we're moving house!

This little cottage has been sweet and just the thing, but two of us and a hound and an inordinate number of elbows seem to be poking out of its seams. We long for a garden and fields to step out into, for a bath, and vitally - a room that isn't also the living room to work in. And this is just what we've found! An ancient thatched cottage on a Hill of Trees, with room to grow vegetables and to dream green expansive dreams.

I shall tell more of this exciting new chapter soon, but for now, I'm away to contemplate the bedroomful of cardboard boxes and just what vegetables to plant and other such Spring busies. It's all rather wonderful, actually!

Spring tripped

2011-03-29T18:01:00.018+01:00

UNDERNEATH our feet and underneath our eyelids and underneath the dead leaves of last year something has been happening. It came tentatively at first: shyly stepping in, still wrapped in a cloudwool scarf that it might still need. And at its knock, we got up out of our deadwood armchairs and stretched our stiffened arms in the sun.

Morning walks amongst the trees have breathed warm green into us. And the birds have sung us their heart-bursting songs of New. Always always at the turning of a new season I am reminded of all the others I have lived through. Glimpses like scents of previous Springs float past, and I am thrilled by the trilling of the birds who are glad and agree in my bones that things are warming.

There was a point near Spring's beginning, though, when the year's wheel hesitated; it got stuck in a rut in the road. The eager early blooming flowers were surprised by late frosts - we saw ice-edged daffodils hanging their heads in sheepish dismay. The first bursts of our own new-found energy for work and ventures got blocked too in the juddering starting of the engine of the year, and wilted like frost-bitten petals, bloomed-too-soon.

Even down in the water on the common there was a hiccup where day by day as we walked by we'd watched the black specks in their frogspawn jelly morph gradually into tadpoles. When the late cold came the water froze over and trapped within its icy crust a good many little swimmers who had been wriggling trustingly toward froghood, now halted forever in their growing.

I broke the ice for them: a cold photographic slide depicting their frozen moment of death - never-to-be-frogs encased in a beautiful snapshot of air bubbles and green green pondweed.
There was even still some unhatched frogspawn, which had been iced too, but underneath the ice their brothers swam on.

Not until I got home and opened up these photographs did I notice their little brown mouths and pinprick eyes and minuscule handlike frondlike gills, which in time they will reabsorb along with their tails, and hop out of the water in their new amphibious costumes. For now, the water is a mass of brown wriggling.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When the days were still grey, we went out to Wistman's Wood again, and sat amongst the elphame trees and green rocks there, stunned as I think I always will be in that place, by its beautiful strangeness. As we were about to leave, we glimpsed wild Dartmoor ponies at the top edge of the woods.

They were not scared as we approached, and continued to nibble (moss perhaps) from the tips of the branches. Dartmoor's umbers and greys and mosses made a wild and quiet backdrop for their chestnuts and whites and coppers. And dappled on the hill they gently walked and chewed as the valley stretched on below them and we went home.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

But after a false start, Spring returned in earnest a few weeks ago. The days lately have been celebrations of sunshine and even pigeons sing in the mornings now. We have walked in the trees where the light paints the moss on their trunks brighter than it has been for nearly a year.

I stand with the sun on my back and the young trees stretch up with purpose and hum in that light which could only come through the branches in March. As we walk through the trees, it is warm enough to stop, and to sit amongst them listening to their hopes for the day and the sound of a slight smile in their voices.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Everywhere is bursting out: shoots and buds and openings occupy all quarters. New growth emerges from the elbow in a thorny stem; trees send forth their green spears; new buds grow on branches where old leaves still cling.

Through the dead carpet green bursts regardless. Here at this still moment we see life turning; we see life-in-death and know also that Death is always there, hands held in the merry dance with Life, skipping in a circle underneath our every moment.

A dead fox appears on our path one morning, mysteriously flung there by the roots of a tree, no sign of a fight, perhaps a bullet hole in amongst its still beautiful fur.

And days later Tom discovers a whole cow rotted to bones. We return that evening with rucksacks to collect, and marvel at the heavy bulk of the pelvis and the great skull full of herbivore's teeth. The vertebrae make a ladder in the grass, the tail tip is a witch's finger and the leg bones weigh heavy as a log.

How long this cow has been here, we don't know. The lower jawbone is elusive, and the other bones are scattered wide. We ponder the cow's demise whilst imagining the bones hung in the trees as eerie wind-chimes for the evening.

And then the celandines begin singing, awake and happy and holding dew on their yellow tongues. The waysides are stirring green again: a wild larder and my favourite of all gardens.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

All through this Spring, we've dreamt and worked and laughed and walked. There was a House-that-Wasn't and a House-that-Will-Be. There has been sky gazing and hound running and vegetable dreaming and equinox celebrating. But that is all I'll say for now...

Branches against dusk skies made a labyrinth of fingers, filigree as the blood vessels on the back of your eye, and the clock on the churchtower chimes now over daffodils as yellow as bright as the promised sun, and yellow as the tune on my lips.

Owl Words

2011-03-11T17:42:00.013Z

WESHIMULO the Gypsies call her - Ghost of the Woods - hoohoo could she be?...
Owls have fared badly in folklore in general, being portents of death and ill omen:

Men beoþ of þe wel [owl] sore aferd. þu singst par sum man shal be ded: euer þu bodest sumne qued [evil].
~c. 1250 Owl and Nightingale - ed. J W H Atkins

The oule ek, that of deth the bode bryngeth.
~c.1374 Parliament of Fowls - Chaucer

Whil'st the scritch-owle, scritching loud,
Puts the wretch that lies in woe,
In remembrance of a shrowd.
~ c.1595 A Midsommer Night's Dreame v. i. - Shakespeare

In 1934, an old country-man told of the death of a common acquaintance. "And .. it weren't no more nor I expected. I come past his house one night, and there was a scret owl on his roof, scretting something horrible. I always reckon to take notice of them things."
~1936 The Gods Had Wings - W J Brown

{All quotations above were taken from The Oxford Dictionary of Superstitions edited by Iona Opie and Moira Tatem}

In medieval bestiaries owls were described as an allegory for the Jews, since they "shunned the light". And indeed superstitions of bad owl-omens are found across the world: many Native American tribes held beliefs that owls were harbingers of death, some even describing death itself as "crossing the owl's bridge". A Mayan religious text describes owls as messengers of Xibalba (the Mayan "Place of Fright"). And in Cameroon the owl has no name at all, it is simply referred to as "the bird that makes you afraid". But not all mythology tells terrible owl-tales, some cultures think of owls as spirits of their dear departed, and others consider them lucky talismans. In Russia, hunters used to carry owl claws to help them climb to heaven when they died. In India owl-eye broth was believed to cure seizures in children and cause one to be able to see in the dark. And in England the practice of nailing an owl to the door to ward off evil continued into the 19th Century.

But of course, probably the most oft thought of owl-quality is that of wisdom. Indeed, I have painted the owl before as animal-symbol of the sixth chakra, associated with far-seeing and psychic perception. Owls are often depicted as bespectacled librarians, keepers of knowledge.
From Athena, the ancient Greek goddess of wisdom to Blodeuwedd, the flower-faced goddess of Welsh myth, owl goddesses were powerful shape-shifting women. Marija Gimbutas in The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe traces veneration of the owl as a goddess, among other birds, to the culture of Old Europe, long pre-dating Indo-European cultures.

I present here three owl works of mine painted in recent weeks. The first, a new Once Upon O'Clock, commissioned by Nicholas as a gift for his mother. He told me she loved owls and books and trees. So a wise owl hides in a tree hole with his book, as time turns around him in these dusk woods.

please click to enlarge

But what is he reading? Words about himself I think... the owl-eyed linguists amongst you will spot words for owl in many languages*, painted tiny underneath the clock hands.

The Word Owl Clock is painted on a piece of apple wood which I show you here in my hand to give you an idea of the size of these clocks.

It was good to be clockmaking again, and another (with Gypsy flavour) will follow soon.

The wisdom or wordiness of owls is interesting, specifically in relation to a particularly curious play on words that I noticed some years ago between two Russian words. In Russian, owl is сова (pronounced sova) and word is слово (pronounced slova).. and it struck me that this word play would make an intriguing basis for a painting.

It's interesting how ideas germinate and gestate. When I thought of painting this сова-слово idea, I vaguely imagined some sort of rich Slavic-flavoured design, like a lubok, perhaps, with Cyrillic lettering and folk imagery. But how far from this the final work ended up!
I sit down at the drawing board in a certain state of mind, and let my pencil take the lead, and it still surprises me how surprised I can be at how my own work turns out! In fact this one has been rather a wrestle. The usual arc of creation-beginning-elation to looming-failure-depression followed the first few pencil strokes. And I suppose I didn't help myself (or the work) by deciding that I needed to step away from my comfort of tried and tested tools and media.

in progress

This is painted in gouache mostly - a paint I know little about, and am not used to using (the only other time I have used it was to paint that Hermitage blog header image up there!). I seem to use paints entirely not as one is supposed to. Oils I paint thin and watered down with a tickle of a paintbrush so minuscule it could have been a flea's toothbrush. Watercolour I use in tight small areas, and layers, paying no heed to the masters' techniques of washes over wide vistas of pale sky, and unworried flicks to denote figures. So I suppose it follows that gouache has foxed me a little; I understand it is best used for tight, opaque, detailed painting, which explains my difficulties covering large areas with it successfully. I was painting on paper too, and when the whole thing began to get the better of me, I left the paper there on the drawing board which is also in our living room and let her watch me for some days....
During which time, Tom and I walked with Macha out in the evening woods, and we heard hoo-hooing, and saw a shape flap onto a branch in the nearly dark just by us. There a Barn Owl preened. As we watched, we hooted hand-hoots and she hoo-hooed back.

The "her" that emerged was an owl-woman - a woman becoming a bird. She looks wistfully out of her owl-eyes at who knows what. She writes, with a feather from her almost-wing; she writes on the sky and on the tree: words of words and words of owls.
Owl-word, Word-owl, Owl, Owl, Word... Owl...

Behind her broods a dark turquoise sky. I looked at the painting for some days when the sky was still plain, feeling that the "something" that was still not quite right must be the emptiness of the sky, and so I sat down with another unfamiliar medium: pastels! Almost never have I used them before, but in the spirit of boundary pushing and desperation to salvage a possibly disastrous work, I carried on. Over the sky I drew pale stars, surrounded by dotted Van Gogh lines, and in amongst: more owl words, written by her. I added pastel to her feathers too, and her hair.

please click to enlarge

But still it wasn't right. She crouched there for more days in our living room, looking woefully at me, while I felt unable to resolve her.
In the end I sat down to work more on the painting and realised it was finished, even though I was unhappy with it. Knowing when you are done with something is an art and a half. So often for us perfectionists, the finish can only be reached with excellence, with a sense that you have done good and achieved. But of course much of the time we don't do good: In my own opinion I sometimes make utter failures, mostly I make sort of adequate mediocrities, and very occasionally: a really wonderful piece of true good work. But whether something is finished or not isn't really related to this sense of achievement. And after all, what, or who is the work for? A piece I may consider disastrous, someone else may love. Something might just perhaps speak through my arrangement of lines and colours to someone else in a language I am quite unfamiliar with. And it is for this reason that I am showing you this painting here, even though I feel the awkward shame of "exposure" in failure. Perhaps one of you might love this?

Slova Sova - print available here

So I rolled this painting up and thought on it for a few days... what ever happened to the original flavour of an idea? Could I make a little drawing closer to what I'd originally intended?
There followed this...

A small pencil drawing in my sketchbook, begun without definite direction in mind, but finished with some sort of pleased feeling, as if this had worked. Not in a brilliant masterpiece kind of way, but it reached its completion in a different place from our owl woman on her branch. I cannot really explain it.

Here two children hoo-hoo through their hands, but they too are the hoot. This owl sings her owl words through children hooting in the woods at dusk, just as we did on that other evening when the other painting wasn't working.

Who the Owl Said - print available here

I sometimes wonder if I am the hooted child, and my work the hooted word. But who is doing the hooting? Who is the owl?

SOME POST SCRIPTS:

The recording of owl calls are from Owl Pages, where much owlish information, mythology and hootery can be found.

And should you wish to buy a print of either of these owl-works, they are perched now in the evening tree of my etsy shop.

Just the other day I found evidence that I was not the first to note the Slavic sova-slova word play. Here's a linocut by Solomea Loboda (found in an owl menagerie on the ever excellent Animalarium blog) of a Ukrainian folk rhyme about the owl which rhymes these two words, and also vindicates my use of an а at the end of слово!

*German, Russian, English, French, Estonian, Polish, Bulgarian, Dutch, Norwegian, Hungarian and Finnish respectively.

The Gate at the Edge of The Village

2011-02-25T12:06:00.013Z

UP ON THE HILL we climbed yesterday, you could smell sun on the low morning air and see specks of buzzards fly far below. Our lungs and hearts stretched and filled with the day, we drank a thermos of tea and looked down over the roofs of the houses of our village. Small as a train set, arranged at the foot of these two hills like the imagined place of a child's game, set out on the green patchwork carpet of Devon in their nursery.

There's been a conversation crackling the airwaves lately, about blogging and the mysterious interconnectedness of it, why we do it and how it inspires.. et cetera. It all began with questions brought up in an interview I did recently. I am the latest to be invited Around The Table With Howard and Rex - the duo behind the emerging graphic novel John Barleycorn Must Die. Howard Gayton, its writer, is the husband of Terri Windling; and Rex van Ryn, its artist.. well, I'd best not shed any light on this shady character... I leave you to investigate further yourselves.

This was the first time I'd been interviewed face to face like this, and it was mighty interesting as a process, especially since the discussion was with people working in the arts themselves.

Part One was posted last week and Part Two is up today. Reading back over what I said has the slight awkwardness of hearing my own voice on the answer machine, and at times I think I made more sense in speaking than I do in text. Nevertheless we touch upon some delicious topics, like inspiration and tricksters, being true to your art, and the nuts and bolts of the creative process, which is what they have been exploring in all the Round The Table With interviews so far. Do go and read, there's even music from some Imaginary Gypsies...

So from here a baton was taken and quite a team has grasped it and run on. So far with varied and fascinating reflections on blogging, there's been musing going on at: Terri Windling's Drawing Board, A Mermaid in the Attic, Ravenwood Forest, Theodora Goss' blog, Lunar Hine's blog, Midori Snyder's In the Labyrinth, and Erzebet Yellowboy's blog. In fact Tom and I even continued the conversation on blogging with Terri and the dogs on top of the other hill overlooking our village the other day:

What a strange and cumbersome word that is - blog - but I like where it came from: a web log, like a ship's log, you can perhaps imagine us all pegging our log entries onto a huge web for the general perusal of spiders everywhere.

The friends above all give their reasons for blogging, which touch upon connection, friendship, and the sharing of delights. Once this Hermitage was mentioned as an example of artisan blogging, a term I liked very much. It has become a vital part of the work of so many self employed artists and craftspeople, and as I say in my interview, I would not now be lucky enough to spend my days painting for a living without it. But I am amazed at how blogging is still catching on, and gathering new enthusiasts daily, I thought I was late to the party when my talented friend Gretel Parker urged me to begin a blog some years ago. (I am continuously thankful to her for this!)

But, the other themes that seemed prevalent to me across the On Blogging posts mentioned above were those of time and boundaries. How near to your garden gate do you allow your followers? How much time can you give to this? Can your blog act as a sort of butler to answer your door - an intermediary between your studio and the world?

I find myself like a child in a sweetshop with a great long list of visually inspiring and well written posts popping up in my reader daily. But in my topsy turvy way, this frequency and abundance is also terrifying to me. Soon enough I tune out and find the never-ending stream overwhelms me. I put an awful lot of energy into the posts I make here, and they are fewer and farther between than most folks'. I am continuously amazed at the apparent productivity of the artists whose doings I follow, and the fact that they can also find time to write about it all.

I think the internet is a truly wonderful thing - a knowledge disseminator, a connector of like minds, a democratizer, a mind expander... but we must handle it carefully. It is easy to become lost in its forests and, most unappealingly I find, become dulled with the brain-fug of too much choice. I would like to find a simple path through this wood, where we do not forget the feeling of damp earth under our feet, and the breath of things that do not contain a silicon chip.

The wonderful and appreciative things you all say here and on email really do make me smile, your words encourage me and remind me that I am apparently tending a good garden here. Thank you. I love too that many of you settle down with a cup of tea with my posts. I am flattered and delighted at that quiet appreciation.

For those of you with a whole pot of tea beside you, I have written before on similar but different threads: Vagabond Villages & Transient Towns (from my travelling days), and ...Considerations on Artistic Conversation.

This little blog-torch-passing phenomenon has been described as A Moveable Feast, an Imagined Village.

The minuscule village scattered below us yesterday is just that - an imagined and manifested community of wonderful artistic folk, amongst whom I am lucky to live. But I think too on the transience, the moveability of our arts.. the way the inspiration is passed along from one to the next to the next and back round again. We are all travelling and standing still, looking down from the hilltop. Artists as gatekeepers, we are, oiling the hinges of the gate to that Other Place...

Look, there in the distance - the beginning of Dartmoor - the wild expanse beyond.