What grief weighs

FOR A WEEK our hills and roofs and lanes and plans have been under a white blanket of snow. And all through those muffled bright-quiet days of strange hibernation, I was in bed ill, unable to go out and enjoy the cold beautiful winterness that shone in eerily through the cottage windows. Instead I read voraciously whilst my dear Tom brought me broths and tonics. The combination of being snowed in and bunged up added a layer of odd sadness to my days; I felt the winter whispering its song of profound death and stopping, as we huddled inside, unable to do anything but stop. 

The snows are gone now, replaced by howling winds. These cold dark January days have pricked the hearts of several people dear to me with the sadness of death, and in their beautiful griefs, I honour them.

Dear friends Andy and Nomi, with whom we spent happy days just before Christmas, are now struggling to hold the huge sadness of losing their baby, in the womb five months. They have spoken eloquently of this, the unfathomable sorrow of having to give birth to a baby already dead, and of her naming, and her being. To Lyra May I send love.

A week ago my friend Gretel Parker, whom many of you will know through her wonderful illustration, felt-craft and well-loved blog, lost her life-partner and sweetheart Andy, who was found dead in the snow last Sunday. I am reeling from this news, and cannot imagine what Gretel is feeling. A campaign has been started by her friends to help her manage financially in these next months, as Andy had no will. His wage supported them and enabled their recent purchase of their forever-house, so if you can help Gretel in any way not to have to think about money in the midst of her grief, I know her huge online community of friends would be grateful. 

And this week saw the one year anniversary of the death of our dear friend Thomas. In Friday's cold snow, a gaggle of his friends and beloveds climbed the hill where he is buried and planted hundreds of trees in the earth where he lays. We miss him terribly. But this year I have watched his wife Lunar navigate this, the sharpest of paths, with a grace and strength I didn't know was possible. She has flown on warrior-wings through the feather-ripping gales of grief. She has mothered her young daughter with skill and beauty. She has honoured her own grief with the pain and tears and joys and memories and humour and discomfort and incongruity of the days that follow on. I am honoured to call her a friend; she emboldens us with her strength.

The photograph above was taken in 1926 by Alter Kacyzne, a writer, poet, journalist and passionate photographer of Jewish life in Poland. The photo shows the village gravedigger of Biała Podlaska, Lublin province, teaching his grandson to read, whilst the boy's grandmother looks on with pleasure. 

Most of Alter Kacyzne's photographs were completely destroyed during the second world war. The only pictures which survived, together with the captions he gave them, were those he sent for publication to the American Yiddish journal Forwerts.

Alter Kacyzne was beaten to death together with five hundred other Jews in the cemetery of Tarnopol by local Ukrainian collaborators during the German occupation of Warsaw, and his wife perished in the Belżec death camp. Their daughter was sheltered by a Polish family and so survived the occupation. Who knows how many of the subjects of his beautiful photographs died similar deaths at the hands of the Nazis?

One of the books I read whilst in my snow-confined sick bed was Fugitive Pieces by Canadian poet Anne Michaels - a beautifully-wrought work telling two Holocaust stories with a fierce art and a fine delicacy, and of love's power, even amid such atrocity as humans are capable of. 

Near the end of the book, I read this:

The night you and I met, Jakob, I heard you tell my wife that there's a moment when love makes us believe in death for the first time. You recognise the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief, you said, is the weight of a sleeping child.

And I think that's true.

A Brush in the Blue Paintwater Jar of June

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?