Dark Mountain

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.

Owl Words

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.

Five chapters of summer

A LONG SPACE there's been between the last time I poured tea here and this! Life has brought a satchelful of wonders and works and wanders, so I hardly know where to begin! Perhaps if I rifle through this satchel and pull out chapters one by one?...

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CHAPTER 1 :: LUKAS

So first and most delightfully of all, I'd like to introduce you to a dear new member of my family! I am an aunt for the first time, and quite amazed to meet this beautiful little boy, born in July to my brother Jan and his Maria. This is Lukas Jacob Staines, here just one day old. I cannot quite believe it, since I remember waiting for his father to come home from hospital when he was the same number of hours old (and I was just two)!


We waited a while for him to come, and while we waited, I stitched him seven linen mice. Slightly patched, askew, and lace-collared, they hang all in a row from a piece of linen-wrapped wire (so that they can be hooked anywhere) upon which I stitched words... there's still space at the end for me to add his name, which at the time of giving, had not yet been decided! There are seven mice for seven stories (and the thousand different ways of telling them...)

(do click to enlarge these)

I so look forward to seeing this dear little soul grow, and to see familiar and new in him. He has his father's useful crooked little fingers. He'll be tall. And he will be loved ♥

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CHAPTER 2 :: JERICHO & HANNAH

And second, a painting! Made for Jericho and Hannah, who are wonderful artists and good friends too across the miles, though we've not met. This watercolour of the dear couple flew all the way to them in the Philippines, where they lose themselves in fascinating artistic endeavour, bluebell woods of their imaginations and sometimes run away together as cat and rabbit. I'm quite pleased with the blue of Hannah's dress amid my usual rust-and-moss pallette. And it is painted on Two Rivers hand milled watercolour paper from Somerset. It was a joy to make a painting for two artists who appreciate my work so, and who also make beautiful works themselves.




Here above you can see my progress: pencil, then light washes, then finer more concentrated detail, then done. (Although, in reality, as you can imagine, it took far longer than that!)

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CHAPTER 3 :: LANVAL

And third, a trip across the sea to Brittany! Do you remember these Arthurian-Breton gold and red and black and white paintings that I found such a struggle to finish a month or so ago? Well, they now hang in the most exquisite chateau exhibition in the middle of the Breton forest of Brocéliande, and I was lucky enough to join some of the English and French artists taking part on a trip to this Nest of Myth and see the exhibition opening amid a fanfare of wonderful events: horse displays, storytelling, harp recitals, Breton music. All the while we enjoyed hospitality of the highest order, with wines and food and good things apparently springing up whenever we looked round!

This is the chateau pictured above, seen from across the lake. We watched moonrise over this lake, and heard how many pieces of the Arthurian myth are woven through this place.. Here the Oak that held Merlin, there the lake that hides the crystal cave. We were taken by horse and cart to the Valley of No Return... but came back nonetheless, wide-eyed mostly at the generous funding and support the arts are given in France compared to the UK.



Inside the castle, the works were hung beautifully. I think I had warmed to my paintings after not having seen them for a while, though had I had paint and brush with me, I might still have been tempted to tinker.


There were beautiful windows all around, I looked out across the lake through deliciously atticy cobwebs, or soft summer-breezed curtains to see audiences being told tales below, and boys playing bagpipes.


I was delighted too to meet a jovial old elf called Pierre Dubois, whose book The Great Encyclopedia of Faeries I owned some years ago. I got to practice lots of French and learned many intriguing things from him about Lutins and all the mischiefs of their realm. Pierre was also responsible for a forbidden foray with a few of us beyond this Interdit sign to find a beautiful old myth-soaked Oak tree and this lilied lake.








We stayed in La Gacilly, a town full to the brim with art. There were photographic exhibitions in the streets, art and craft shops everywhere, and cobblestones and hanging baskets too.



And all of our work, along with tales of the making of the accompanying film were put together in a beautifully produced book of the exhibition. The show continues in France until the end of August and the film will premiere there in October. Then for the winter, the exhibition comes to Exeter in December, and we look forward to welcoming our French friends here then and returning their wonderful hospitality. Much appreciation goes to all who put such efforts into this wondrous sharing of legends.

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CHAPTER 4 :: HOTCHIWITCHI

Now fourth, I bring more artwork, and pages too. A while ago I wrote about hedgehogs, telling of their significance amongst Gypsies and the superstitions that bristle around them. This in turn inspired Sam Rawlings to make a piece of writing about the hedgehog, and I was asked to illustrate it. This handsome little booklet which houses my hedgehoggery is the latest in the short story series produced by London based Arts collective Lazy Gramophone. Their books are beautifully done, with thoughtful letterpress and an eye for a good font. I am delighted to be involved with such an enthusiastic and creative bunch. You can buy a copy of this limited edition publication here for £4.99.


And I am selling prints of my drawing here in my etsy shop. He is a shaman hedgehog, with not apples, but amulets, collected on his wise old spines.

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CHAPTER 5 :: THINGS TO COME

And so fifth, and onwards! Life is full colour at the moment, and blooming with all kinds of delights. I am busy selling work, and making work, as ever trying to dream up projects in between the ones I must make for pennies. Next weekend I will be hawking my wares at the Harlequin Fayre in Norfolk. The next chapter, I'll tell of soon. It has wonder-books and earth-adventures and beloved patchworks and cauldrons of goodness and the threetoed footprints of Baba Yaga's house in it...