Mad girls, sung ships, ivy lamps, rooted houses, and the ever-turning...

HOW DO YOU THANK a far-scattered myriad of people? A quite staggering many have each given individual, heartfelt, warm and honest pieces of themselves to me over these last weeks in the forms of words and poems, stories and help and love. And I am touched. Truly, I find it quite astounding how much good you stranger-friends have shown me though you have never met me. Saying thank you seems inadequate, but I mean it. Your thoughts and warmth have encouraged me and shown me chinks of many other lives, all being lived somewhere else, all as full of tribulation and inspiration as mine, I can see why this place is called the web. Some years ago I read a tale set in an Anglo-Saxon pagan England and it told of a shaman's apprentice and otherworldly visions of every single thing being held together by spidersilk. Every thing, animate and inanimate, tree and stone and book and person and crow, all linked by a thread, a thread the shamans could travel up, and a thread through which vibrations of others could be sensed. This ancient view of things is common amongst shamanic cultures worldwide I think; it somehow feels true. The book was The Way of Wyrd by Brian Bates and it is based on a thousand year old Lacnunga Manuscript held in the British Library.

And the warmth has not come only from far off; here in my new village I have experienced the kindness of true friendship, and the generosity of a community that is becoming very dear to me. People have helped with practical box-lugging and emotional box-lugging. And it has caused me to ruminate on the importance of neighbourhood. Though solitude is solace, spidersilks attached a little way out from your lair are good.



Speaking of lairs, mine has been getting to know me slowly .. this house has been here a long time longer than me, and there are stories in the walls I am sure. I feel like each day I have nested and arranged and unpacked and boiled the kettle and sat painting, I wafted metaphorical Rima into the house as others have done before me, and the walls are sniffing me to see what they think.


House magic is so interesting, and I love stirring that particular cauldron. Puppets and bells and paintings have been hung and rugs thrown, books stacked and arrangements arranged. But most of all postcards have been strewn. Everywhere I have lived there've been millions of postcards on the walls, dogeared and beautiful, some of them I remember being stuck to my bedroom wall as a youngster, generations of blutack knobbled at each corner. They are like little windows, inspirations, eye-feasts, mini-masterpieces.


It is vital for me to get a place to a certain point of comfort before I can sit down and work in it. So for a week or two I busied and busied and the nesting will continue, I am nowhere near done.
It is cosy and peaceful. But it is strange. I have gone from a tiny truck space to a whole house, with stairs.


I used to have to walk just two paces from desk to kettle, now there is a whole hallway and two rooms between those two places. I miss the sound of the rain on the roof, the rain doesn't leak in these days in a downpour, but because the roof is so far above my head I don't even hear it. I lay in bed the other night expecting the house to sway when a log lorry went past. But it didn't.



The house is stuck to the ground good and proper. It feels heavy and permanent, and the world feels further away. But these granite walls are grown in a beautiful place, I just have to walk down the road a bit to find nature and so I did...

Half way up the stairs there is a window where you can just see past the village edge to fields beyond.



There have been February snow flurries and there are crocuses and snowdrops in the churchyard. Every so often a day with a hint of spring in its step comes along. I took one of these and headed off up a hill. From this hill you could see that winter had headed off too... round the corner of the world to the antipodes who will have their turn soon.


Up on those hills I clambered into fields and watched sheep who watched me. The view was delightful. And the air smelt of newness and damp clouds.



The sheep knew it was spring too..


While the sheep watched me I sat and looked over the fields below and thought the thoughts I always think at the beginning of a new season. The smells of a new spring remind me of last spring and many springs before that. Seasons turning make me nostalgic and forward-looking at the same time. I decided I loved the outdoors so much I was going to take some of it home with me so that it wouldn't be far off any more. There was a pile of tree trimmings, all wrapped in ivy wood, which had little flags of sheep wool tufted onto the twigs. I prized off a few branches and carried them off with me...


..wrapped in an old chain that I found buried in the ground. At first I thought it was some sort of giant worm cast.


I climbed along the hedgerows in the lowering sun...


In the next field I met some cows who walked over to where I sat. There is something eminently peaceful about cows. They approached me in their grass-stamping wet-nosed way, mothers going before their calves in case I was dangerous. And I sat with them all around me tall and steaming, cow hulks, brown-eyed, interested and indifferent.


I loved them and the dusk came and made them into snorting silhouettes.


And so I took my bundle of sticks and stumbled downhill again, this time taking a different route that wasn't really a path, and so it wrapped me up in brambles and sunk my boots in squelch.
There were steep woods and yellow gorse. A few times I fell and got caught on fences, cursing the heavy chain-and-sticks that I was stubbornly lugging all the way.


At one point a whole flock of sheep followed me expectantly as I walked through their field. No doubt I had come at dinnertime. I walked on past their sheep-shelter, and somehow ended up alongside an overgrown woodland stream, ducking under hoops of growth, slightly lost, and thinking about a cup of tea.


At last I returned home triumphant and bramble-scarred, with that invigorated puff in my lungs that comes from clambering.

And with those far-hefted ivy twigs and some leafy handmade paper and a bit of wire and string, I made a woodland lampshade! There are bare lightbulbs all through the house, as you may have seen.. (I must say that having electricity is a luxury in itself, as is hot water straight from the tap!) ..but the bare bulbs needed dressing, and so here is how I brought the outdoors in:



It makes a lovely light, but I think its branches might need trimming a little, for the prevention of accidental blindings.

And what about painting? Well I have been busy, two clocks and a commission have been completed, and I will show you those soon. But for now a couple of pieces I have made for the sake of painting.
First a strange stained glass design, depicting not church imagery, but Finnish saga. It is painted with oils on cardboard, a new experiment which I am not wholly sure about.. I like the way the paint dries quickly and enables you to make a scrubby translucent surface (which reminded me of coloured glass, hence the addition of black lead lines later).



This is Väinämöinen - old sage of the Finnish epic poem the Kalevala. A while back I heard an interesting programme on radio 4 about the Kalevala and it mentioned a point in the story where Väinämöinen sings a ship into existence. I found this such a lovely image that I decided I should paint it. Here is the stained glass Väinämöinen, I am not sure what I think of the final piece, but it was an interesting hexperiment.

Väinämöinen sings a ship - oils on cardboard

And would you like to hear how he sings? I have loved listening lately to the sound of a Finnish folk instrument the jouhikko - a horse hair bowed lyre.
Here is Jouhiorkesteri playing Mina Mina Poiga Nuori. This is the sound I imagine coming from my painting.

~~~

And the second painting, inspired by words in a Dylan Thomas poem:

Love in the Asylum
by Dylan Thomas

A stranger has come
To share my room in the house not right in the head,
A girl mad as birds

Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.
Strait in the mazed bed
She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds

Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room,
At large as the dead,
Or rides the imagined oceans of the male wards.

She has come possessed
Who admits the delusive light through the bouncing wall,
Possessed by the skies

She sleeps in the narrow trough yet she walks the dust
Yet raves at her will
On the madhouse boards worn thin by my walking tears.

And taken by light in her arms at long and dear last
I may without fail
Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars.

Here she is this lunatic girl. The birds I have hidden beneath her skirt after a dream I had where I was harbouring injured animals of various sorts under my skirts.
She is made with pencil and then watercolour, is only about 6 inches tall, and I think I rather like her.

A girl mad as birds - watercolour and pencil

My desk these days looks out onto the oldest building in the village, a Bishop's house. In the mornings I sit with my coffee watching the humourous strutting crows hopping about on the roof pecking at the thatch.


There are many interesting projects approaching and paintings and clocks to be made, so I will be painting my brushes bristleless as March wears on. I have had to write lists to keep all the stuff tethered in my flippety brain somehow.



And I will be here again before too long to show you more things. I hope this lengthy epistle makes up for the tumbleweed blowing past here of late.
Meanwhile I will continue magpieing and feathering my nest. I will sit on mornings and evenings and think on the turning of things and the returning of springs. I hope I'll be able to see some blossom from a window when it comes.


In my living room there is a heavy dark old wooden door, with a latch, and either side of it stand two wooden upright beams. They are very beautiful. That door leads to the front door which leads to an even heavier old oak door. I wonder about all the people who have gone through it. Their comings and goings, their days and ruminations, and sorrows and mundanities. Lives cross in many different ways. Sharing an old old house with long dead people is interesting, and I'm not talking about ghosts. I mean the real people, their real lives, all our real lives. They all are connected by the spidersilk, because they have all been here at one time, or maybe at many times. Here, lifting latches, coughing, loving, sleeping, sweeping, chopping carrots, wondering, grieving, leaving, and coming home again, in out of the rain falling from the same sky.
Is time linear or cyclical? When they stepped out of my front door, where did they go next? What story did that set in motion? and what was born of that which was born of that?

It is snowing in the book of my childhood

WHEN I WAS SMALL, my family travelled to Oberammergau, a Bavarian village at the feet of the Alps where the houses are painted with fairytales and the winter snows are deeper than the doorknobs. We lived there on and off over a few years with the cowbells and woodcarvings, the Kofel mountain, the Bavarians with their rules, and the Passion Play for which Oberammergau is best known.

I have fond and vivid memories of this time. The summers of my recollection are sunny green grass and bees and buttercups, the river Ammer where my brother threw his toy helicopter, and paper windmills and glass jewels stuck in the earth between the flowers in the garden of Frau Jaekel who lived in the village. But the winters... that cold winter when my parents had to tear the wallpaper from the walls for a fire to warm the old house we had just moved into. In the very deep snows, we couldn't drive our van to buy groceries and so my mum pulled us and the shopping along on a wooden sledge which still sits upstairs in my parents' house. Nuns used to leave us gifts of food on the door handle, I wore a pinstriped snowsuit, and Schnuffel the St Bernard ate icicles.

(that's a little Rima driving the sledge with my mum and brother)

I have been thinking lately... this snow in all its blue lustre and creaking cold beauty has stayed with me always, in my imagination and in my paintings. Every winter I paint a snowy picture which usually turns into my Christmas cards. There is snow in this painting of mine, and this and this and this and this and this. I don't know where it comes from. I think if the world in my paintings were to be hunted for on a map, it would reside somewhere North, somewhere where there are white nights in the summer and dark days in the winter, somewhere blanketed in snow. Perhaps an Eastern-European Scandinavia? A Finnish Siberia? A Germanic Russia? A Russian Svalbard? A Saami Holland? Wherever it is the snow hangs heavy on the conifer forests and logs are stacked under low hung eaves for fires by which stories will be told.

These thoughts led me back to the books of my childhood, three in particular, which I think played an enormous part in carpeting my imagination with winter.

The first, a well loved favourite, given to me when I was quite young I think, is The Fox and the Tomten by Astrid Lindgren, after a poem by Karl-Erik Forsslund and illustrated by Harald Wiberg. This is a story based on the Scandinavian folkloric character of the Tomte which I have written about before.

He is a protector of the homestead so long as you leave him a bowl of porridge on winter nights; in this tale he reliquishes his porridge to Reynard the fox to stop him eating the chickens. Harald Wiberg's paintings (watercolour I think) have stayed strongly with me, the shadows on snow so blue and moonlit, the still quiet of a snow covered night so well described, the hearth-glowing family interior so warm in contrast with Reynard out in the cold through the window, and the filigree of white branches so delicately frosted.

The second, a book I would read with delicious expectation every Christmas Eve of my youth: The Night Before Christmas by Clement C Moore and illustrated by Douglas Gorsline. This too was given to me young, and I can still recite the well known poem in my head. The excitement and magic, not just of Christmas for a child, but of snow itself, was conjured in a young me by this book.

"The moon on the breast of the new fallen snow

gave a lustre of midday to objects below."

And the wonderful reindeer entourage arrives over rooftops, bringing sugar canes and bells down chimneys worldwide. The night before Christmas was always far more wonderful than the day itself for me because of all the possibility of strange and impossible rooftop visits and the almost unbearable anticipation of stocking-rustlings and chocolate coins at the bottom of the bed.

The third is a book I have mentioned before. Trubloff by John Burningham is the story of a mouse who wanted to play the balalaika. He lives with his family in the panelling of an inn bar somewhere in Eastern Europe, and is enchanted by the music played by the gypsies who stop at the inn for food and shelter.

Burningham's illustrations are wonderful in their rough scratchy paint-stipply simplicity. I envy his ability to create innocence in deceptively simple brushstrokes. With this book too, a memory of snow was made in me. These skies are grey blizzard skies, and the air feels freezing.

The huge yellow block-printed moon is somehow far away. And have you ever heard of a mouse on skis? Let alone one who can play the balalaika...

Now as well as these favourites, there were many others. I remember well the page in Beatrix Potter's Tailor of Gloucester when Simpkin the cat ventures out into the snowy town on the one night of the year when all animals can talk.

And those stories like that of the Ant and the Grasshopper when one animal has been diligent in his preparations for winter and the other has frittered summer away and ended up cold and homeless, a little like red-footed Thumbeline, taken in by the mouse, in this version of the tale illustrated by a genius of watercolour - Lizbeth Zwerger.

There are an awful lot of animals out in the snow in these books aren't there? Mice and foxes and cats and reindeer. I do wonder how their conversations go on that one wonderful night.

And finally I'd like to tell you of another book about an animal out in the snow. Though it is one I have discovered more recently, the beauty of the illustrations must be sung. Gennady Spirin is an artist whose work I have long admired.

This story, Martha, is a true account of Spirin's young son Ilya finding a wounded crow in the Moscow snow and nursing it back to health. It is a simple tale illustrated exquisitely and should be on everyone's shelf. I love the cover for its black and blood red against white, and the snowflakes all over.

I have a theory that the storybook imagery you experience as a child enters you in a different place to visuals taken in as an adult. There is a separate storehouse for these precious visions, limited in their number as your childhood years, but brighter and more musical by far than the myriad pictures that pass your eyes in later living.

***

In my musings on snowy imagery, I must not forget Pieter Brueghel's beautiful winter paintings. His bare branches against duck-egg sky, his many peasant colours against snowy Dutch landscape, are for me a triumph in painting, and a beauty to aim for.

Here is The Hunters in the Snow:

And here is The Numbering At Bethlehem:

And last I bring you some winter paintings of my own. Over these last weeks I have painted two snowy scenes, both in watercolour, one the tale of a fleeing, what from I do not know, and one of a well loved rooftop visit on the night before Christmas.

Here is Snow Flight Under the Seasky:

(in progress details - click to enlarge)

(print available here)

And here is Father Christmas:

(print available here)

I am taking a little hibernation from blogging for a while, but in the meantime I can highly recommend the A Polar Bear's Tale blog for a plethora of snowy painting inspiration and other Northern delights.

I wish you all a splendid Wintertime, a happy Christmastime, a magical Yule, wherever you are, may there be hoofprints in the snow and chocolate coins, Christmas Eve rustlings, tales by the fire and love.

***

And I leave you with the childhood Christmas words of an oft-quoted favourite, Dylan Thomas, from A Child's Christmas in Wales:

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.

(...read the rest here)