Tatterdemalion

OVER THE YEARS OF BEING AN ARTIST, I have come to think of and describe my paintings as Waymarkers to the Otherworlds, as gateways, portals, signposts to take you through to those Other places, those worlds just beyond this one: behind, or beside or underneath our every day. There are many ways through, of course, and many different destinations, too, which all depend on the traveller and their particular way of reading the sign. 

As the signmaker, I don't usually have any idea (or control over) where my paintings take people, or what happens when they get there. But four years ago, one traveller to these otherworlds followed my painted signposts and came back with her story. 

Sylvia Linsteadt, as many of you know, is a writer of great talent, who has an incredible ability to conjure the beautiful and uncanny and barely-seen wild worlds which shiver at the periphery of our perception. Four years ago she began writing the stories of the worlds my paintings took her to, and when she sent them to me, I was blown away. Her work is lyrical and profound, folkloric and unique, and for me, these stories were so moving to read - so familiar and yet so new. We knew we had to make a book.

These past years have seen these stories grow and enmesh and they have become what we are calling a post-apocalyptic mosaic folktale. A back-to front book which began with the illustrations, a tale of wheeled and raggedy folk, of edge-dwellers and shape-shifters, itinerants and wild ones, and their imagined futures in a world after the breaking we are currently living through.

 

A perfect meeting of arts and souls, and a book born of it on this day of new beginnings. Sylvia and I met at last in the flesh last October; she came from her native Northern California (where the book is set), to visit us and stomp the tors and woods and Dartmoor's bronze age relics with us, to share our hearth and breathe these winds for a while. It was a wonderful meeting, which seemed to have happened long ago already.

 

And while she was here, our book was taken up by a publisher. Unbound is a publisher very suited to this tale: it is liminal and powered by its readers, it is back to front and supportive of the unusual. Which means that this book cannot be without you! To preorder your copy and find your way to this utterly wonderful, strange and necessary Otherworld - bejewelled and ragged, rooted and sung - click on the image below! 

Bring Tatterdemalion into the world!

Fær

Fær

 

THE OLD ENGLISH word above holds inside it many meanings. It is a going, a journey, a way, a journeying, an expedition, a road, a passing, a course, a march, a voyage, a path; it is a place where passage is possible, a thoroughfare, an entrance; it is that in which a journey or voyage is made - a vehicle, vessel, carriage, ship, ark; it is a body of persons who journey, a crew; it can also mean fear, peril, danger, sudden, intense and beautiful.

(~ information gathered from the Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary)

This word can conjure others too if you look at it long enough: it could be the just-out-of-sight otherworld of færy; it could be a gathering of festive merriments from afar – a fair, or the gift one would give to another at such an occasion – a fairing (which word also describes a part of the structure of a vessel of travel put there in order to streamline its passage and reduce drag); it could be fear, it could be far; it could be for; it could be fair – alluding to both beauty and justice.

We see its bloodline in the word fare, which is a merging of fær and Old English faru – companions, baggage. Fare can mean the price required for passage, or indeed food, a meal, nourishment; its old sense of travelling and being lives on when we say farewell, and in words like seafaring and wayfaring.

For some years I had the word wayfarer on my business card alongside the other words which try to describe in a small way what I am doing here on this earth. I've always liked the word; it encompasses my love of nomadic dwellings and of wandering the byways, but also for me it paints a suitably vague yet accurate picture of the way we pass through life. All of us are wayfarers.

[The way part of the word is also Old English: from Old English weg - road, path, course of travel, from Proto-Germanic *wegaz (cf. Old Saxon, Dutch weg, Old Icelandic, Old Norse vegr, Old Frisian wei, Old High German weg, German Weg, Gothic wigs – way), from Proto Indo-European *wegh- to move. And, incidentally, ways are timbers on which a ship is built, the sense stemming from the older meaning of “channels in the body”.]

(~ information gathered from the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology)

So you can imagine how interested I was to hear that Penguin - as a promotion for Robert McFarlane's book The Old Ways - were running a competition to hire a wayfarer to walk the tracks of Britain this summer and write about it along the way. In another less busy incarnation I would have entered myself, but was happy to follow the wayfarings of the person who did win the competition with the submission of a short film and an essay.

Her name was Sarah Thomas, and with her Wayfaring came this way many, if not all, of those linguistic fær-scents mentioned above, and a tale-thread that entails itself like a blessing-knot on an old story-string that has hung by my side for a long time.

You see, our paths had crossed before, in many ways, though not yet in this way. In past chapters of our lives, our tales had plaited their yarns together, without our ever yet meeting.

But to begin with I didn't know this. Sarah Thomas the wayfarer was just Sarah Thomas the wayfarer – a traveller, film-maker, writer, observer, whose beautiful words and images I read with delight and interest as she went along. She walked northern paths in July and left word on her blog, for followers to read. I invited her to stop by for tea should her paths wend this far south, assuming they may not.

But the more I followed her words back in time, the more bells began to ring in me. Clues amongst her earlier tales made me wonder. Places and names and details all conspired in my mind to bring me to a realisation that she was in fact a person I had known without knowing: she and I had both, at different times, been with the same partner.

This was not a simple and straightforward realisation. For me that relationship had been difficult, traumatic and deeply damaging. This man who had been a part of both our lives had a kind of madness which has caused far-reaching disturbance through my heart and psyche. In those days, Sarah was an ex-girlfriend of his, with a different name, someone I only knew of through his (not always rational) descriptions, and whom I undoubtedly found intimidating.

Now, by the side of Sarah Thomas The Wayfarer had stepped up another woman with another name, and she stood there carrying many heavy bags of memories, asking me to believe that they were one and the same person.

I wrote to her again, reiterating the invitation to tea, tenfold, commenting that we may have a great deal to talk about! Sarah wrote back, touched. It seemed we had crossed paths several times in the days since our shared connection was long gone, but she had been too shy to say hello (thanks to yet more inaccurate second-hand descriptions and stories), and I had not known who she was.

Her wayfaring brought her to Devon. And so we met by a river, and it was like meeting someone I'd known for aeons without yet seeing her face. We fell immediately to talking about thises and thats as the hours threatened to eat up the daylight. We knew then, I think, that this was a profound and incandescent connection which would birth wayfarings of its own, and unleash a long-awaited healing.

Our next days turned into weeks, with Sarah adventuring on Dartmoor inbetween even further-reaching travels which took place inside our conversations. This journey was not just on foot – the voyage was made in a spirit-ship on old waters; it followed a barefoot earthen path through the moonlit forests of our hearts, meted out in ashen truth-stones; our map was hand-wrought on the skins of sorrowful beasts; each of us had pegged out waymarkers for the other.

We laughed a ridiculous amount, we cried. We walked and swam and sat and danced, and most of all, we talked. It feels as if we've only barely begun to form the first syllables of long long sentences, though we have talked through many hours. There in this bowl we share rest many beautiful things, not least among them is a trust born of I don't know what, and the steps to thought-dances we thought we were alone in learning.

In the middle of these days, came the Uncivilisation Festival, and Sarah came too, riding in the back of our van to the throng of fire and rain and story. Tom and I have felt thoroughly blessed to have such a lovely visitor, with whom we can share space without difficulty, and jokes without censure. She is one of those people you meet very occasionally in life from whom a familiar bloodfirelight shines, a companion on the beautiful roads and the brambled.

It is rare that I share my deeply personal stories here on this blog, for reasons many and various, and, I hope, obvious. But this one feels like it also belongs in part to all those who have suffered silently in the cages of unwell relationships, as a reminder that there is goodness and strength and renewed enchantment to be found woven in the threads of this sisterhood-cloth which could so easily have been lost. Also, it is a lovely tale.

Sarah's wayfaring has taken her on from here for now, and before too long it will bring her to her husband and home in Iceland, land of this old language we speak, land of old story, land still crackling with un-buried magic. One day, we will make our way north to meet again there, and the wayfaring will go on, the road a yarn weaving together pasts and presents and futures, hearts and places and arts and dreams and people.

Once a student of linguistics and languages, if I play too long with words, I can find new threads to connect them...

wayfaring = Old English wegfarende

way                                      farende

wa                                        farend

war                                      frend

wær (= Old English true)   friend

 This way for the other half of the tale...

Small Visitations from a Winter-Dusted Equinox

A BLUE BRIGHT COLD DAWN blew in the other day. It was a surprise amid these endless fogged and drenched grey days of unspring. Chicklets under our eaves, gambolling lambs and dogged primroses are chirping out the fact of spring, their joys flitting over the Equinox and on through white-blanketed March, whilst we huddle indoors, disbelieving the daffodils and wondering what happened to the sun. 

This blue bright morning was beautiful though, and all etched in frost. Macha and I climbed the hill behind our house where you can see all across the valley of villages and out beyond onto Dartmoor. A mist crept in, silent and low, hanging between the hills and whispering over the roofs of the just-waking houses.

Frozen mornings trap beauty in a certain thrilling way. The ochres and browns of winter's trees and hedges hummed in patchworks around the shadow blues of iced fields. 

As the morning rose, the light pinked the far-off moors before it reached us.

There's a magnificent old sentinel pine tree on the hill behind our house, a homing land mark for getting lost on long rambles over the fields, and a memory-keeper for all that happens in the valleys below.

Macha and I stepped quietly through the dawning, smelling new things from the night, and looking down into the day shining crisply at our feet.

Other days have brought snows, which have dusted the toes of birches, the roofs of shacks and weighed heavy on the confused petals of spring.

 

On the rare days we have sun, it plays a game of chase with the frost across the thatched roof of our cottage, until the colder of them wins at the end of the day anyway.

There have been beautiful visitations at unexpected moments too. I encountered the swoop of a tawny owl one night as I drove home along a dark lane. It landed on a branch overhanging the road, and so I stopped and turned off the engine to watch it. It crouched there with something in its claws looking me directly in the eye. Then it flew off into the night, dropping the whateveritwas onto the road. I peered and noticed it moving. So I got out of the van and went over to find a baby rabbit, screaming, but apparently unhurt. I picked it up and took it home in my lap, where it crouched, the terrible screaming subsiding eventually. Once home, it almost met its end again after leaping from my lap and running to the darkest corner of the room where Macha leapt after it. Deciding that I wasn't going to be able to raise this little one myself, I took it outside in the dark to find a rabbit hole. It was small, and probably too young to survive alone. I don't know whether rabbits adopt young, but this one had already been flown far from its home, so I had to try. It sat still on my open palm for a while, sniffing the air. Then - hop, hop, hop - it bounced down the rabbit hole I'd found for it, and out of my story.

Another night brought a flitting-flapping floor-bound moth to the corner of my eye. It also nearly ended up as a dog-snack, but I held it for a while, its wings so light green and papery, they were almost an entirely new colour. I had a chance to remember this one with my camera before I released it to a night time of moon and owl silence.

The letterbox has also brought wonders from other shores, whilst we stay in by the fire as the winter refuses to withdraw her talons.

These beautiful hand-spun, hand-knitted sock masterpieces were knitted by Teleri Gray in Germany in return for some of my prints. I am so delighted by their intricacy and perfect fit, I almost can't bear to wear them and prematurely destroy the heels with my chicken feet! 

photo © Sylvia Linsteadt

And last but most surely not least, a wonder-tale through the mail, written by my amazingly talented word-magician friend Sylvia Linsteadt. This is part one of the Gray Fox Epistles, a fairytale-by-post project that she has created, and which you can sign up for too, at her blog. This first story is a retelling of the Celtic tale, The Children of Lir, and my goodness is it an artful and beautifully-wrought thing! Sylvia makes the land speak across centuries, and conjures a world so familiar to me, that it is all the more strange for it. 

The envelope arrived, all wrapped in wonder and the footprints of deer, and tucked inside were wild clover leaves, redwood needles and a single wild jackrabbit hair. Sylvia has magic in her quill, and I urge you all, each and every one, to sign up for her next story which will be a unique retelling of the Russian tale, Tsarevna Frog. One fine and not too distant day, our arts will share pages, but for that you shall have to wait...

The cold nights are still woodstove firelit and damp window-paned, and our days have been filled with the little plans of coming months. I have painted and drawn and begun preparing a new studio space which must be reached through a trapdoor (of that more anon), and Tom is deep in the gruelling last months of acupuncture studies. The truck awaits our dreams and hammers and nails still, as it crouches under its tarpaulin blanket until clearer skies come this way. Mythic midsummer exhibitions are in the cauldron. My ideas, as ever, tramp and stamp like a herd of snorting wild horses held at the end of a bunch of long tethers in my hand as the year marches on happily and strangely.

Ventriloquism

Ventriloquism : n. art of throwing one's voice so that it seems to come from some source other than the speaker. 1797, formed as a descriptive noun to ventriloquist, with substitution of the suffix -ism. The word has generally replaced the older ventriloquy. —ventriloquist n. an expert in ventriloquism. 1656, in Blount's Glossographia; formed from English ventriloquy + -ist. —ventriloquy n. ventriloquism. 1584, formed from Late Latin ventriloquus ventriloquist + English -y. Late Latin ventriloquus (Latin venter, genitive ventris, belly + loqui, speak) was patterned on Greek engastrimythos, literally, speaking in the belly.

~ from the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology

AND SUCH WAS THE TREASURE OF INSPIRATION I found in my beloved Etymological Dictionary, when I searched for Ventriloquism, upon learning that I was to paint the front cover for Catherynne M. Valente's wonderful forthcoming collection of short stories. Catherynne's world and mine intersect in some melancholic snow-bound medieval Slavic outpost, where freaks and outcasts, oddities and dreams wander the streets with sorcery in their pockets and an eye on another horizon. Truly her writing is exquisitely painted, and I was honoured indeed when she asked me to create the cover for this marvellous book.

She told me that it had the flavour of her other work - baroque and colorful and more than a little sad. It's full of duelling geographers, she said, dream-eating tapirs, winemakers in space, selkies, aeronauts, Venus and Mars, secret video games, a host of fairy tales, rusalka medical students...it's six years of my work, in one book. I kind of think of the whole thing like the witch's candy house in Hansel and Gretel.

Well! How could I not be inspired and delighted by all that?! And so in I delved...

I took the idea of belly-speaking from the original meaning of ventriloquism, and decided that the front of the book should show a kind of marionette figure (operating her own strings) whose body was the gingerbread house itself. From the belly of this character, from the stove of the gingerbread house/body, rises a smoke of characters from the world of these stories: Narwhals, bears, parrot-men, pickpocket pamphleteers, monks, dream-tapirs, witches, monopods, rusalki, selkies, blemmyae .... and a mystery of others.

In the sky above hang many strange planets, even a fob watch, and down below on a railway line from some eastern onion-domed city, travels a train whose track becomes a ladder to the moon. Underneath this, for the keen-eyed, is written in Cyrillic a Russian lullaby which goes like this:

Баю-баюшки-баю,

Не ложися на краю.

Придёт серенький волчок,

Он ухватит за бочок

И утащит во лесок

Под ракитовый кусток.

which means something like this:

Baby, baby, rock-a-bye

On the edge you mustn't lie

Or the little grey wolf will come

And will nip you on the tum,

Tug you off into the wood

Underneath the willow-root.

and sounds something like this:

This track is Yuri's Lullaby from Ludovico Einaudi's soundtrack to Doctor Zhivago, but you might have also heard the lullaby in the masterly 1979 animation by Yuri Norstein Skaza Skazok (Tale of Tales) ...

Russian animation delights and astounds me endlessly. I collect favourites on my youtube channel here for afternoons with rain on the windowpane and cup of tea in hand, and I sit and marvel at the patience and soul that goes into these masterpieces.

Anyhow, although I learnt Russian at school, and can just about order a cup of coffee and read road signs to Vladivostok, I seem to have made one tiny mistake in the lettering... exchanging a к for a ж! This was spotted by an eagle eyed reader of Catherynne's blog and is going to bother me forever now, as it was whisked to print before I could correct it! But perhaps it'll remain a little oddity, in excellent company amongst oddities of the highest order who inhabit the wonder-filled world of Ms. Valente.

I was chuffed indeed to read her kind praise of my work too, and to hear that she feels my painting describes her world so closely.

The painting took me absolutely weeks and weeks... I got more and more involved in it and happily lost in the world of gingerbread marionettes, medieval monstrosities, sugar-spun ships, sea-dwellers, forests in the snow... Here amongst my burblings are pictures of it in its birthing, pencil and then watercolour, and the title lettering too.

You absolutely must order a copy. It is available for pre-order now, ready for its December publication. Ventriloquism is being published here in the UK by PS Publishing, based in Yorkshire, with an introduction written by Lev Grossman, who writes of the book:

"When this book arrives it will destroy you. It is going to change things. As its herald I will be spared. But you? There is no safe harbor for you."

This is the final work - do click to enlarge

~~~~~~~~~

AND as a last post script, I'd like to say a basketful of thanks to all of you who read my recent post and wrote such kind, encouraging and thoughtful comments and emails. I am uplifted and cheered and more than a little astounded! Thank you!

Our late autumn days are rolling along happily, the Slavic aroma has drifted into other things, as it is wont to in this house: there's accordion and clarinet duetting, Baba Yaga drawing, and daily hound stomps out into the frost where the hills are crackling blue and Winter watches us all from over the hill, and throws her voice into this November, like the artful ventriloquist she is.